Sports Illustrated panel: Female sports reporters under 30 talk about their careers

I find the “media panels” that Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch hosts fascinating and illuminating.

Deitsch occasionally convenes roundtable discussions, via email, among working pros on topics in sports media. This week, in response to the news that 28-year-old Katie Nolan will be hosting a nightly show on Fox Sports 1 starting in March, Deitsch gathered seven women who are 30 and under and working in sports media to talk about their experience in the business.

The discussion is long and well worth reading. It’s certainly not all negativity, but Sports Illustrated NFL writer Jenny Vrentas did concisely sum up what one of the biggest problems young women in sports media have to deal with:

Young women seem to have to do a lot more to “prove” themselves than young men, to be considered for senior jobs on sports staffs. Early in my career, an editor told me I wasn’t ready for a beat yet, even though there were other reporters of a similar age and experience level covering sports beats at the newspaper. I’d covered Penn State football in college, and I had a master’s degree in journalism, so I had a hard time understanding what else I needed to do. I focused on working hard at the assignments that were given to me and worked my way up. But at times in my career, I’ve felt as though there was an assumption that I couldn’t do something, and I had to prove otherwise. I feel that, more often, men get the benefit of the doubt. You certainly see a trend across the business, where women are less often given the more prestigious roles like the biggest beat at a newspaper, senior writer, analyst or editor.

The others on the panel are Kalyee Hartung of ESPN, Laura Keeley of The Raleigh News & Observer and Charlotte Observer, Laken Litman of USA Today, Monica McNutt of NewsChannel8 in Washington, Gina Mizell of The Oregonian and Francesca Weems of WLBT/FOX 40 in Jackson, Miss.