gender

December’s New Media Index count results in low female bylines, sources

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: In January 2011, we set out to examine the ways in which women are represented in online news both as sources and as authors. To mark our first year here at The Gender Report, we’re revealing our findings from our year-long studies as well as other statistics and commentaries in a series of posts. View other coverage of our one-year anniversary here.

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A low article count in December’s monitoring of the New Media Index resulted in few female bylines and sources.

December’s monitoring marked a full year of monitoring the top articles of the web based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups. Findings from the year will be released later this week.

For some background, the New Media Index reports the top five news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday to Friday week based on commentary on blogs and social media sites. For the purposes of our study, we’ve focused on the top five in the blogosphere. When more than one link was provided on the topic, we’ve tried to monitor the first mentioned or the one that appears based on the writing to be more dominant, unless it is mentioned that articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

Here’s what we found in the 12th month:

December 2011

PEJ New Media Index: December 26-30, 2011
Between Dec. 5 and Dec. 30, the New Media Index included only 11 articles that could be checked. No report was released for the week of Dec. 12-16. The same review of the Asus Transformer Prime appeared in all three weeks in which there were reports. In the week of Dec. 5-9, no link was provided for the No. 5 topic of the 2012 presidential race. Likewise, no link was offered for the No. 5 story of drunk history humor video in the week of Dec. 19-23.

In the stories we monitored, here’s what we found:

  • Women were 15 percent of sources in December’s articles. The articles contained 17 male sources and 3 female sources.
  • Only 3 of the 11 articles contained human sources. Two of those three had only male sources. The vast majority of the sources came from one article, the only by a female author.
  • One post was written or produced by a woman while nine articles were by a man. One company post did not identify a specific author.

This low number of sources overall and small percentage of female bylines has been a trend since the New Media Index’s methodology underwent changes in August. As we’ve mentioned previously, these changes included the use of more sites to track the top stories as well as a larger sample size and range of sources. (Read more about those change and the process here.) As a result, we’ve also continued to notice changes in link diversity (particularly from blogs) and in topics, with more technology topics making it into the top five.

Up next

Check back later this week for the results of our year-long study of the New Media Index. We’ll be comparing the findings from August forward to those for the earlier part of the year to more clearly see the differences as a result of the change in the New Media Index’s methodology.

To look at past months’ findings as well as other statistics on gender and the online news, visit our findings and statistics page.

One year: Gender Report kicks off week of anniversary coverage

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

A year ago this month, we founded The Gender Report as an effort to start a conversation about gender representations in online news. As such, this month also marks the completion of two year-long studies that have attempted to examine the presence of women as sources and authors of Internet news coverage.

We invite you to join us as we commemorate the occasion this week, with coverage stretching from Sunday, Jan. 29 through Sunday, Feb. 5. To start, we’ll have daily posts uncovering what we’ve found in our first year.  These posts will unveil data from our year-long Gender Check monitoring project as well as our 12-month study of the articles in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index. We’ll start the week with posts on the findings from the final month of both studies followed mid-week by the complete results from the full year examined from several different angles.

In addition, we’ll be providing a recap post of all that we’ve accomplished to date in our first year, a review of women in the news over the past year, and commentary on what we’ve learned and what our plans are for the future. Watch for this logo (right) as we start our coverage. In case you miss any of our one-year anniversary posts, you can view it all in one place here.

We’ll be discussing our findings on Twitter this week, so we invite you to join us there as well. In addition to the comment sections on posts, you can share your thoughts and ask us questions about our results and our projects using the #GRdiscuss hashtag. You can help us celebrate our anniversary by following The Gender Report on Twitter and Facebook or by encouraging others to do so.

We’d also like to take this chance to thank you, our readers and followers. We appreciate all of your support and encouragement this first year. It has meant a lot to us. We hope you’ll stick around to continue this dialogue about gender and the news media. We look forward to hearing from you in year two.

Check back for our first post of our year one coverage later today.

Looking back: Top posts of the year

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

This month marks a year since we founded The Gender Report. We’re taking a brief pause from our regular content this week while we gear up for our week-long celebration starting Jan. 29, in which we’ll share findings and commentary from our year-long studies and projects. In the meantime, review what we’ve been up to for the past 12 months by checking out the top five most read posts from our first year.

1. Where are the women in the Romenesko discussion?

Our most read post this year came in November 2011, when journalism industry icon Jim Romenesko resigned. We looked at the gender breakdown of those commenting on, discussing or writing about this announcement and the preceding allegations by the Poynter Institute.

2. Women breaking journalism’s glass ceiling: The ascent of Jill Abramson and others

This Week in Review from June 2011 highlighted women who were moving up the ranks in journalism. This included the announcement that Jill Abramson would be the new executive editor of The New York Times, the first woman to fill that spot in the paper’s 160-year history.

3. Week in Review: Women journalists in the news

The No. 3 post was a Week in Review from December 2011 in which we provided a round-up of stories about women in journalism ranging from the treatment of female journalists abroad to recent studies and discussions about women in newsroom leadership.

4. New study: Women hold less than one-third of top news media jobs

Our write-up on the International Women’s Media Foundation’s “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” was our fourth most popular post. The study, which looked at more than 500 companies in nearly 60 countries, was released in March 2011.

5. Examining gender representations in the New Media Index

The introduction of our year-long study monitoring articles in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index was our fifth most read post. This write-up included findings from the first four months of the study. Final results on the full year of this project will be released next week.

Marking a year at The Gender Report: Stay tuned…

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Yesterday’s Gender Check from the Midwest represented more than just our usual monitoring of gender in lead articles from online news sites — it also marked a special occasion. The completion of this week’s Gender Checks means that we’ve conducted a full 12 months of our monitoring project and, in effect, can celebrate a year since we founded The Gender Report.

In light of this, we are gearing up for a week-long anniversary celebration filled with findings, statistics and commentary. Starting Jan. 29, you can expect to see daily posts commemorating one year here at The Gender Report. Watch for this logo (right) as we start rolling out coverage.

In the meantime, we are putting our weekly Gender Checks on hold until Feb. 6, at which time we’ll announce some changes to this project going forward as well as other additions to the site. Over this next week leading up to Jan. 29, you may see fewer posts from us, but that’s because we are busy crunching and analyzing numbers from our two year-long monitoring studies — Gender Checks and the New Media Index.

We’d also like to use this time to hear from you, our readers. We want to know what questions you have about our studies, what numbers you’d like to know and what you’d like to see from The Gender Report in our second year. Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below or on Twitter using the hashtag #GRdiscuss.

Thanks for joining us for year one. We hope you’ll stay tuned for more.

New Media Index: Findings from October, November show slight increase in female sources, bylines

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Catching up from October and November, our monitoring saw slight gains in the percentage of female sources and bylines in the News Media Index after all-time lows in September and August.

Since January 2011, the Gender Report has been monitoring the top articles of the web based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups. The New Media Index reports the top five news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday to Friday week based on commentary on blogs and social media sites. We’ve opted to focus on the top five in the blogosphere for the purpose of our study. When more than one link was provided on the topic, we’ve tried to monitor the first mentioned or the one that appears based on the writing to be more dominant, unless it is mentioned that articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

Here’s what we found for the months of October and November:

October 2011

Between Oct. 3 and Oct. 28, the New Media Index included 22 articles that could be checked. No specific link was provided for the No. 2 story on the 2012 presidential election in week four. The No. 3 story of week three on Occupy Wall Street was done as a special report, and therefore had no link provided. Similar to what was seen in September, news about the new iPhone appeared every week in the top five, though different stories or blog posts were referenced.

In the stories we monitored, here’s what we found:

  • Women were 25 percent of sources in October’s articles. The articles contained 18 male sources and 6 female sources.
  • Thirteen of the 22 articles contained no human sources. Nearly all of those links were to blog posts or posts from companies. In addition, five articles featured only male sources and one article featured only a female source.
  • Three articles or posts were written or produced by a woman while 17 articles were by one or more man. That means women wrote 15 percent of articles or posts by authors of one gender or the other. One article was by a male and female and one was by staff.

November 2011

PEJ New Media Index: Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2011
Between Oct. 31 and Dec. 2, the New Media Index included 23 articles that could be checked. No New Media Index report was released for the week of Nov. 14 to 18. Again the new iPhone or Apple products were in the news every week.

Here’s what we found in the stories that we monitored:

  • In this month’s articles, women were 27.2 percent of sources. The articles contained 16 male sources and 6 female sources.
  • Seventeen of the 23 articles, or 73.9 percent, contained no human sources. As has been found previously, all of those links were either to blog posts or posts from companies. Also, two articles featured only male sources.
  • This month only two articles or posts were written or produced by a woman while 17 articles were by one or more man. In other words, women wrote 10.5 percent of articles or posts by authors of one gender or the other. Two articles had shared bylines between multiple males and females, one was by staff and one article’s author was not identified.

We only have one month to go in our year-long study of the New Media Index. We’ll be comparing the findings from August forward to those for the earlier part of the year to more clearly see the differences as a result of the change in the New Media Index’s methodology.

As we’ve discussed previously, August marked some changes to the New Media Index’s methodology, including the use of more sites to track the top stories as well as using a larger sample size and range of sources. (Read more about those change and the process here.) As a result, we’ve continued to notice changes in link diversity (particularly from blogs) and in topics, with more technology topics making it into the top five. So far this has meant a decrease in the number of sources and the percentage of female bylines.

For past months’ findings as well as other statistics on gender and the online news, visit our findings and statistics page or view our six-month recap of all of our projects and studies here.