Women’s sports media has accelerated beyond niche coverage, with new outlets growing alongside and sometimes directly competing with mainstream sports desks as the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics unfold. The industry shift is visible in how reporters frame events, who runs the platforms, and which audiences are being targeted as sports organizations look for more consistent attention.
Christine Brennan, a USA Today sports columnist covering her 22nd Olympic Games, described the change by looking back to the 1990s, when she said male colleagues mocked her for insisting women’s sports deserved coverage. Brennan, who served as the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media, later said the landscape has moved toward outlets built specifically to center women’s sports rather than treat it as a sideline.
Brennan said she is encouraged by the growth of women’s sports-focused media outlets, which she described as increasingly handling the coverage itself rather than waiting for mainstream sports media to adjust. She pointed to a broader ecosystem taking shape around Olympics coverage as well, with multiple companies and newsletters that have positioned themselves as dedicated homes for women’s athletics.
Ketra Armstrong, a sport management professor at the University of Michigan, tied the expansion to a change in storytelling power. Armstrong said the influx of women-led outlets is “liberating” because women athletes are “owning their stories and not waiting for it to be filtered through any traditional lens.” That framing underpins how some outlets describe their mission: coverage is not simply more frequent, but also differently controlled.
Several newer outlets trace their growth to frustrations about what traditional sports media offered. Haley Rosen founded Just Women’s Sports after stopping professional soccer and saying she could not find reporting that resembled the world she had known. Rosen said she saw coverage that felt “very young, very pink and glitter,” and she asked, “where are the sports?” Just Women’s Sports began as an Instagram account in 2020 and has expanded into an industry outlet with brand partners including Nike and Amazon Prime, with Rosen emphasizing equal seriousness in how women’s sports are treated.
Ellen Hyslop, co-founder of The GIST, described a similar gap between what fans wanted and what mainstream broadcasts delivered. Hyslop said she watched ESPN SportsCenter every morning but felt the experience often carried an unspoken message that sports spaces were not meant for her as a woman. She said The GIST was built to welcome readers who felt shut out, and that it now reaches roughly 1 million newsletter subscribers, with about half of them described as Gen Z and millennial women.
Sarah Spain, an ESPN veteran and the host of the daily women’s sports podcast Good Game on iHeart, said social media and high-profile athletes helped accelerate growth for women’s sports media. Spain also said women’s sports lacked consistent attention that is critical for pro leagues, pointing to what she called a “very organic and natural push for more women’s sports coverage.” She argued that the earlier pattern involved “blaming of the product of women’s sports” without recognizing the broader “ecosystem and infrastructure” that had been lifting interest in men’s sports.
Spain said the Olympics function as evidence of how quickly audiences can respond when women’s sports receive contextualized coverage, not just headlines. She said the Olympics are the “shining star” for women’s sports coverage because it demonstrates that if audiences get the “information, and the nuance, and the context to care,” they can become dedicated fans—an argument made while she is in Italy covering her first Olympic Games for Good Game.
The Milan Cortina Olympics are producing that effect in real time, with headline coverage continuing to spotlight athletes including skiing star Lindsey Vonn, downhill champion Breezy Johnson and snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim. Even with that visibility, Armstrong and others cautioned that women’s sports media still represents a “very small piece of the pie” compared with the broader sports industry, and that market incentives shape which sports receive sustained attention.
Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor Craig LaMay said growth in coverage does not guarantee long-term sustainability, because decisions about what gets covered often remain “relentlessly a business decision.” LaMay pointed to Forbes’ annual list of the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes, saying it includes no women, as an example of how pay and attention still differ despite the emergence of new media outlets.
Still, women’s sports media and related commerce are leaning into slogans and partnerships designed to capture broader audiences. TOGETHXR, described as a media and commerce company founded in 2021 by four star athletes including Olympic halfpipe silver medalist Kim, promoted the slogan “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports.” Co-founder and chief brand officer Jessica Robertson said the message rejects “very antiquated rhetoric in women’s sports that no one watches,” and Robertson said the company has sold more than $6 million worth of products bearing the slogan. Robertson also said TOGETHXR reaches more than 4 million users across platforms, a 17% increase from 2024, and that it produces newsletters, docuseries and podcasts including “A Touch More” with Olympic champion Sue Bird and soccer star Megan Rapinoe.
Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, said streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple have created additional ways to consume women’s sports beyond older linear television networks. Leighton also said the work behind today’s momentum began years earlier, and she framed the change as a long process with an acceleration point. “It takes generations to make generational change,” Leighton said, noting her organization’s founding in 1974 by Billie Jean King, two years after the passage of Title IX, and concluding that the moment now amounts to “a tipping point.”
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