On Tuesday, AL.com published a piece about an event coming up this Thursday called “Girls of Fall: Food, Fashion and Fun.” It’s a gathering in Mobile, Alabama, for people who don’t know enough about football but want to learn more about the sport and perhaps how to throw the best football party. It is a gathering for people like women, actually, because as author David Holloway noted in the opening sentence of his piece, “Football can be a confusing and often vexing concept, especially for women.”
According to Romenesko, the article was quickly amended after it became a bit of a Twitter sensation so that it now reads “Football can be a confusing and often vexing concept” with no mention to the gender of the person who might be confused by the sport. The post now has this clarifying remark at the bottom:
This story has been edited to remove incorrect and offensive assumptions about women and football. We apologize for the error in judgment.
The rest of the piece contains no real references to this event being particularly “female-friendly”, except if you’re reading into the connection between a woman’s place being in the home, hosting parties and the emphasis on the party aspect of a football game. “Girls of Fall” must be a notable event, however; while Holloway wrote his piece for the Food section, another article on “Girls of Fall” was published just the day before in the Sports section of AL.com. The latter piece includes a quote from Senior Bowl Executive Director Phil Savage who helped organize the event. (For those women reading who don’t like football, the Senior Bowl is an all-star college football game played in the off-season.) Savage explained the event not much differently than Holloway had done in the original lede in his piece:
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