DU's Defense

The following is the email the sports editor for the Daily Universe sent in defense of the paper:

Dear Erin Hamson,

Thank you for reading The Daily Universe and for responding. It's always great to know we have readers out there who pay attention to what we're doing.

First, I want you to know right away that we at The Daily Universe have no intention of discriminating against women or treating them unfairly. But I think where your argument might be a little misguided is that you're taking a stand for women's rights, when really this is an issue about sports journalism and not sexism.



In sports journalism, where the crowds go, so do the reporters. Right now, the most popular sports at the collegiate level are football and men's basketball. On the professional level, it's also football and basketball that warrant multi-thousand-seat stadiums and multi-million-dollar advertisements, as well as baseball. Sixty years ago, sports like horse racing and boxing were more popular than football and basketball. You don't see as much about horse races and boxing matches anymore. Times have changed, and so has sports journalism.

Basically, when we decide what to fill up our newspaper pages with every day, we are thinking not in terms of equality but thinking economically. We try to understand our community and what will make them pick up the newspaper. (What you pointed out about the newspaper being free is true. But we try to run our newspaper as close to an off-campus, "real world" newspaper as we can. And even though we are free, we still have advertisers to think about. Some advertisers buy their ads only for specific places in the newspaper, like sports pages.) And from what we can tell, all anyone on campus, in Provo, in Utah, and in the whole country can talk about when it comes to BYU is men's basketball, especially Jimmer Fredette. By diminishing our coverage of the men's basketball team, we appear out of touch and certainly do not appear to be competent sports reporters and editors.

That said, we also do our best to look for unique and interesting stories on any sport. We do our best to write about every game, meet, match and race. We love BYU sports, and we try to share that with our readers, and the BYU athletes and fans. We also have lots of plans for profiles and feature stories on all the BYU sports, including women's basketball. Just give our reporters a little more time (after all, they only just started writing for The Daily Universe at the beginning of the semester), and you'll see their writing and coverage improve in every area.

To be more specific, I can give you an idea of the behind-the-scenes action behind our men's and women's basketball stories last week, so that you can be benefited by having more than just assumptions to base your opinion on.

The reason that women's basketball did not have coverage until Thursday is because they did not have a game until Wednesday night. It's true that we could have had a preview for Wednesday's game in Wednesday's paper. If you've been reading the newspaper all semester, you would know that normally we do. You caught us on a day when we missed that story among all the other sports we're trying to cover, and we apologize for that.

The reason that the women's basketball story on Thursday was short was because we learned our lesson from the men's basketball game the night before. We wanted a normal length story, but because the game was right up against our press deadline, by the time the story came in we missed the deadline and we got in trouble for it. The next day, we told our women's basketball writer to just get in whatever she could at the final buzzer, no matter how long or short it was, so that we wouldn't repeat our mistakes.

Tomorrow (Wednesday), we will have a preview for the women's TCU game. We will have a brief mention of the game in Thursday's paper, then a full story on Friday (we will give our reporter another day so she can get more of a story written).

If you would like to offer any other suggestions, please contact Rich Evans, our newsroom editor with decades of experience covering sports for the Deseret News.

Even though we feel like we are doing the best we can compared to what's normal for sports journalism, it is nice to have a reminder and have suggestions on where we can improve. Thank you for letting us know we have a loyal women's basketball and Daily Universe fan out there.

J.J. Despain
Sports Editor
The Daily Universe