10 † Corresponding author © 2015 Conscientia Beam. All Rights Reserved. COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRINT MEDIA COVERAGE OF INDIAN ATHLETES IN LONDON OLYMPICS Asish Paul 1 † --- Gopa Saha Roy 2 1 Assistant Professor, Dept. of Physical Education, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, W.B., India 2 Assistant Professor, S.I.P.E.W., Hastings House, Alipur, Kolkata, W.B., India ABSTRACT Sports became the most interesting area of media coverage among different stream. As it has got its most important status in the world’s media to popularize the newspaper, there is a distinct lack of comparative research on the media coverage of sports. To minimize the gap, this search draws attention on sports coverage during the London Olympics, 2012 from three different newspapers of different languages. The coverages were recorded considering the preview, competition and review phases. The results show that the total coverage of the English newspaper, the Telegraph (36039 sq. cm.) was more than the other two Bengali and Hindi newspapers (9224 sq. cm. and 2599 sq. cm. respectively). The female performers got more attention (34942 sq. cm.) than the male performers (12920 sq. cm.). All the three newspapers provided maximum coverage in the competition phase rather than the other two phases. The English newspaper provided more attention in preview of the main competition also in comparison to the other two newspapers. It has concluded that the coverage of the print media depends mainly on the performance of the athletes, popularity of the performers and intensity of the competition. Keywords: Media, Print media, Sports coverage, Newspapers, Performance, Gender. Received: 1 December 2014/ Revised: 20 January 2015/ Accepted: 23 January 2015/ Published: 28 January 2015 Contribution/ Originality The present study enriched the research in the area of sports journalism. 1. INTRODUCTION Exercise and Sport has been a central part of the Indian culture considering its entertainment and developmental values since last 3000 yrs (Mondal, 2013). The ancient Indian literatures provide us such information. Print media coverage of the endeavors’ of performers played an important role to provide information about the athletes and gets a feedback from the society. Aspect of the media's coverage of sport has been the way in which it has allowed the community Journal of Sports Research 2015 Vol.2, No.1, pp. 10-17 ISSN(e): 2410-6534 ISSN(p): 2413-8436 DOI: 10.18488/journal.90/2015.2.1/90.1.10.17 © 2015 Conscientia Beam. All Rights Reserved.