Yahoo! Sports

COVERAGE of the NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP GAME

This page provides a summary of research results for Yahoo! Sports’s photographic coverage of the  final game of the NCAA March Madness tournament.

YAHOO! SPORTS PHOTOS of the NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP GAME*

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During the NCAA Championship Yahoo! Sports ran photo and video coverage of the game. Researchers found that most of their content focused on the actual game with little fan coverage. Louisville, the winning team, received more media attention post game while Michigan received very minimal post game coverage.

Overall, researchers pinned* 170 photos and videos from Yahoo! Sports the night of and day after the NCAA Championship.  Although photos comprised a majority of Yahoo’s visual coverage, Yahoo! Sports also posted Youtube videos and GIFs.

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Yahoo! Sports ran a good deal of pre- and post-game coverage. — Yahoo! Sports

  • Yahoo! Sports published  more than twice as many photos of Louisville than of Michigan.
  • Researchers noted that Yahoo! Sports mentioned Louisville coach Rick Pitino and Michigan coach John Belein more than any of their teams’ players.
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More than half of Yahoo’s coverage featured the actual game. — Yahoo! Sports

  • A substantial proportion of Yahoo’s on-the-court coverage depicted actual scoring attempts, but the shots ran with minimal captions: almost half of the photos did not identify the players, leading researchers to conclude that Yahoo! believed the aesthetics of their images were as important to their audience as the players depicted in them.

(Click here to see Yahoo! Sports’ photos that researchers pinned to Pinterest.)

These images from Yahoo! Sports are a sampling of its photo coverage of the NCAA Championship game. Clicking a photo links to the Pinterest board of that photo.

Focus of YAHOO! SPORTS’ Photo Coverage during the NCAA Championship

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The majority of Yahoo Sports‘ photos focused on action and game play.

      • As one might expect — but that didn’t prove to be the case for many of the sports outlets — Yahoo! Sports dedicated the greatest percentage of its attention to what was happening on the court — the action of the game overall.
      • Yahoo!, like so many others ran substantially more photos of the winning Louisville players than the losing Michigan one — certainly during the post-game celebrations, but also across the board.   
 

PINTEREST:  Researchers noted that Yahoo! Sports only allowed visitors to “pin” photographs on the site; researchers could not pin videos or GIFs. As a result, researchers could not represent all the components of the full visual experience of a visitor to Yahoo! Sports via Pinterest. 

CONTEXT:  

* NB: 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.
It is fair to note, however, that the number of photographs of either game collected for any given site is a rough indication of the commitment of that site to photographically covering that specific game