NCAA Website Coverage: Do Athletic Departments Provide Equitable Gender Coverage on Their Athletic Home Web Pages?(Report‪)‬

The Internet is a contemporary communication medium that provides sport organizations with the opportunity to communicate with both current and potential fan bases (Lombardo, 2007). In today's realm of sports media, the Internet has become a major media source for fan consumption. Currently, there are hundreds of millions of Internet users worldwide, and the number of individuals accessing the World Wide Web increases at a rapid rate each year (Internet World Stats, 2007). Particularly, the Web has become a primary outlet for news consumption. While only four percent of the population went online to access news in 1995, today nearly 26% of the population accesses news content on the Web on a weekly basis (The Pew Research Center [TPRC], 2007). Furthermore, of the individuals accessing the Internet regularly, 46.5% claimed that sports were a primary entertainment source while browsing the Web (TPRC, 2007). The mass consumption of sports news on the Internet alone makes it essential for scholars to focus on the sports coverage being provided on the Web. In addition to the growing interest, the Internet is also a unique medium, because it provides athletic teams and programs with an outlet to promote their product to fan segments. As a result, intercollegiate athletic programs have the ability to control the coverage being provided to each of their individual teams on their athletic home Web page. Thus, the athletic departments also have the unique opportunity to control the gender coverage being provided on their individual websites.