À quoi ressemble un journal dont on retire les articles sur les sports masculins ?

Soyons tout à fait honnêtes : chez Konbini sports aussi, le sport féminin est beaucoup moins mis en valeur que les activités masculines. Si l’on tend à changer des choses, cela va prendre du temps et tous les médias ou presque sont concernés.
C’est d’ailleurs ce qu’a voulu démontrer une graphiste, Katherine Burgess, avec son travail qu’elle résume ainsi sur Instagram : “Les femmes ne sont pas absentes du sport, mais des médias sportifs.”

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I want to thank everyone for the support with this project, it’s really amazing to see people caring and offering help. I’ve been thinking about continuing this for longer, but I decided for the moment I won’t be. The reason I would have continued the project would be to prove a point, however, I believe this week in review proves a striking point already. I may play around with different publications or different media sources for now. And there will be more to come on this subject matter as I dig into the issue more deeply with the help of my agency. Some people have been messaging me wondering if they could try the experiment on their own and share the results and I think that’s an amazing idea! The more the merrier. It can be with any media source you want to use too! I’d love to see the results!

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 15 Sept. 2020 à 4 :22 PDT

Elle a ainsi choisi un immense quotidien américain, le New York Times, pour montrer combien les femmes étaient absentes de ses pages sportives. Elle a pour cela découpé chaque jour, pendant une semaine, les articles et photos dédiés aux hommes sur la une de la section sports, pour ne laisser que les rubriques concernant les femmes. Force est de constater qu’il ne reste pas grand-chose…

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Monday, September 7th, 2020. The front page of the @nytimes sports section with only the coverage on women’s athletics remaining.

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 7 Sept. 2020 à 5 :42 PDT

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Tuesday, September 8th, 2020. The front page of the @nytimes sports section with only the coverage on women’s athletics remaining. One plot of data will never fully paint a full picture. After yesterday’s jarring page of the Times that had 95% of its page sliced out I knew I wanted to continue this for at least a week to see what a comparison of several front page spreads would look like. I chose to focus on men’s verses women’s media representation because of a past study that showed that women only receive on average 4% of the national sports media coverage. I’m not necessarily “grading” the Times on whether if they have an even 50/50 split of coverage on average on just this one issue because there are many moving parts when it comes to showing representation in the media coverage of sports besides just gender representation. However, proper representation for women in the field is an issue that’s been an on going problem and I was curious on how visually striking or different a paper would look with certain portions of the coverage removed. Yesterday’s paper was gutted of nearly everything except for 10 words about Serena Williams. If I would have flipped the experiment and kept men’s coverage and sliced out the women’s coverage it would have barely been noticeable that something was missing. More thoughts to come. Maybe tomorrow I’ll dabble into more of an art school reflection and put all of my art history and theory class credits to use.

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 8 Sept. 2020 à 6 :43 PDT

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The front page of the @nytimes sports section on Wednesday, September 9th with only the coverage on women remaining. Overall, I have lots of thoughts, but it’s also only day 3 of 7 so I want to wait until the end to go over everything before making statements. Does this page look frightening? Yes. But I recognize that a front page news spread only contains 1-3 stories on average and that there are many more stories that I am not examining in the other 4 pages. I decided to focus on only the front page to make it more digestible and impactful in one frame slot because of the digital age and how we consume content on Instagram. But also because the front page of the sports section is supposed to be the most important, most ground breaking, or most intriguing news for the readers and audience of that news outlet. Secondly, I also recognize that as an artist (an advertiser by training) that I have power in how I’ve chosen to present this photojournalism story. An artistic choice I’ve taken was to completely eliminate the sections of the newsprint that covered men. I could have done nothing and ask the viewers if they saw anything interesting with the page. I would say “interesting” because it’s a safer non loaded prompt word then something like “bad.” A loaded prompt word like bad would subconsciously sway the viewers thoughts and opinions to fit my agenda if that was the narrative I was trying to push (which I don’t want to do, no pushing). If I were to have done that I’m going to somewhat unfairly assume here what potentially could have happened… maybe that experiment would have shown that most men would have not found anything off, but most women would have noticed right away that there’s no coverage on women. Or maybe the women would have not found anything off either because coverage on men is the norm/standard anyways in our society. Maybe it would have sparked a conversation? But getting back on track, I’ve decided to physically cut out the men’s coverage with an exacto because I wanted to see how eerie, bare, and empty the news might look without men’s sports being mentioned. Because as a women it’s normally us that are not in the sports media.

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 9 Sept. 2020 à 9 :50 PDT

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Thursday, September 10th, 2020. The front page of the @nytimes sports section with only the coverage on women’s athletics remaining. For those of you who don’t mind answering (DMs are also fine if you want it to stay private): Whether if you’re a men or a women, what are common things you’ve heard as to why women receive less media coverage in sports? I’m not saying you have to believe or support these things, just what have you been told? There’s no right or wrong answer. We’ve all heard stuff, some untrue and are a misconception, some things that are more reasonable and understandable, and everything weird, out in left field, and in between. Overall I am just trying to make a list and want more experiences then just my own. Thanks:)

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 10 Sept. 2020 à 6 :47 PDT

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Friday, September 11th, 2020. The front page of the @nytimes sports section with only the coverage on women’s athletics remaining. So another question I’ve been thinking about: I feel that it is safe to say that women do not get enough sports coverage from the national news sources. But what does better coverage for female athletes mean to you? How do we know or measure when we reach it. What are the indicators of change or the steps that need to be taken to get there?

Une publication partagée par Katherine (Katie) Burgess (@katherine_kart) le 11 Sept. 2020 à 10 :04 PDT

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Selon l’Unesco, “les femmes ne reçoivent que 4 % de la couverture médiatique sportive, dans laquelle elles sont souvent objectivées ou décrites de manière dénigrante. Pourtant, en dehors de la période des grands événements sportifs, les statistiques affirment que 40 % des athlètes sont des femmes.”