Gender and Sports Publications in School Newspaper Columns: The Greek Example

Sport is a basic element of social culture and a way of social expression, while it also constitutes a form of social education. Sport, however, also exhibits the most evident gendered characteristics of sports journalism since it constitutes a “male/male-dominated” field. What is the presence of boys and girls in the role of the sports editor/journalist? What sports issues are chosen by boys and girls and published in school newspaper columns? To what extent is the presence of the “male-dominated” sports domain and the sports news perpetuated/continued in schools’ newspapers? We analyze the publication content by gender in school newspapers, so as to determine in a qualitative and quantitative manner the basic parameters that define gendered sports discourse and its social components.

events of school and social life. In this way they participate in a social "dialogue" choosing to write what in their opinion would be interesting to communicate to their classmates, their teachers and parents.
Through the newspaper, children make an effective use of a communicative discourse that aims at convincing, moving, entertaining or all of the above according to the occasion. Students write various texts for the school newspaper that they publish in order to air their considerations, their apprehensions and troubles. All of the above mentioned occasions are real instances that form a part of social and school life by extension (Adaloglou, 1994, pp. 24-25).
According to Graff (2003), students' participation in publishing activities is an excellent opportunity to assess their entire academic progress but not only that. Bowen and Tantillo (2002) claim that scholastic journalism helps students develop their critical thinking, their ability to communicate and to be better, active citizens, whereas according to Poslaniek (1990, pp. 139-140) the school newspaper belongs to what he calls "empowering animations" ("animations responsabilisantes"); it is a "product" that is proposed to a heterogeneous and demanding audience, through which the citizenship, not the pupilness is under evaluation. In addition, Kolodzy (2006, p. 248) calls the children journalists "kid (citizen) reporters" and notes the practice of certain Media, such as BBC for children, to entice children of all ages to participatory journalism.
Undeniably, children do not live in a social vacuum before they enter school; they are rather immersed in a gendered social environment that provides them with the gender baggage of attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes and practices regarding masculinity and femininity that has been formed by institutions ranging from family and peer groups to the local community culture, mass culture and subculture, and the Media. These attitudes/prejudices/practices meet with the meanings, the standards and the symbolic practices, the values, intentions and goals that form the dominant gender culture of schools; as a consequence, students construct and re-construct their new gender "identities" by means of negotiation and conversation, as they place themselves in a variety of discourses (Politis, 2006, p. 182).
Consequently, gender identity (Davidson, 2006, p. 94) is a product of interaction (Denzin, 1992, p. 29) that is created and re-created through the interaction of various dominant discourses and different ideologies (Althousser, 1971).
The Media depict life in our society and set the public agenda by providing us with information regarding all other societal institutions, including the military, education and sport. On one hand, sport in the twentieth century has been a favourable field for men to create and reinforce an ideology of male supremacy. By excluding women and connecting athleticism to masculinity, sport provides opportunities for men to assert their dominance at a time when male hegemony is constantly challenged in everyday life (Duncan & Messner, in Wenner, 1998). On the other hand, where sport is concerned and in an attempt to define news, the routinized version of this definition is that news becomes "whatever the editor says it is" (Creedon, in Wenner, 2002, p. 103). Sport as news/report/article is considered to be the par excellence "male/male-dominated fort", since by Greek standards the presence www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm coverage is shown to be almost nonexistent (Halvatzakis, 1998).
As Miloch et al., have pointed out (2005, p. 219), although women have made significant contributions to business and industry breaking glass ceilings, they have not yet completely broken through the gender barrier that exists in the sport arena (Humms et al., 1996;Neupauer, 1998;Schell & Rodriquez, 2000). Miloch et al. (2005, pp. 219-220) stress the fact that female journalists covering sports may appear to be a recent phenomenon, but women actually began working the sports beat in the 1920s, where, as the Associated Press estimated, only about 25 women were employed as full-time sportswriters at American daily newspapers (Creedon, 1994). In addition, they also note (Miloch et al., 2005) that past research suggests the majority of female sports journalists have faced some form of discrimination from male colleagues within their respective departments and organizations, and, among all, they are expected to know less and adhere to higher standards of performance while tolerating low salaries, less desirable assignments, and sexist comments in the workplace (Miller & Miller, 1995, p. 888). Hardin and Whiteside (2009, p. 628) also have pointed out that the most recent study reflects an enduring industry trend: women in sports departments work in token status, where they constitute a fraction of sports editors (6%) and reporters (10%). In this frame, Hardin et al. (2008, p. 68  Meanwhile, only 32% of "hard" news was written or covered by women and more often they found reporting on "soft" subjects such as social issues, family, or arts and "living" (up to 40% women).
While statistics show that more and more women are training and entering the field, although the number of women executives, producers, chief editors and publishers remains too low." In 2002 the Canadian Newspaper Association report stated that only 8% of the editors-in-chief and 12% of publishers were women" (Gender Equality in Journalism, 2009, p. 4). Thus, as Kian (2007, p. 6) suggests the lack of women in the sport media profession and particularly in positions of power (i.e., editors, producers, managers), supports the notion the sport media is a masculine hegemonic institution (Hardin, 2005;Pedersen, Whisenant, & Schneider, 2003;Trujillo, 1991).
Sport fascinates a great number of people-adults and juveniles-and constitutes a popular spectacle/reading/topic of discussion. The word sport in Greek ("αθλητισμός") etymologically comes from the word "άθλος" ("athlos") which means struggle, fight, intensive effort. Sport constitutes a basic element of social culture and is a way of social expression as well as a form of promoting human physical and mental beauty. Apart from that, the endogenous elements of sports are in a position to foster the mental and physical cultivation of societies whereas at the same time sport constitutes a form of social education. Sport has a special place in the pages of political newspapers, it forms a goal and content of specialized newspapers-the sports ones-while it also finds its place in the columns of school newspapers.

Purpose
The purpose of our study is to examine how gender affects the promotion of sport and sports issues, through the par excellence school Media, the school newspaper. We attempt to record the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the featured sporting events that are described by the reporters in the columns of school newspapers.
Specifically, we record and discuss sports publications based on the editor's name, thus trying to reach conclusions about the presence of gender in sports school journalism, the gendered preferences as to the content of the articles they choose to publish, but mainly the kind of events that according to each gender constitutes sports news which requires to be published. We examine the content of sports issues that young reporters choose to bring under the spotlight of publicity, thus determining the basic parameters that define gendered school sports discourse and its social components.
More specifically, our research attempts to respond to the following questions: 1). What kind of sports articles do young male/female editors prefer?
2). What is the content of these articles according to the gender of the editors?
3). What is the number of boys and girls that write about sports issues in school newspapers? 4). Is there a quantitative differentiation between sports articles by boys and girls?

Sample
The sample of our study is composed of sports publications that we encountered in newspaper columns The collection of primary school newspapers has been a difficult procedure. The publication of a newspaper depends on important factors such as the encouraging teacher, sponsorships and mainly the children-reporters/editors. The circulation of a school newspaper is affected by the aforementioned factors as the teacher may be get a transfer/leave of absence, sponsorships may end, the young reporters/editors may change class-most move on to high school-resulting in a permanent or temporary discontinuation of the newspaper publication or a publication at rarer intervals than those of the original planning. There are school newspapers with consistency and continuity in time, but they are extremely few. For this reason the collection of the issues was adapted to these facts and the additional fact that we often encountered during the material gathering, that not all issues of the newspaper are kept In the process of collecting the sample and sending the newspaper issues to the researcher, one question was asked by means of telephone or e-mail to the school principals or the teachers that were responsible for the publication of the newspaper: how the newspaper articles were selected and how they were assigned to the children. All the persons that were responsible answered that the selection of the topics was performed by the group of children that were responsible for publishing the newspaper and the assignment of the articles was also performed by the children according to their preferences.
The children were usually assigned with the topics they had proposed to the editorial team themselves.

Method
The method that was followed in the process of our sample was content analysis (Krippendorff, 1980;Berelson, 1952;Weber, 1990;De Sola Pool, 1959;Palmquist, 1990). The publication was utilized as an analysis unit. Berelson (1952) notes that content analysis is a "research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication", of written or oral speech, with interpretation as the final goal. De Sola Pool (1959) offered a different dimension to content analysis noting that it is ideal for the study of meanings and semantic relationships contained in written or oral speech. Several years later, Palmquist (1990) utilized content analysis in written texts of students and teachers.
The first step was to record and classify the publications of our sample. All 167 sports publications were classified according to the editor's name in three basic axes: Regular columns, Various publications and Features.
These publications were subsequently placed in the following categories based on their content and title:

Results
In a total of 225 publications, the name of the young male/female editor is shown in 167 of them. We encounter 262 young male and female editors in total, out of which 137 are boys (a percentage of 52.2%) and 125 are girls (a percentage of 47.7%) ( Table 1).

REPORTERS/EDITORS 125 (47,7%)
The following Figure 1 shows the representation of gender in the publications of the newspapers in our sample:

Figure 1. Representation of Gender
Seventy four publications are written by young male reporters ( Table 2) which include: 15 publications in "Regular columns" out of which 4 have to do with the school championship, 44 in "Various publications" out of which 5 concern the school championship and 15 in "Features", out of which one is about the school championship. We notice that male reporters' articles outnumber females in "Various publications", but are equal in "Regular sports columns" and in "Features". We also deduce that they only write 10 articles concerning the school championship in a total of 74 articles.  Seventy-five publications are written by young female reporters (Table 3) which include: 11 publications in "Regular columns", out of which 8 have to do with the school championship, 28 in "Various publications", out of which 3 concern the school championship and 36 in "Features", out of which 3 are about the school championship. We notice that female reporters write more "Feature" articles, their presence is then observed in "Various publications", while they exhibit a more limited presence in "Regular sports columns". We also deduce that they only write 14 articles concerning the school championship in a total of 75 articles. In the remaining 6 publications found in the category of "Entertainment columns" (crosswords, literature, acrostic puzzles, etc.) we record 6 boys and 5 girls. In Table 4 we observe that male editors write 2 quizzes, 2 poems (out of which one is a hymn and it is entitled "Hymn to Olympia") and 2 letters/missives to male athletes they admire and regard as a role model, Demis Nicolaides and Colin Mc Rae in particular. The female editors write 1 acrostic puzzle, 2 poems and 2 letters/missives to female athletes they admire/regard as a role model, Katerina Thanou and Svetlana Khorkina.
Letters/missives lead us to the conclusion that young reporters prefer to address athletes of the same gender as themselves. It also seems that male reporters have as idols/role models athletes from spectacular sports (one of which is characterized by extremely high speed and competitiveness) such as rallying and football-par excellence men's sport-whereas girls prefer female athletes from track and field as well as gymnastics-more "feminine" sports-a main reason being that gymnastics athletes are distinguished for their gracefulness and elegance.  The quantitative analysis of our sample on the basis of gender highlights and points out the gendered preferences as to the theme of their publications (Table 5). Male reporters, as shown in Table 9, exhibit a particular interest in the "Sports" category with 34 publications in total (a percentage of 45.9%), and their references about football clearly outnumber other sports (23 publications), while publications about basketball (5), volleyball (3), karate (1), chess (1) and track and field (1) follow at a wide difference.
The second category with 19 publications in total (a percentage of 25.6%) are "Olympic and Paralympic Games" with most references concerning the Olympics, less about the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games (7) and only one about the 2004 Athens Olympics.
The third category are "Championships", with 9 publications in total (a percentage of 12.1%) in which male journalists focus their publications more on the school championship (6 publications) and less on Champion's League (2) or the European Cup (1).
In the "Social issues" with a total of 8 publications (a percentage of 10.8%), editors prefer to write more about football and violence in the football stadiums (4 publications in total), about doping and anti-doping (2 publications), followed by publications concerning the importance of sports (1) and health through sports (1).
The category of "Athlete-idols" comes last in the interests of boy reporters since we record only 4 publications in total (a percentage of 5.4%) referring to Schumacher, the old international footballer Theodore Voutyritsas, the local team coach Notis Psychogios and Spyros Louis (an imaginary interview).  Female reporters, as shown in Table 6, exhibit a special interest in the category of "Olympic and "Sports" is the second category in girls' interests (18 publications in total, a percentage of 24%) with the references to basketball having the lead (7 publications), followed by the references to volleyball 3 and two about handball, football and track and field. Chess and cycling, horseback riding have one publication each. The fourth category with 4 publications in total (a percentage of 5.3%) are "Social issues", the references of which focus on the Olympics in relation with sport, doping, Olympic medalists (1 publication for each one), whereas 1 publication focuses on the spectator's role as an animator of teams and athletes.
The fifth and final category is "Championships" with 1 publication (a percentage of 1.3%) about the school championship.

Observations
All in all, the comparison of the publication content by gender results in the realization that boy reporters/editors prefer to write more about sports and mainly the so-called "king of sports", football, and less about athlete idols, whereas girl reporters/editors opt for greater events such as the Olympic and Paralympic Games and less for Championships, the references of which regard only the school championship. Moreover, it appears that boys favor references to spectacular sports (football, basketball, volleyball), whereas girls seem to have a predilection for references to great events and their historical data. What is more, athlete idols for boys seem to be those of football and formula 1-all males-whereas for girls are Olympic and Paralympic medalists-males and females alike.
The social issues of sports that boy editors are concerned with seem to regard mostly football and violence, then doping, whereas girl editors focus on the Olympic Games and medalists. Girls are only interested in school Championships, whereas boys also refer to Championships such as the Champion's League and the European Cup. At the same time, we infer that girls have more publications in "Feature articles" and less in "Regular columns", whereas boys have more "Random publications" and are equal to those in "Regular columns" and "Feature articles", a fact that once again exhibits the usual practice of male presence in regular sports columns.
The discrepancies of the school newspaper publications as to the editors' gender and based on the content of the articles appears to follow the classic stereotypical versions that occur in the Greek social fabric.
For instance, boys are mostly interested in football and Formula 1, whereas girls prefer the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Even when it comes to social issues that are related to sport, boys persist with football matters (violence in stadiums and less about doping), while girls are more intrigued by the Olympics.
Apart from that, again we confirm that boy reporters of sports issues outnumber girls. However, although boys exceed in number, girls' publications outnumber those of the boys, even by just one, a fact that demonstrates the girls' dynamic presence in school sports journalism. Our research clearly shows that female sports reporters seem to find their position in scholastic journalism, getting involved with great sports events-such as the Olympic and Paralympic Games-a fact that contradicts the interests and presence of adult female reporters.
It should be noted of course that the publication of a school newspaper is among others a learning procedure based on the principles of Problem Solving (Viz. inter alia: Abercrombie, 1979; AUT