PR Roundup: How Not to Interview Caitlin Clark, North American Communications Monitor and NPR’s Rollercoaster Week
By Nicole Schuman for PRNews
How Not to Report on Women’s Basketball
What happened: This week’s WNBA draft continued to bask in the afterglow of an historic Women’s NCAA March Madness tournament and welcome some of its newest and brightest stars.
Caitlin Clark mania continued for the Indiana Fever, who drafted the University of Iowa star with the first pick in the draft. Unfortunately an awkward interaction between an Indianapolis Star columnist and Clark overshadowed much of her introductory press conference with the Fever.
Gregg Doyel, the columnist, wrote a sort-of apology piece on April 17 in the Star, but the damage had already been done, and social media users had a field day canceling Doyel.
Communication takeaways: It will be curious to see what happens next with Doyel and his tenure with the Indy Star. Lauren Smith, Professor of Communication Studies, Sports Communication & Media at Rowan University, says this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to coverage of women’s sports.
“Women’s sports are finally seeing a long overdue push, and with that push, the issues and problems with the treatment of female athletes are coming to the light for a lot of people,” Smith says. “When these problematic behaviors are shown, I believe the best course of action is to not only point it out and condemn it, but explain WHY it’s problematic. Gregg Doyel’s statement yesterday left a lot of women holding the bag (again) to explain why the statement was so gross.”
Molly K. Yanity, Professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University says Doyel was right to apologize quickly on social media, but that was about the extent of the “right moves” by him and the Indianapolis Star.
“He never should have been allowed to write a column about his apology, which of course rehashed and described the entire cringy episode,” Yanity says. “The next-day column just further made a spectacle of the incident and of the apology. It didn’t seem to me that Doyel or the brass at the Star understood the public sentiment surrounding it all. Doyel should’ve apologized briefly and sincerely on social media, apologized to Clark privately and then made himself scarce in WNBA media circles—which, frankly, he had been before.”
Smith also notes the importance for other communicators and journalists in that situation to call out problematic questions in the future.
“Put a stop to it,” she says. “Don’t put that on the player to have to muddle through the uncomfortable interaction.”
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