Saturday, November 05, 2011

Blogs Take Manhattan: The Women Talk Sports panel, and women in sports media

Back in September, I headed to New York for another Blogs With Balls conference. The two I’d attended before, in Vegas and Chicago, were amazing experiences, and this one was no different; it was a great time, an excellent chance to get some intelligent perspective on where blogging’s going and a chance to hang out with some awesome people. I was just going through my files and realized I had a lot of notes from the BWB4 panels that I’d never posted, so here they are. First up, the first panel, Women Talk Sports. Note on the notes: these are in chronological order (as much as possible), but I couldn’t write down every comment from every panelist, so this is more of a "Highlights" piece than a full transcript.

Panelists: Sarah Braesch , BlogHer/Draft Day Suit, Richard Deitsch, Sports Illustrated, Jemele Hill, ESPN, Tina Cervasio, MSG, Jane McManus. Moderator: Megan Hueter , Women Talk Sports.

The panel started with a discussion of why women’s sports aren’t shown more prominently on television, and Deitsch had some interesting comments about that.

"A lot of it has to do with economics and dollars," he said. "A lot of women’s sports don’t really rate on television."

The Olympics are an exception, but Deitsch thinks that has more to do with the flags involved than the genders of the athletes.

"Olympics, nationalism trumps gender," he said.