At the Olympics and beyond, women’s sports media outlets are expanding their coverage and writing their own playbooks, filling a void that veteran sports columnist Christine Brennan says was left by male-dominated mainstream sports media, according to the Associated Press (AP) .
Brennan recalls when male colleagues used to laugh at her for insisting on covering women’s sports back in the 1990s. “It was absolutely infuriating to me,” said Brennan, who served as the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media.
Now, entire media outlets dedicated to centering women’s sports are springing up, growing rapidly and tackling coverage themselves, including in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, according to the AP. Alongside the historic growth of women’s sports, the women’s sports media ecosystem is likewise flourishing, and outlets like TOGETHXR, The GIST, Just Women’s Sports, The IX Sports, GOALS and Good Game with Sarah Spain are expanding their reach.
Brennan, now a sports columnist at USA Today covering her 22nd Olympic Games, said that mainstream sports media totally missed the boat on women’s sports, adding that she is heartened by newer outlets “doing a job that should have been done by mainstream sports media,” according to the AP.
Ketra Armstrong, a University of Michigan sport management professor, told the AP that the recent influx of women-led outlets is uniquely “liberating” because women athletes are “owning their stories and not waiting for it to be filtered through any traditional lens.”
Haley Rosen, founder of Just Women’s Sports, said that everything she was seeing felt nothing like the world she had known. “It felt very young, very pink and glitter, a lot of lifestyle content. And I was just like, where are the sports?” Rosen said, so she built Just Women’s Sports, which started as an Instagram account back in 2020 and has since grown into a prominent industry outlet with brand partners like Nike and Amazon Prime, according to the AP. Rosen told the AP that one of the most important things to her is that women’s sports get covered with the same intensity and seriousness as men’s sports. “These women are the best athletes in the world, competing at the highest level. And I think we have to treat them as such,” Rosen said.
Ellen Hyslop, co-founder of The GIST, described herself as “a super-massive avid sports fan” according to the AP. Hyslop told the AP that despite watching ESPN SportsCenter every morning, “the default was always, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, so you’re not a sports fan,’ as opposed to just being welcomed into those communities.” The GIST was designed for readers who felt shut out of traditional sports media and now prides itself on providing equal coverage to men’s and women’s sports and reaches roughly 1 million newsletter subscribers — nearly 50% growth over the past two years— most of them Gen Z and millennial women, according to the AP. Hyslop told the AP that sports are supposed to be for everyone and have the ability to unite people.
Sarah Spain, an ESPN veteran and host of the daily women’s sports podcast Good Game on iHeart, credits social media, WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and the women’s national soccer team for accelerating the industry’s growth, pointing to “a very organic and natural push for more women’s sports coverage,” according to the AP.