Findings and Statistics – Page 8

May brought few female sources, bylines in New Media Index stories

July 5, 2011July 25, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Women made up less than 15 percent of both sources and authors in the top linked to and discussed articles in the blogosphere in May, significantly lower than the findings of the first four months of the year.

Since January, we’ve been gender checking each of the top articles based on the links that the Project for Excellence in Journalism provides through its New Media Index roundups in addition to our geographical checks each week.

The New Media Index chronicles the top five linked to and discussed news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday through Friday week based on leading commentary on blogs and social media sites. We chose to focus on the main top five in the blogosphere. In cases where more than one link was provided on the subject, we’ve picked the first mentioned or that which appears based on the writing as more dominant to check, unless it is specifically mentioned that two articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

From each of the articles, we’ve been cataloging the gender of the authors or creators, the source breakdown by gender and the subject matter. Overall, in the first four months of checking the New Media Index, women made up 21.8 percent of sources and 31.3 percent of authors.

Women were found in lower percentages of both in May. Here’s the breakdown:

May 2011

Between May 2 and May 27, we found the following. In total, only 12 articles could be checked this month. No links were supplied by the PEJ roundup for the week of May 16 to 20 because a special report was done on the Israel-Palestine conflict that week. Additionally, as has been the case in the past, a link to a specific story was not included for several large news events including Bin Laden’s death (at least the first week), the Shriver-Schwarzenegger split and the Joplin tornado. Other months have had between 17 and 25 articles to check, so the lower amount may have played a role in the results overall.

Here’s what the 12 articles showed:

In the articles monitored this month, women made up 13.3 percent of sources. The articles included 39 male sources and six female sources.
Eight articles were written or produced by men and only one was by a woman. Additionally, two were by both a man and a woman and one was not bylined.
Two top linked-to articles in blogs were opinion pieces. Both were by male authors.

Links this month predominately came from the LA Times, with a few for the BBC, one from the Washington Post and one from the New York Times.

For more information or research on women’s representation in the news media, check out our “Useful Resources” page as well as our other posts on findings and statistics.

Check back on The Gender Report next week for June’s findings from the New Media Index.

Gender Checks show higher count of female bylines in fourth month, fewer female sources in fifth

June 28, 2011July 21, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Though the fact that we missed some Gender Checks in the fourth and fifth months of this project may have slightly altered our results, overall between the two months women represented 25.7 percent of sources and 44.8 percent of bylines in the articles we monitored.

The percent of female authors in particular is significantly higher than what we found in our first three months of Gender Checks. During that time, women were 31 percent of authors. This difference is largely attributed to our fourth month (see findings below) in which for the first time in this study the number of female authors outnumbered the amount of males. That result may have been due to the fact that we missed several Gender Checks from the Northeast that month, and, of our four regions, it tends (at least as an average of our first three months) to return the lowest percentage of female bylines.

For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites from that region — one associated with a newspaper and one that was online-only. In doing so, we pulled the top articles on their websites at the time of the check and gathered information on the gender of the author and the breakdown of the genders of the human sources referenced in the articles among other details. (For more on what Gender Checks are, read our introductory post here.)

Here’s more detail on our findings of both sourcing and authorship from the two months broken down by geographic region and news site association:

Fourth Month: April 19 – May 20, 2011

We reviewed 32 articles, two in each Gender Check. This month we had five Gender Checks from the Midwest and South, four from the West and only two from the Northeast.

Sourcing

The articles contained 71 male sources and 31 female sources, which put women at about 30.4 percent of the human sources referenced in these articles. This does not include sources whose gender was not identifiable.

Here’s how it broke down by geographic region:

West: 13 males, 6 female (Women at 31.6 percent)
Northeast: 15 males, 6 females (Women at 28.6 percent)
Midwest: 20 males, 13 females (Women at 39.4 percent)
South: 23 male, 6 female (Women at 20.7 percent)

And, here’s the breakdown by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not.

Newspaper website: 41 males, 15 females (Women at 26.8 percent)
Online-only: 30 males, 16 females (Women at 34.8 percent)

Authorship

Overall, 16 articles were written by an individual woman and 12 by one or more man, which meant for the first time in this study there were more female than male authors. All geographic areas were fairly evenly split. As stated earlier in this post, this may not have been the case if we had completed an equal number of Gender Checks in the Northeast this month, as it has shown to have the lowest percentage of female bylines thus far in our study. In addition, four articles had a shared byline with a man and a woman.

Here’s a look by geographic region:

West: 5 by an individual woman, 3 by an individual man
Northeast: 2 by a woman, 2 by a man
Midwest: 4 by a woman, 2 by a man, 4 by a man and a woman
South: 5 by a woman, 5 by a man

And, here’s the look by news website association:

Newspaper website: 9 by a woman, 5 by a man, 2 by a man and a woman
Online-only: 7 by a woman, 7 by a man, 2 by a man and a woman

Fifth Month: May 24 – June 24, 2011

We reviewed 30 articles, two in each Gender Check. This month that included five Gender Checks from the West and Midwest, four in the Northeast and only one in the South. Keep in mind that the lack of Gender Checks from the South may have changed slightly our results overall. In the first quarter, the South had slightly higher percentages of women authors and sources than the other geographic regions.

Sourcing

The articles contained 62 male sources and 15 female sources, which put women at about 19.5 percent of the human sources referenced in these articles. This does not include sources whose gender was not identifiable (particularly unnamed sources with no pronoun modifiers, which we saw more often this month).

The Northeast and Midwest performed particularly poorly for women this month. Here’s how it broke down by geographic region:

West: 18 males, 7 female (Women at 28 percent)
Northeast: 19 males, 2 females (Women at 9.5 percent)
Midwest: 20 males, 3 females (Women at 13 percent)
South: 5 male, 3 female (Women at 37.5 percent)

And, here’s the breakdown by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not.

Newspaper website: 37 males, 11 females (Women at 22.9 percent)
Online-only: 25 males, 4 females (Women at 13.9 percent)

Authorship

Overall, 10 articles were written by an individual woman and 20 by one or more man, which meant women were 33.3 percent of authors this month. There were no shared bylines.

Here’s a look by geographic region:

West: 2 stories by an individual woman, 8 by an individual man
Northeast: 4 by a woman, 4 by a man
Midwest: 3 by a woman, 7 by a man
South: 1 by a woman, 1 by a man

For authorship, the number of female bylines newspaper sites and online-only sites matched this month. Here’s the look of what that meant in numbers:

Newspaper website: 5 by a woman, 10 by a man
Online-only: 5 by a woman, 10 by a man

A reminder for our readers: These results reflect a limited amount of data from our simple Gender Checks. We hope you recognize the limitations of this data, since we’ve only sampled a few articles from eight news sites (and in some cases, as in these past two months, not as consistently as we would have liked). Further research and time is needed to verify any validity across the board.

To look at past month breakdowns and other data on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category.

In the newsroom: A look at gender breakdowns at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Beacon

June 27, 2011July 21, 2011Jasmine R. Linabary1 Comment

This is the second in a series of posts (one from each of our geographical regions) looking at how our findings through our Gender Checks — that women have 31 percent of bylines thus far — compare to the actual makeups of these news sites’ newsrooms. The goal is to help determine what other factors may play a role in determining who bylines top-of-the-website stories.

Here’s a look at our monitored websites from the Midwest:

Midwest

During the first quarter, women bylined roughly 41.6 percent of the stories we “gender checked” in the Midwest’s geographic region. Those were distributed as 10 stories written by an individual woman and 14 by one or more man.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Stltoday.com)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newsroom contact list (accessed June 22) shows women as 31.3 percent of the staff members listed. The number of women in the newsroom is at a much lower percentage than has shown up in the bylines on top stories on Stltoday.com, which during the first quarter showed a 50-50 ratio of men to women in the articles we checked. Of those articles from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the first quarter, six were by a woman and six by a man or two.

The gender breakdown in the Post-Dispatch newsroom appears to fall mostly along traditional lines. Women made up the majority only of the arts and entertainment (six to two) as well as the lifestyle (five to one) and health (three to one) staffs. On the other hand, the biggest differences for men were in sports (20 to one) and business (seven to two) staffs. If those under news staffs are tallied up (general assignment, city beats, city hall, main news, metro and national/international), men outnumber women at a ratio of more than three to one.

Of those listed as specifically online news staff, three were female and five were male. The deputy managing editor/online is male — Bob Rose.

St. Louis Beacon

As is typical, the St. Louis Beacon, the online-only news outlet we monitor in this region, has a much smaller staff than the newspaper-based St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Women actually make up the majority of the 15-person editorial and reporting staff (accessed June 22) — nine are female, or 60 percent.

However, even though the St. Louis Beacon has a much greater percentage of female news staff than its newspaper competitor, that has not yet been the case in its byline record through our Gender Checks. During the first quarter, four articles were by women while eight were by men. It’s still early to determine whether this is an ongoing trend.

Unlike with the Seattle P-I, where an apparent emphasis on crime reporting displayed on the top of the website brought out more male bylines, there does not necessarily appear to be a trend at this point here. Three of the eight male bylines belong to one reporter whose topics were of state and city government issues but the rest are spread out between two other reporters and a “special to” the Beacon contributor. All four articles with female bylines counted in our Gender Checks as of the first quarter were of different authorship.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the editor of the Beacon is a woman, Margaret Wolf Freivogel, who is also one of the site’s founders. According to her on-site bio, she has received recognition for her coverage of women in politics and served as president of the Journalism and Women’s Symposium.

Note: For the purposes of our study, most of our data for the breakdowns of the individual newsrooms we feature have and will come from what is readily available online through the news sites’ own contact and staff listing pages. From what we know from our own experience in the industry, we’re aware these aren’t always quite up to date, but they should give us a general idea of what the newsrooms look like. We’ve stuck to newsroom staff for our purposes. This may vary by news site, as some, particularly newspapers, include different staff positions on their lists.

Read the first post in this series, which looked at the staff breakdowns at the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I, he re. Watch for the next installment coming soon. Two more posts remain in this series — the Northeast and the South.

CPJ Report: Journalists break silence on experiences with sexual violence

June 11, 2011July 21, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Since so few people who have come forward in the past to share their experiences, little has been produced to document journalists’ encounters with sexual violence. That’s now changing.

In light of recent events, the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report June 7

by Lauren Wolfe titled “The silencing crime: Journalists and sexual violence,” as part of an effort to start digging deeper into this issue.

The report was inspired in part by CBS correspondent Lara Logan sharing about her sexual assault by a mob in Egypt earlier this year. (Read our post about the coverage of her experience here.) Her “breaking of the silence” has since encouraged others to come forward and groups like CPJ to realize how little information there is on journalists’ experience with sexual violence on the job.

More than four dozen journalists were interviewed for CPJ’s report. Although women made up the majority of victims, some male journalists also came forward and shared experiences, mostly that took place while in captivity. Experiences ranged from groping and threats of sexual violence to violent rapes.

The report identified three different incidents in which journalists typically experience assault: (1) those that are targeted at specific journalists often in response to their work, (2) those that occur in a mob while the journalists are covering an event and (3) those that take place while journalists are detained or held captive.

Many had not previously shared their stories due to fear of stigma, distrust in authorities to act on their report and fears of professional reprisals including of getting pulled from assignments.

Correspondent Jenny Nordberg, one of those whose story is told in the report, expressed concerns about its possible effect on her work assignments and noted the gender of her editor may have played a part in her decision not to share what happened. Nordberg’s experience is similar to Logan’s: She was sexually assaulted by a crowd of men while covering the return of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan in 2007. Here’s what she said:

“It’s embarrassing, and you feel like an idiot saying anything, especially when you are reporting on much, much greater horrors…But it still stays with you. I did not tell the editors for fear of losing assignments. That was definitely part of it. And I just did not want them to think of me as a girl. Especially when I am trying to be equal to, and better than, the boys. I may have told a female editor though, had I had one.”

In light of the special report, CPJ also produced an addendum to its security guide touching on the issue of sexual aggression and ways to minimize the risk of such experiences.

CPJ notes that this initial research is meant to provide the basis for a long-range survey it will work on about the issue in the coming year.

Read the full report here. What information would you like to see on this issue in the longer survey? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Database shows women as 28 percent of news sites’ principal staff

June 6, 2011July 21, 2011Jasmine R. Linabary2 Comments

Approximately 28 percent of the principal staff members at online news outlets are female, at least according to data pulled from the Columbia Journalism Review‘s database of online news sites.

The News Frontier Database is a collection of searchable data and write-ups on 125 outlets, with more added on a regular basis as they fit the criteria. It includes information on the type of coverage, staff sizes, revenue sources and content management systems of the sites along with written profiles and links to CJR coverage.

Most interesting to us was the “principal staff” listing for each outlet in the database. According to the survey news sites are requested to fill out for consideration to be added to the directory, CJR requests a list of the top editorial staff members and titles. It’s suggested news sites stick to naming three individuals, but the directory will include up to five. Sites have offered up names of one to five people who hold a variety of position titles from upper management to writers and contributors and those who do some of everything.

We pulled information from the database June 3 to get a general idea, based on what was provided, of how well women are represented among the positions news sites considered relevant and important to list as “principal staff.” Aside from the overall finding that women represented 28 percent of those listed, here are some of the other interesting tidbits we discovered from looking at this data:

Missing gender

Most disturbing was the fact that 46.4 percent of the sites in the database had no female listed at all. A male was absent from the principal staff list on only 8.8 percent of sites.

There were a total of 125 sites on the day we pulled the data. Fifteen sites listed more women than men, while the database contained 84 sites where the number of men listed outnumbered the women (This includes those sites with no person of a certain gender listed).

Staff size

We also took a look at the data by editorial staff size. In the case of all 15 sites listed as having one editorial staff member, all of the singular principal staff members were male. One site listed both a male and a female (she was art director), though it was noted that the male was the only paid staff member. This seems to suggest that men are more likely than women to develop and run an online news outlet solo.

When the representation of men and women at the news sites was divided out by the range of editorial staff members, a trend emerged that appears to show women have greater representation among the principal staffs of smaller sites (the exception being the staff of one, see above) and increasingly less representation as the staffs get larger until it hits the “more than 40” range. Here’s how that plays out. For sites with the editorial staff specified, the following percent of principal staff members listed are female:

2 to 5 editorial staff: 32.9 percent
6 to 10 editorial staff: 31.3 percent
11 to 20 editorial staff: 18.9 percent
21 to 40 editorial staff: 9 percent
More than 40 editorial staff: 20 percent

Type of coverage

When it came to the type of coverage listed in the database entry, women had parity on hyperlocal sites and for those that covered education with representation hovering between 48 and 50 percent.

No women were included for sites with the type of coverage listed as ethnic, foreign, sports or transportation, though only a few sites from each at this point are included in the database.

Women represented 20 percent or less of the principal staffs for sites that covered business, politics, science and technology. In the case of politics, 11 of the 20 sites with that coverage type did not list a female principal staff member.

The remaining coverage areas — arts and culture, general and investigative — showed women at 26 to more than 34 percent of principal staffs, with investigative at the higher end.

Site location and coverage area

Women were better represented overall from sites identified with a particular state only rather than those that were considered national. Women made up 31.6 percent of the principal staff members listed at state-specific sites versus 20 percent of those from national sites.

Twenty-two of the 37 sites under “national” did not include a woman in their principal staff lists. Only one national site did not list a male and it covered arts and culture.

This information gathered from The News Frontier Database gives us just a glimpse of what the gender breakdowns at these online-only publications might be, at least in the positions considered to be key to the organizations.

To see how these results compare to other studies as well as information we’ve gathered, view our posts on findings and statistics. Additional research on women’s representation in the news media, can be found on our “Useful Resources” page.