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Who's the Boss: Women, leadership and digital news
- 1. Who’s the boss? Women, leadership and digital news Meg Heckman Lecturer of Journalism Based on research conducted at
- 3. A brief history of gender counts: In 1979, Dorothy Misener Jurney started counting newswomen at papers across the county. Jurney, a retired Philadelphia Inquirer editor, used newsroom directories to tally the number of women in leadership roles. Although ASNE started counting race in 1978, it wouldn’t add gender to its annual census until 1998.
- 4. Female newsroom leaders, 1979:
- 5. Female newsroom leaders, 1999- 2013: 0 20 40 60 80 100 1999 2003 2008 2013
- 6. New paths to success: “News is migrating to all kinds of places, some of them unexpected, all of them small. Gone are the days when a job as a cub reporter in a city paper was the start of a promising career in journalism.” – Nicco Mele.
- 7. A shifting landscape: Digital journalism ecosystem LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers) Nieman Lab’s Encyclo CJR’s The Guide Michele’s List
- 9. Methods, writ small: Named staff members + contextual information = A rough tally of female leaders.
- 11. A deeper look: 0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00% 70.00% 80.00% 90.00% 100.00% 60-80 40-59 20-39 0-19 Female leadership by publication size
- 12. Missing woman-led news orgs:
- 13. What’s going on?
- 14. Welcome to the “pink ghetto.”
- 15. Why this matters: “Diversity is certainly a part of accuracy and fairness, whether it relates to avoiding stereotypes or redefining news to better reflect a multicultural society. Diversity is about the makeup of news organizations and about who is making decisions. Diversity is about the way story ideas are developed and who does the reporting. Diversity is about inclusiveness in choosing sources and about giving voice to the voiceless.” J. Black et al., Doing Ethics in Journalism: A Handbook with Case Studies (Allyn and Bacon, 1999)
- 16. Recommendations: Keep counting. Defining a problem is an important first step. Value the many ways in which journalism is being practiced and redefined. Support programs that provide technical and entrepreneurial training to underrepresented populations. Hiring editors: Post your job ads. Call bullshit on editors who say they can’t find qualified and diverse new hires.
- 17. Questions? This presentation and the thesis it’s based upon are available for free download at megheckman.com. Reach me at mheckman32@gmail.com or on Twitter @meg_heckman. Special thanks to Jeff Howe, Dan Kennedy and the rest of the journalism faculty at
Editor's Notes
- When I say “editor” there’s a good chance you imagine someone who looks like this.
- I’m hardly the first person to try to gauge the number of women leading newsrooms. In 1979, a year after ASNE launched its race census, Dorothy MisenerJurney started a gender-based count of her own. Jurney, a retired Philadelphia Inquirer editor, used newsroom directories to tally the number of women in leadership roles.
- She found that, in 1979, women accounted for 6.5 percent of newsroom management. That number was lower — 4.4 percent — at papers with circulations above 25,000.
- Better, but still not parity. And, here’s the real problem: this number doesn’t account for the full journalism landscape.
- This new path should mean that journalists of all kinds now have an equal chance of landing at the top of their fields. Right? Wrong. At least according to what I found – but it wasn’t easy to count. The same shifts that make modern journalism so darn exciting also make it hard to count heads.
- List a few of the changes that happened recently. Pull out jar of bubble stuff and blow some bubbles. Like chasing bubbles.
- This map shows the 402 news organizations in my sample. (Networks like Patch and Village Soup are not represented here because the databases didn’t include enough details about the location of individual sites.
- I used an old method in the new world, and it worked pretty well. Anyone with questions about inclusion/exclusion criteria can see me afterwards for detailed tables and a complimentary bottle of Advil.
- At first glance, this seems pretty good. Women are slightly more likely to hold leadership roles in emerging digital orgs than they are in legacy orgs… but look deeper.
- 0-19 is 36 percent; greater than 40 is about 22/23 percent. (Most of the orgs in the under 19 group were 1-2 staffers.) Note that Dorothy Jurney noted the same trend in 1979. Women, it seems, are concentrated at the smaller news organizations, and those orgs are likely have a hyperlocal focus.
- Since 2009, roughly two dozen projects have received funding from either the New Media Women Entrepreneurs organization or the New Media Women Foundation. None appear in the Encyclo, and only two appear in The Guide.Michele’s List also overlooks all but one of these sites. The subject matter of the excluded sites is varied: ShineInPeace.com seeks to document every murder in Oakland, California; FullCourt.com covered women’s basketball since 1996; and Symbolia is a tablet magazine that uses comics to explore current events. The exclusion of these sites could someday skew historians’ understanding of the role women played in building digital journalism. This raises questions, but it’s hard to say if inclusion of these orgs would shift the percentage of female leaders. We don’t know the full size of the digital journalism universe, so we also don’t know how many orgs – male and female led alike – are excluded. (In technical terms, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to gauge sampling error.)
- The things we associate with modern news startups – geekiness, news chops, bloggy-tech savvy, entrepreneurship – are also typically constructed as male. (This, btw, is also true of race. Typically seen as white and male.) The work of women has historically been seen as something else.
- What’s often called the “women’s pages” were a place where women could rise a bit, but they were paid less, were less likely to lead to professional recognition and were less likely to lead to promotion within the organization. We can’t allow this to happen in this exciting new golden age of journalism. I don’t make any value distinction between local journalism and national journalism, but the narrative about modern journalism seems to forget this basic tenant. We’re only starting to understand the economic realities of this digital arena, but it’s fair to say that making a living at the hyperlocal level is hard. VERY hard. Launching an investigative foundation isn’t a cakewalk either, but tax records show it’s possible to attain a certain level of personal financial stability.
- Now that we’ve moved beyond traditional orgs, we must pay attention to diversity in the entire ecosystem. How are promoting equal access, equal compensations and equal VOICE in the journalism that’s to come?
- That count should include race as well as gender. (Mine didn’t because of time and resources.)