MEDIA WATCH: CHANGING FORTUNES IN WOMEN'S SPORTS MEDIA

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

The signs started in early 2000.

Cutbacks at some websites and the closing of others were only foreshadowings of what was to come in terms of the providing of news over the World Wide Web.

In late 2000 and early 2001, a couple of huge cutbacks -- one at Yahoo! and one at Disney's Go.com shook the net-news industry to its very foundations.

But in the middle of 2001, two more cutbacks struck at the heart of the reporting of women's sports news on the Internet. The first was part of a restructuring at Time, Inc., which filtered down to cnnsi.com.

Writers and columnists were cut and the entire women's sports daily news and features section was cut. Click on the "women's sports" tab on the website today, and you will see a promotional section for Sports Illustrated for Women. Oddly enough, at the same time the web section was cut, Time, Inc. was replacing the managing editor for the SI for Women print version and extending the print run to eight issues per year, up from six.

The other change is the partial shutdown of SportsForWomen.com. The Massachusetts-based site is, according to founder Daniel Kron, looking for more funding to keep going. The site is known for its useful women's sports wire. Results from the mid- to lower-level college sports and weekly rankings were posted, and represented a much more complete record of the daily goings in the world of women's athletics than even the AP wire.

Question is, where do we go from here? None of the Big Three major sports portals (Fox, ESPN, CBS Sportsline) specify a women's sports section. CNNSI cut its section, while MSNBC's women's sports section is not a true "wire," including only a smattering of events on its front page. Some major sites even exclude women from the equation: CBS Sportsline does not include WUSA results in its soccer section.

The independent websites that deal with niche sports, such as SportsJuice.com and OurSportsCentral.com, have sprung up as great alternatives to the major media websites who feel as though women's sports is an easy cutback.

There are other sites, like Oxygen.com, Real-Sports.com, SportsJones.com, and the Women's Sports Channel (wschannel.com) whose feature articles provide a perspective you can't get from the major sports media.

Single-sport websites in lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, basketball, and even for women's boxing and martial arts have sprung up in the past few years, and also can keep fans informed of what is going on in their particular interest.

It is hard to know exactly the motivation behind the decisionmaking when it comes to women's sports on the Web. In a time when the Web is growing as quickly as the opportunities in women's sports, cuts like those at CNNSI and at SportsForWomen.com are indeed unfortunate.

Editor's note: Despite all of the changes in women's sports media, TopOfTheCircle.com will remain a strong and committed voice. The Founder has secured this URL until the year 2009.