Journalist. Author. Educator.
Journalist John Surico attended a talk yesterday by New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson. While she spoke, he tapped out a few tweets. One, about the gender breakdown in the newsroom, caught my eye:
(The Times has, however, increased the number of op-ad pieces written by women in recent years.)
Here’s more on the difference between the number of women in the classroom and in the newsroom.
Duke University is now a training ground for feminist bloggers. Jezebel.com reports that “22 women and 1 dude” will take part in the Write(H)ers program, which is designed to help student writers explore gender issues.
The campus paper, the Duke Chronicle, explains that students “will participate in personal blogging and workshops with professional journalists to discuss gender issues in society and on campus.” One of those journalists is Rebecca Traister, the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry, a book about gender in the 2008 presidential election.
Duke’s Women’s Center is organizing the training and has been linking to student work on its Twitter feed. Here are a few recent posts:
Duke’s project, by the way, is the exact opposite of what Beliefnet did last week.
The web is full of sassy, smart publications focused on feminism, gender and the portrayal of women in the media, but the most useful resource I’ve found so far is a subdued blog maintained by a California graduate student and a high school teacher in Baltimore. It’s called The Gender Report, and it’s focused on studying the role of women in digital media.
The site launched in 2011 after its founders attended a talk on gender inequalities at a college journalism conference. They left wondering what role women will play in digital news:
Where was the woman’s voice? The woman’s byline? Or for that matter, where were the men in family leave policies, or stories focusing “women’s issues”?
The site mixes original research with aggregation for page after page of useful information. During its first full year of operation, The Gender Report found that women were routinely underrepresented as sources and writers in online news stories. There’s also a directory of outside research on related topics and a weekly list of suggested readings.
The Gender Report is also part of a trend in academic research, one that’s merging the strengths of the social web with the rigors of scholarly research. This practice is common in the digital humanities, where researchers use high-tech tools to collaborate and to present their findings.
Meg Heckman 