Race and Gender

Just to give everyone a heads up on our next issue (which will come out in March), Gina Daddario of Shenandoah University has a paper on gender marking and racial stereotyping in the 2004 Athens Olympics. Charlie Tuggle of North Carolina also looked at the 2004 games, comparing network coverage of men's events and women's events. Max Utsler and Jennifer Byrd of Kansas analyzed how Sports Illustrated covers Black NFL quarterbacks, and I did a paper with Mary Lou Sheffer of Texas-Arlington on why women find it so difficult to get a job in local sports broadcasting. Ric Jensen of Texas A&M contributes our essay on the public relations lessons learned by the Houston Astros in naming their stadium after Enron, and Liz Matson of Northeastern University has our book review.

That's four out of four research papers (all blind reviewed) that deal with race and gender. Given the myriad ways of studying sports media (economics, historical, management, etc.) are gender and race the most important current issues related to sports media?