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A labor of love: How fans of women’s sports navigate streaming subscriptions and slow changes in coverage

Monica Crawford

Media Culture and Society2026https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437261417330article
ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Extensive scholarship has documented women’s sports coverage and its slow growth in visibility across televised sportscasts, print, and online news. Relatively little research has considered women’s sports audiences and their ability access women’s sports coverage. Through interviews with 19 self-identified fans of women’s sports (FoWS) in the U.S., this study explores FoWS’s perceptions of current patterns in coverage, their practices for finding it, and their interpretations of those practices. The interviews indicate that extensive “work” is required of FoWS should they want to find live sportscasts of their favorite teams. However, the use of social media networks to encounter specialized, grassroots outlets’ reporting has made accessing women’s sports news easier for some. This quest for access is constrained by media availability, resulting in a form of fan labor that is inherently aspirational.

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Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437261417330

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{monica2026,
  title        = {{A labor of love: How fans of women’s sports navigate streaming subscriptions and slow changes in coverage}},
  author       = {Monica Crawford},
  journal      = {Media Culture and Society},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437261417330},
}

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A labor of love: How fans of women’s sports navigate streaming subscriptions and slow changes in coverage

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.