David Burrick: Defending the sports section against accusations of bias

There's a reason why I write about sports -- it's because I'm not good enough to play them.

So I have tremendous respect, and also jealousy, toward anyone talented enough to participate in Division I athletics. In fact, I have so much respect for Penn's athletes that I am willing to dedicate almost every hour of my day to covering the Quakers. So I was caught off guard this week when Daily Pennsylvanian columnist Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan accused my section of being biased against women's teams.

Now, I have nothing but respect for Kwak-Hefferan (Lord knows she could beat me at just about any sport), but I have to disagree with her argument.

As senior sports editor of the DP, I have to balance two very difficult interests. First and foremost, I want to make the section entertaining. I want readers to look forward to picking up the paper each day, skipping the news section and enjoying the articles on the back page. Sports is a form of entertainment, so the section should try to play to the reader's interest.

But while I am try to entertain the reader as much as possible, I also face the sometimes-impossible task of covering 29 varsity sports in under three pages each day.

When selecting stories and designing the layout, I have to try to serve both of these interests -- creating a section that is both interesting and broad in its coverage.

But trying to determine what 30,000 readers will enjoy is not an easy task. There is data, however, which helps me get a feel for what readers want.

The DP Web site can track the number of people who have read each article. The results tell us one thing -- our readers want to read about men's basketball.

A recap of the men's basketball team's past weekend garnered over four times the hits on our Web site than the recap of the women's team.

And our readers don't just want to read about Penn men's basketball. An article about the Princeton men's team -- which ran on the inside of the print edition -- received close to 50 percent more hits than the women's recap, which ran on the back page. Last Friday's spotlight on Columbia forward Matt Preston was read twice as many times as a preview of the Penn women's basketball team.

Attendance at sporting events is another way to see what people are interested in. The results point overwhelmingly toward men's basketball and football.

More fans show up to a single football game than they do over an entire season of women's basketball. And besides men's basketball, for what other sports are Penn students willing to camp out overnight to get tickets? In fact, how many other sports even make students buy tickets? None.

Kwak-Hefferan argued that the attendance is lower at women's events because they are not as highly touted in the DP. While this may be true, it is not the job of a newspaper to put people in the seats. There is an entire office within the Athletic Department which is dedicated to this, and it does a good job. I have received various magnets, posters and T-shirts in my time here at Penn for attending women's lacrosse, basketball and volleyball games.

When I took over as editor this semester, I made a point of establishing a weekly column on women's hoops. Not even popular men's sports, such as wrestling, get such coverage. Also, despite midterms, we sent several writers to Tuesday's women's basketball game at Princeton, a game that even The Daily Princetonian did not cover.

Last year, the DP wrote 25 articles on the women's basketball team. While their season is not over yet, we have already written 34 pieces on them since I became editor. And expect that number to increase dramatically if the team remains atop the Ivy League to end the season. A trip to the NCAA Basketball Tournament will receive substantial coverage.

Kwak-Hefferan specifically criticized the Feb. 2 edition of the DP, which devoted most of the sports page to men's basketball after they lost their first two Ivy games, while the women won their first two.

The way I see it, my job is not to publicize only Penn wins. Sometimes the bigger story is in a loss. This was the first time the men's team was swept on an opening weekend since 1982, while the women's team's wins were expected. Women's hoops coach Kelly Greenberg admitted that anything but a sweep "would be a disappointment."

I realize that it's frustrating to work so hard at something and to always be trumped by men's basketball or football. In high school, I was on the state-champion fencing team, which often was buried inside our local paper.

However, we don't ignore these other sports. Other media that cover Penn sports -- such as WXPN, UTV or the commercial Philadelphia newspapers -- devote far less of their coverage to women's sports. Our lead stories are often about women's teams -- as was the case this week. But we are here to interest the readers. Until there are indications that these readers are interested in something else, men's basketball and football will get the most DP coverage.David Burrick is a sophomore urban studies and philosophy, politics and economics major and senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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