Abstract
Sports-specialized newspapers are one of the print media with the highest number of readers in Spain. However, little is known about the health coverage in this type of print press. The aim of the study was to analyze any health-related material in sports newspaper coverage and describe the main characteristics. This is an observational and cross-sectional study, performed in relation to the three most read daily Spanish sports newspapers (MARCA, AS, SPORT). A descriptive analysis was conducted to assess the health-related materials selected after a careful search over a period of 30 days. During this time, a total of 815 units of analysis were identified. On average, 14.79% (n = 645 pages) of the full content (n = 4362) included health-related material. The Liga BBVA section was the most frequent to contain health-related content by a significant margin (p = 0.01). The main covered topics were injuries to soccer players (52%), doping (21%), and other diseases in athletes or their relatives (8.6%) with no significant differences (p = 0.10). Photographs (87.4%) were the most frequent visual material used in the health content, followed by infographics (12.6%). Press releases were the most frequent source of information (58%). Spanish sports newspapers include a high proportion of health-related material, especially in terms of providing detailed descriptions of athletes’ sport injuries, mainly related to soccer.
Highlights
Sport is a large, fast-growing sector of the economy and is responsible for around 2% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
30 editions were analyzed of all three sports newspapers
MARCA published the major proportion of health content (HC) units (n = 299, 36.69% of the total) and the greatest number of pages (n = 228), but the paper with the highest proportion of pages containing HC was AS (n = 225, 15.65%), followed by SPORT (14.46%), and MARCA (14.29%)
Summary
Fast-growing sector of the economy and is responsible for around 2% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sports sector employs 15 million people or 5.4% of the labor force [2]. Major sporting events and competitions have considerable potential to generate increased tourism in Europe [3]. The relationship between the sports sector and the media is critically important. Especially television, create big audiences, they have become interesting partners with sports for economic and political purposes. In Europe, television broadcasting rights are the primary income source for professional sport [2]. Diverse sporting events including the Olympic Games, athletics world championships, major professional soccer championships and leagues, tennis grand slams, Formula 1 races, etc. Are an important source of content for the sports media Diverse sporting events including the Olympic Games, athletics world championships, major professional soccer championships and leagues, tennis grand slams, Formula 1 races, etc. are an important source of content for the sports media
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