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Will tech narrow the gender gap in music journalism?

This great story about women in music journalism makes a strong case for why technology has the potential to help close the media gender gap.

As author Joe Rivers explains, music writers have historically been mostly men, but the web is giving aspiring journalists of both genders new ways to build their reputations: 

If you wanted to be a music writer forty years ago, what would have been your route to success? Most likely it would have involved attempting to live the rock n’ roll lifestyle, developing contacts and a personal connection with the movers and shakers of the music industry, and the gumption to doss down in London wherever the story was. That’s not to mention having a Y chromosome, which was practically a pre-requisite. Nowadays, it’s how you utilise the internet to fit what you want to do, and your genetic makeup is going to have far less of an impact on whether you succeed.

Let’s hope that’s true.

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More female reporters = more female voices in the news

Here’s an interesting detail from the 4th Estate Project, a group that uses data to monitor media trends. The project amassed oodles of numbers from coverage of the 2012 elections.

As you can read here, men were used as expert sources far more often than women. But, when the researchers focused on stories from National Public Radio, they found something interesting:

There was a huge discrepancy in the sourcing patterns between men and women journalists at NPR… While men NPR journalists quoted men 80% of the time and women 20% of the time, women NPR journalists quoted men 52% of the time and women 48% of the time.  This is a dramatic difference, and suggests that NPR women journalists are doing their part in trying to change the culture of sourcing in new stories.  Interestingly, NPR women journalists stand out in this regard as compared to their counterparts in print or broadcast. We did not see the same discrepancy when looking at the sourcing patterns of men and women journalists working in either print or broadcast.

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Mind the Gap: A video about gender, journalism … and coffee

Talk to me.

I mean it. The issues addressed on this blog — gender roles, media stereotypes, the influence of technology on journalism– are big and complex. Making sense of them will require an open, diverse conversation. To get us started, I put together a  video that ponders one of the bigger questions on my mind lately: If most journalism students are female, why are women chronically underrepresented in newsrooms?

For more on the statistics referenced, read this post from earlier this year.

Thank you to the students who sat for interviews… and to the campus Dunks for handing over an extra plastic cup without any questions.