How Many Photos?

SportPix researchers collected over 3,000 photos of the Super Bowl and the NCAA Men’s basketball championship from 16 different news outlets.   

  • SportPix researchers evaluated a total of 2,135 photographs of the Super Bowl published in 10 online news sites.
  • SportPix researchers evaluated a total of 1,041 photographs of the NCAA Championship published in 12 online news sites.
Note that researchers selected outlets that were expected to make a significant commitment to cover the games.  So, for example, researchers evaluated the photo coverage of the hometown news outlets of the various teams — the Baltimore Sun’s coverage of the Ravens, for example.  However, given research limitations, researchers were unable to evaluate all media outlets that covered the games.

The chart below compares the amount of photographic coverage of the 2013 championships of six major media outlets.   

Click to enlarge.

The numbers to the right of the bars represent the number of photographs researchers found and pinned* of the two games.

Across these six outlets, the Super Bowl received significantly more coverage than the NCAA Championship.

Note the great disparity in the simple amount of coverage of the two games — especially in the five sports-centric news outlets.

Only USA Today — the single historically print newspaper in this list — ran more coverage of the college basketball championship game.

* NB:  The total number of photos pinned to Pinterest during both the Super Bowl and NCAA championship game is  3,274.  
Researchers applied the same collection methodology for all the news outlets studied.  It is likely that the researchers on this survey did not collect every photograph published, and, on occasion, certain photographs that could be viewed were not collectible by Pinterest.  The total number of photographs studied, therefore, should be understood to be representative of those published on the news outlets, not an absolute set of all photographs published on all sites.  
Note that the total listed at the top of the SportPix Pinterest homepage is a subset of that number.  That pin count reflects only the number of pins added directly through the ICMPA Research account and does not include pins from researchers on group boards.