women in journalism – Page 39

Women wrote more than 40 percent of articles in month six of Gender Checks

July 25, 2011August 13, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: Six months ago, we set out to look at how women are represented in online news both as sources and as authors. To mark our progress, this week we’re reviewing our findings as well as unveiling new statistics based on what we’ve uncovered thus far in a series of posts. View other six-month coverage here.

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Women had more than 40 percent of bylines in the sixth month of stories we monitored in our weekly Gender Checks. Females also rebounded from our lowest showing of 19.5 percent of sources in the fifth month.

Since this marks our sixth month of our Gender Checks project, we’ll be unveiling the half-year roundup of our findings later this week. For now, here’s a look at the representation of women during just our sixth month:

Sixth Month: June 28 – July 22, 2011

During our sixth month of Gender Checks, we reviewed 32 articles, two in each Gender Check. This month that included four Gender Checks from each geographic region. For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites from that region — one associated with a newspaper and one that was online-only. For our monitoring, we pulled the top or lead articles on their websites at the time of the check and gathered information on the gender of the author, the breakdown of the genders of the human sources referenced in the articles and other details. (For more on what Gender Checks are, read our introductory post here.)

Sourcing

Overall, the articles contained 105 male sources and 39 female sources, which meant women were 27 percent of the human sources referenced.

Here’s how it broke down by geographic region:

West: 22 males, 11 female (Women at 33.3 percent)
Northeast: 43 males, 14 females (Women at 24.6 percent)
Midwest: 32 males, 10 females (Women at 23.8 percent)
South: 8 male, 4 female (Women at 33.3 percent)

Sites associated with newspapers used a low percentage of female sources this month. Here’s the breakdown by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not.

Newspaper website: 56 males, 11 females (Women at 16.4 percent)
Online-only: 49 males, 28 females (Women at 36.4 percent)

Authorship

This month 13 articles were written by an individual woman and 17 by one or more man, which meant women were 43.3 percent of authors of one gender or the other this month, which is one of our higher percentages by month. The highest came in the fourth month with women as 57.1 percent of bylines, the only month that women were in the majority. There were two shared bylines between a man and a woman.

Here’s how bylines broke down by geographic region:

West: 4 stories by an individual woman, 4 by an individual man
Northeast: 2 by a woman, 4 by men and 2 with a shared byline between a man and a woman
Midwest: 3 by a woman, 5 by a man
South: 4 by a woman, 4 by a man (or two)

Here’s how women did in bylines between newspaper sites and online-only sites this month:

Newspaper website: 5 by a woman, 10 by men and 1 with a shared byline between a man and woman
Online-only: 8 by a woman, 7 by a man, 1 with a shared byline

As always, we remind our readers that these findings reflect a limited amount of data (a month’s worth) 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. 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. Check back later this week for our full sixth-month report.

Women’s presence higher in June after low showing in May’s New Media Index count

July 15, 2011July 30, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

The number of female authors and sources in the top articles in the blogosphere climbed again in June after a low showing in May.

Here at the Gender Report we’ve been monitoring the top articles based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups, which chronicle the top five linked to and discussed news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday to Friday week based on commentary on blogs and social media sites. We focus on the main top five in the blogosphere. When more than one link was provided on the topic, we’ve monitored the first mentioned or the one that appears based on the writing to be more dominant, unless it is specifically mentioned that two articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

In May, we saw a new low with women as only 13.3 percent of sources and even fewer authors in the 12 articles that could be monitored that month. Women were more present in June’s count, particularly among bylines. Here’s what we found:

June 2011

: PEJ New Media Index: June 13-17, 2011

Between May 30 and July 1, the New Media Index included 29 articles could be checked — more than double the amount from last month. For five topics this month, two articles shared the attention, contributing to the higher overall article count. Only one story did not have a link provided this month — Obama’s Afghanistan plan — when instead a special report was done.

Here’s what was uncovered:

Women were 20.2 percent of sources in this month’s articles. The articles contained 83 male sources and 21 female sources.
This month 16 articles were written or produced by a man and nine articles were written by a woman (or in one case, two). Three were by both a man or two and a woman and one was not bylined.
Like last month, two top linked-to articles in blogs were opinion pieces. Both were by male authors.

Again, links this month predominately came from the LA Times, with a few for the BBC and individual articles from four other news sources.

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

Coming soon: Check back on The Gender Report for a look at the overall findings from the first six months of our monitoring of the New Media Index articles.

A look at the representation of women in articles of “national” online news outlets

July 7, 2011July 27, 2011Jasmine R. Linabary1 Comment

Our purpose here at The Gender Report has been to identify how women are represented in online news and how that compares to traditional media. One of the ways we’re doing that is to look at those sites that are online-only news sources specifically and women’s presence in their coverage and staffs.

Last month, we examined the number of female principal staff at the online news outlets listed in the Columbia Journalism Review‘s News Frontier Database, based on what was included in the sites’ individual database entries. We found that 28 percent of these top editorial staff members were women.

: “National” sites in the News Frontier Database

The News Frontier Database, CJR’s collection of searchable data and write-ups on online news outlets, now has a total of more than 130 entries including sites that are nationally situated as well as those that pertain to a particular state or location. It was these “national” sites that we decided to take a closer look at this month.

The database currently contains 40 sites under the “national” search, with three added since June 3, the day we last took a look at it. Those additions still leave these sites in the 19 and 20 percent range in terms of the percentage of women in their principal staffs, which is lower than the overall total.

On July 1 we visited all 40 of these websites at about 11 a.m. (PST) and pulled the top or lead article, which we then “gender checked,” including taking note of the subject, gender of the author (or authors) and the gender breakdown of the sources referenced.

Here’s what was found:

Sourcing

Women made up 22 percent of the sources in the 40 articles monitored. That broke down to 71 male sources and 20 female sources.

Our sample included three stories with one or more female source that contained no male sources. These were also the only articles with more female sources than males — in other words, if a story had male sources, it always had more of them than females.

Fourteen stories that used one or more male source had no female source. These articles contained as many as eight sources total, all of which were male.

Interestingly, 13 stories in the sample cited no human sources. In most cases it was because these quoted other news sources (i.e. according to the New York Times) or were alternative story forms like charts or lists.

Authorship

Of the articles in the sample, 12 were written or produced by a woman, 23 by one or more man, three with a shared byline between one or more man and one or more woman, and two credited to staff. That puts women at 34.3 percent of bylines of those articles that were written by a person of one gender or the other.

As a note for further study, we’ve had regular occurrences of stories we’ve monitored be written by more than one man but very few if any written by just more than one woman. That’s something we’ll keep an eye on in the future.

When gender matters

With this study, we opted to see if the author’s gender made a difference in the use of female sources. It turns out that it did.

The 12 stories written by women used 13 male sources and eight female sources, putting women at 38 percent.

Meanwhile, the 23 stories written by men contained 45 male sources but only five female sources. That meant women were only 10 percent of sources.

For the stories that were produced by both a man and a woman, the percentage was closer to that of female authors, at 37 percent. That separated out to 13 male sources and seven female. Stories attributed to “staff” had no sources as they were both lists.

With or without women as “principal staff”

With the differences seen by the author’s gender, we also decided to take our data a step further and look at it based on our previous study of the gender breakdown of the sites’ “principal staff.” For simplicity, we took the findings from the 23 national sites that listed no females among their principal staff members and compared them to those of the 17 sites with at least one female staff member.

Though the sites with at least one female listed appear to have better representation of women as both authors and sources, the difference was particularly apparent in bylines. Of the lead articles from national online news outlets with no females as principal staff, women had 23.8 percent bylines. Those with at least one female had parity overall with women as 50 percent of authors.

In sourcing, a look at articles from news sites with no principal female staff showed women as 19.3 percent of sources. At sites with one or more female at the top, that percentage reached 26.5 percent.

It’s true that other factors could be at play in these sites to create these differences. More research would need to be done to see if there are other shared characteristics. From initial glance at the data, both groups — those sites without a female principal staff member and those with — include those of the full range of editorial staff sizes as well as coverage topics with few exceptions.

Comparison

This is just one small sample, so further research will be needed to determine how these findings hold up and to see if other factors are at play. However, in comparing the overall percentages of female sources and authors in this study to those of others, it appears to be on target.

The Global Media Monitoring Project (2010), in its first study that included monitoring news websites, found that women were 23 percent of news subjects and bylined 36 percent of stories in its sample.

And, in the first quarter of our weekly Gender Checks of eight online news sites across the United States, we found that thus far women were 24.6 percent of sources and had 31 percent of bylines.

For more data on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category or visit our “Useful Resources” page.

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

June 11, 2011July 7, 2011Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

The past two weeks have been filled with women moving up the ranks in journalism. Most barrier-shattering has been the announcement that Jill Abramson will be the new executive editor of The New York Times, the first woman to fill that spot in the paper’s 160-year history.

Many have noted and cheered the historic nature of the moment, including the women who sued the newspaper in 1974 over sex discrimination. Abramson noted that she “stands on the shoulders” of the women who came before her, and even acknowledged some by name during her speech before the Times’ staff.

Columnist Gail Collins, who herself broke a barrier at the Times by becoming its first female editorial page editor, noted how significant the moment is for women: “In this one great paper, maybe we’ve reached the ultimate goal of the entire women’s movement, which is to make it utterly normal for women to be everywhere, including the top.”

While Abramson’s appointment is good news for women, it’s not yet common across the board. Studies, like the “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” by the International Women’s Media Foundation that came out earlier this year, have identified a general “glass ceiling” for women in U.S. newsrooms once they reach the senior management level, after which their presence falls from 41.5 percent to the 23.3 percent at the top-level management.

But, news like this can help facilitate positive steps forward in changing those percentages, as Poynter’s Jill Geisler suggests in a piece highlighting what Abramson’s appointment could mean for women in journalism. She says it can serve as inspiration and motivation to the many current female journalism students. “Seeing a woman lead a legacy institution into the digital future can be a powerful motivator,” she writes.

Abramson herself has given the nod to the value of her appointment to women in several interviews, but notes she felt it wasn’t as a result of her sex that she achieved the position.

“Number one, I know I didn’t get this job because I’m a woman; I got it because I’m the best qualified person. But nonetheless what it means to me is that the executive editor of the New York Times is such an important position in our society, the Times itself is indispensable to society, and a woman gets to run the newsroom, which is meaningful.” (The Guardian)

Abramson had been pegged as the “heiress-apparent” to replace outgoing executive editor Bill Keller and was described as such in a profile by New York Magazine last fall.

Some have asked whether her gender will have any effect on the newsroom or the paper. Time will tell, but in terms of content and based on her interest in “hard-edged” in-depth investigative stories and international stories, she’s said, “I don’t think anyone is fearful that I’m going to bring soft news on to the front page” (Via the Guardian). And some stories, including this one from Politico, noted the Abramson’s toughness has often been referred to using “masculine” describers. Those include comments like, “She’s got more balls than the New York Yankees.”

However, others have pointed out ways in which feminism, particularly through her writing projects, has always been part of Abramson’s career, including a piece from The Nation calling her a “feminist journalist.”

Outside of her gender, conversation also circled around what her appointment would mean for innovation and for digital advancement. Most reports, including those from Times insiders via Twitter (like this one), have said this move will be positive. Abramson launched her Twitter account Thursday with a humorous exchange with Felix Salmon of Reuters who had predicted she wouldn’t start tweeting until she takes over in September. Her response? “Wrong!”

Moving up and moving on

Aside from Abramson, several other women have been on the move this month. Here are a few:

Vivian Schiller, who was forced out as NPR chief executive in March, has been appointed the chief digital officer of NBC News, a newly created position.
Katie Couric signed a multi-year contract with ABC to host a new daytime talk show. She will also serve as a contributor to several ABC News programs. Couric recently finished out her contract as “CBS Evening News” anchor, a position that broke barriers by making her the first woman to solo anchor a weekday evening news program on a major network.
Susie Ellwood, currently chief executive of the Detroit Media Partnership, was named executive vice president and general manager of USA Today.
Also in Gannett Co., Janet Hasson was named president and publisher of The Journal News. She was formerly senior vice president/audience development and strategy for the Detroit Media Partnership, publisher of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

This is the Gender Report’s Week in Review, a weekly post that highlights some of the major stories related to gender issues this week. Some of these stories may have already appeared in our News Feed or in the week’s Gender Checks. We’ll at times include a longer analysis of stories as well as bring attention to stories that may have slipped through the cracks of the week’s news cycle.