Everyman is Everywhere

In town visiting three students on Journalism Residency, I was driving past the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art yesterday. The banner flapping from the lightpost read: “SFMOMA, Your own narrative fills in the blanks.”

In my inbox, an email from Vogue (I buy it for the articles), urged me to “share my own Vogue story.” The text read: “Each month we tell you what inspires us, what moves us, and what takes our breath away. But now we want to hear from you. Share your Vogue story. Tell us how the magazine has been apart (sic) of your life.”

You really want my story?

My answer is that I see it in my mailbox every month,  take it out, flip through the pages and sometimes laugh at the gaunt 20 year-olds teetering in impossible heels with ratted wild wicked witch hair. Sometimes I take the fragrance inserts and rub them on my wrists. I read the profiles. Sometimes I see a pair of shoes that make me swoon.

But they are right, it is “apart” from my life. Not an integral part of my life. It is a magazine. And no matter how much I loved the movie, “Sepetember Issue,” I believe deep in my soul that Anna Wintour cares not a wink about my story.  The disingenuous attempt at inclusion feels false. No one wants Vogue to be about everywoman. For that I can look in the mirror.    

Still, it seems so many outlets want my story. Your story. Your narrative. Our narrative.

Each morning my Google Alerts for “everyman” include up to 20 entries of mentions from the trend toward “everyman” Oscars this year to pity for the downfall of Tiger Woods as Everyman. I don’t think so.

The overuse of the word and the notion of “we’re all in this together” supports my notion that we are immersed in a culture where the avergae citizen  is more appealing and newsworthy than an elite celebrity.

Sometimes the moniker is not deserved or sincerely applicable. Take Scott Brown, Republican’s No. 51. He is no Everyman for me, even though that has become his subtitled reference. Show me an everyman who poses for Cosmopolitan and wins a Senate seat. John Edwards was not an everyman either. He was a cheating slug.

Is he really an Everyman?

Pizza Hut and Comcast have everyman advertising campaigns, the late Walter Cronkite had everyman appeal, Barack Obama was an everyman and now not so much. Books, magazines, museums, ads, movies, pols, everyone and everything want to appeal to everyman.

Some of it I don’t buy. Some of it is just slapping a popular title on anything and everything.  Everyone is not an everyman.

The hubris of paid content and the humility of good journalism

     The New York Times announced yesterday it will begin charging in 2011 via a metered system for some online content. You would think New York fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Every media pundit is posturing about what this means for the future of journalism. Take a listen to what Jay Rosen of NYU had to say:

\”NPR Story on NYTimes Paid Online Content\”

      Here’s my take. When I was a journalism student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern in the 1970s, my professors told all 100 or so of us freshmen that our goal should be to work on the national desk of the New York Times. That was the pinnacle. That was what we all should want. And if we didn’t want it, well, we were just plain wrong. 

    I nodded. OK, I’ll try.

     A few weeks into classes of Basic Writing, it dawned on me that if everyone in the freshmen class of 1975 –and every year before and after–is told to shoot for the same job, then one heck of a lot of us won’t make the cut. Just how many jobs are there are on the national desk of the NYTimes? And what is the turnover rate?

    Yes, NYT is an outlet for elite journalists. It is undeniably a well-respected legacy instituition, but one struggling to be successfully heard above the cacophony of voices and background noise that is today’s media landscape. But can it expect people will pay for it? Isn’t there a generational prejudice of an expectation for free content?

        Television used to be free. True, it was a handful of narrow networks, but it was free. At first observers scoffed at the thought of cable television and monthly charges for access to far fewer than the gabillion channel and content options available today. People paid. And paid. And they have not stopped.

      My notion is the reporters and multimedia journalists who contribute to the New York Times content must be certain their storytelling is enterprising, value-added and not what an audience can derive from 1,000 other outlets. Or even 10 others. No “official source stenography” and no ranting columnists; the blogosphere has 184 million of of those. That’s worth paying for.

     In the 21st century, it’s humbling and exalting to be a writer. I know. I write for newspapers, magazines, websites and also publish books. As an author, publishers want a guarantee you have an audience before you sign the contract. No more chasing the audience after the pub date, but establish the need before you deliver a printed or kindled word. No more agent lunches with the editor and a contract by 3 p.m.

   A similar shift is true in daily journalism. There is no guarantee your content will be read, your audience loyal.  No one needs to come to you for the news that happened yesterday, unless you will offer some fresh, original take, added to  enhanced, engaging alternative storytelling that will seduce readers/viewers/clickers to stay with you from the lead to the last line. The audience is fickle becuase it can be. There is a lot of real garbage out there, but there is a lot of great, evocative narrative journalism. And much of it on sites and from outlets that are not the New York Times.     

It is hubris to think people will pay for the New York Times just because it is the New York Times. New sites, nonprofit enterprises and blogs emerge regularly offering content that is valuable and free.  No matter where you work or post, as a journalist it is worth the effort and energy to produce excellent, authentic, poignant, humanistic and compelling journalism that informs, edifies and exposes.

However the business model shakes out, it is always the goal to expend the talent to deliver stellar journalism. You just can’t expect people will pay for the brand. Just like you can’t expect as an 18-year-old that you will graduate from college and get a job on the national desk of the New York Times. Along with 100 of your closest friends.

Obits: The Ultimate Everyman News

     “Dead. That’s what Mary Jones is.”

     I remember clearly the Basic Writing assignment in 1975 at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where I was a freshman. We were to write an obituary and we were not to write it that way. That was a catchy lead, sure, but it was not the proper tone. And obits are never funny.

   So we completed our obituary assignment from a sheet of facts, typing on manual typewriters in the basement of Fisk Hall where the instructor chain- smoked and drank about eight cups of coffee in a four-hour lab. Sometimes students stifled tears as they typed. Everyone turned in something at the end of the hour, along with the carbon copies.

    Fast forward 34 years. I am an assistant professor at Medill, assigning obituaries to the freshmen in 201-1 Reporting and Writing, and not allowing them to create fiction by writing their own obituaries (a practice I find not only ghoulish but unethical) that was suprisnlgy on the syllabus before my arrival.  Knowing how to write an obituary is solid practice in news judgment, sourcing, organization,  as well as writing with the appropriate tone and voice. Good practice for profiles.

         It seems obits are not only good practice for journalists, but good business for forward-thinking media innovators.

    Two of my Medill colleagues, Owen Youngman and Rich Gordon, led a group of students in the Fall 09 Interative Innovation Project to recently redesign, rethink and relaunch the American obituary for legacy.com.

    At the presentation last week students spoke about the immense popularity of ”compelling stories about a noteworthy life,” separate from fame and celebrity. These were life capsules of “anyone’s neighbor, any average Joe.”
        Everyman news? Of course.  And these stories are not just a community or family service (no pun intended), but death notices are a 1/2 billion-dollar revenue maker for newspapers. 

       Add text, video, audio, photo slideshows and all combinations of multimedia memorials and this is the somber flipside to youtube’s jackass videos of teenagers jumping off their parents’ garages. Not that my three sons have done that. Yet.

      An element I found especially interesting in the presentation was the fact that historically newspaper obituaries were limited to stories of society’s elite, and naturally, at first only elite white men. Few women were written about and honored in print obituaries.   Another demographic piece is that an overwhelming majority of visitors to online memorial sites are Christian.

     Now here is the opportunity.

    We (me, too) spend a lot of time writing, teaching and talking about the democratization of news and the necessity for inclusiveness in media of all forms. Tell everyone’s story. Project all voices. So in the spirit of open sourcing, here is the chance to have storytelling without boundaries, with repsect for all religious and non-religious affiliations, to honor a life, any life, every life, everyman’s life, everywoman’s.

     We all deserve a memorial, a story with dignity that honors who we were, what we contributed and how we were loved and known. And one that doesn’t begin with “Dead. That’s what…”

Storytelling and bigtime validation

“Chicago, we tell your stories” was the headline of a folded announcement over page one of the Chicago Tribune this morning.  ALL CAPS. Inside, editor Gerould Kern wrote: “We bring you stories about people who are part of the everyday drama of life in Chicago, stories that reveal who we are and what we value.” The backpage introduced the writers, columnists and photographers labelled “Chicago storytellers.”

Everyman news.

I had not heard or seen it so blatantly articulated before in a major newspaper. It validates all that I have researched and observed and continue to see in newspapers, not just in this country, but around the world. And not just in print, but in digital media formats, from blogs to broadcast outlets and long form text.

It’s about the story.

At the Medill School of Journalism, where this quarter I am teaching the freshmen in Reporting & Writing, one assignment was a speech story. Students needed to cover a newsworthy speech for credit sometime during the quarter, but regardless of when it happened,  it was due on Friday, November 20. Of course, about 12 of the 16 from my lab came in right on deadline. And three of the stories were about Gerry Kern’s speech at NU a few months ago. I graded those this morning.  

I was in the audience, too, for Kern’s speech and students got the basic gist. But today’s announcement on the Sunday front page from Kern was more than what he discussed back then. Today’s explicit declaration of a company-wide pursuit of everyman  narrative validates my assertion that everyman news is the direction of media, regardless of platform.

The story is king.

The audience craves stories that are personal, more in depth and categorized as human interest. They want a face to the news. They want the value-added journalism that is more than an opinion-soaked blog or an instant update from Twitter.

It gives me fodder for an essay I am working on for a magazine: the future of digital narrative. Far beyond the finite boundaries of a front page, journalism is emerging as a dim sum of narrative from a multitude of sources. Readers find the story they want, regardless of host outlet. The appetite is for a la carte narrative. Everyman news.

Change, Sure; Extinction, No

Tom Foremski wrote last weekend about the inevitable demise of newspapers:
“If you are in the path of a disruptive technology you are toast. Disruptive technologies disrupt.”

OK, but toast can be made into croutons. What we have to do is separate the content from the delivery mode. The ink on paper from the journalism. Yes, the media environment is like the auto industry (and that is surely not an original claim.) When there was only Ford and GM, the manufacturers could afford to be haughty and less industrious, their myopia blinding them to the future and to the onslaught of foreign, especially Japanese, competition.

It is time for reinvention, adaptation, constructive and creative response to the disruptive change. And it may be the next generation who does it well and polishes to a sheen what we are scrambling to understand and reinvent right now.   

At the Medill School of Journalism graduation recently, Washington Post’s Katharine Weymouth spoke about the vibrant, yet reshaped future of journalism. She quoted Warren Buffett as saying that for too many years newspaper companies were the one “toll booth over a bridge.”  Now there are many, many bridges and no more toll booths.

Katharine Weymouth speech

I believe– yes, I could be wrong– that viewing media companies through the frame of their platforms is missing the point. What you want from the New Yorker is not the physical magazine product that does smudge when wet. You want the New Yorker stories, the author’s slant, the eloquent phrasing.

What you want from a newspaper is no longer the foldable version of the scores to yesterday’s game or even the results of a city council vote. You want the good journalism. You want content other sources can’t provide.

Citizen journalists, bloggers, cable news, heck, anybody with a camera phone can provide updates, opinion and visuals on the latest breaking news. But journalists can provide the context, the in-depth enterprise reporting, the investigations, the analysis, the long form narrative. The exquisite writing that makes you sigh.

I say let people get their daily news and nuggets from a gabillion different news and information sites and sources. No kidding –you don’t need to buy a daily newspaper for that. But have the journalists dig for the big stories, uncovering with dexterity the kinds of stories that just anybody’s cousin with a video recorder is not able to get.  Have teams of hard-working reporters trying to find the deeper truth, not just the news of what happened today. Offer themes of coverage: one week offer the latest on education or crime. Or the trend of governor scandals.

It makes much more sense for a traditional media company with the experienced journalist power to offer an Anna Quindlan or Tom Friedman commentary or an expose by a team of investigative reporters on just about any subject, than to deliver a short news brief about what happened yesterday. We don’t need that from a news company anymore. By the time the paper is printed, it is old news. Unless, unless, unless, it is enterprising and original reporting you can’t get anywhere else. Great interviews, profiles, narratives. Gutsy work.

With superlative content, it does not matter if that arrives on your doorstep, in your mailbox, on your laptop, your TV screen, your radio, your phone or anywhere.

Whether or not any of that information is delivered digitally or even through brain waves does not matter. Because that may be next. The journalism matters. It does not matter that the information is now offered in the form of ink on paper or words on a screen. It’s the content, silly.

Good, reliable, accurate journalism will not die. It will arrive in a new form. It is arriving now in forms unimaginable 20 years ago.  But it will not be disrupted into extinction.

Tom is right. You can’t stop the disruptive change ovcercoming global media any more than you can stop a tidal wave. But you can swim with the force of the wave instead of against it. You can land on the beach and start again.

There. Have I mixed enough metaphors? Should I go back to croutons?

Has print news come full circle?

theprintedblogvol1no11

Today a new entity makes its debut in Chicago, The Printed Blog.

It’s an ambitious project mixing opinion and multimedia and some hyperlocal observations that would normally be solely online. But they are appearing in print, downloadable by pdf and set for distribution through several micro channels.
The debut is a little disappointing. Less news than opinion and diatribe, it appears slightly amateurish and not high qaulity journalism. But it is the first one and everyone can grow.
We are all tired of hearing about the demise of ink on paper. But if this experiment works, nothing speaks to the changes in the industry as clearly as this debut of a new model for journalism. It is the ultimate combination of professional and amateur journalism geared towards hyperlocal niche media.
Newspapers have been in decline for 20 years, and the slide continues. It is the Internet coming back to its print roots, completely reinvented. I am not convinced from this first issue that this is really solid journalism, as it is first-person musings and clever commentary. It is no Huffington Post, or politico.com. But it is a sign of rapid change and the evolutionary of media.
A 2008 survery of more than 700 newspaper editors shows that 2/3 of those editors believe the decline in readership among young people is the single greatest threat to the newspaper, according to the most recent edition of the Newspaper Research Journal.
Surprisingly, a study of 1,200 young adults in 2009 showed that 41 percent said in five years they would get their news from print newspapers, a 193 percent increase from their current reported habits. 71 percent said they will get their news from Internet sites. Ok, Ok, 28 percent said they get their news from Facebook right now.
Gannett newspapers launched “Assignment Zero” to completely reorganize and redfine its newsroom structures, relying on citizen journalism and” crowdsourcing.” At the same time, Steve Krug has been launching his theories of web usuability in a book called, “Don’t Make Me Think.” Because no one wants to when he or she is reading news content online. It is a passive endeavor.
The Christian Science Monitor will be only online as of April. In the current issue of Nieman Reports from Harvard, Edward Roussel wrote, “Newspaper still tend to define themselves by their paper rather than their news.” As I wrote in my most recent book, “Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page,” the content is the commodity, not the delivery mode.
The Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy, Chapter 11. And it is undergoing so many changes, it reminds me of me right before I have to attend a black-tie dinner. I try everything on in the closet, and then I go with whatever I can wear that has matching shoes. The Tribune is trying a tabloid format, visually explosive front pages, the hyperlocal news, the oversized thumbnail photos of columnists, all of it, any of it.
But I do think I know some of the answers. I do think journalists should do what they do best. Hard, investigative, thorough reporting.
People want hyperlocal news, OK, leave that to the bloggers and the great citizen journalism sites. Edit that with superb commentary, not venting. Vett the venting, cull the accurate information. Journalists are plugged in better than an intern who will be covering it for the first time. A part-time blogger who is paid little to nothing for his or her content just cannot have the resources, time, expertise or experience to uncover stories that matter to the democracy.
Journalists shoudl spend the time working on those big stories that matter to society. Put all the daily news online as a shared effort wiht citizen journalists and content providers. Thousands of people covering the inauguration and writing the news story about how many went, why and how much? Not necessary. Pool resources for that.
We need to discern the difference between showing images and writing text in real time of what is happening and developing thoughtful, insightful journalism that puts these evenst in context with balance and multidimensional reporting.
Save the great reporting for the segments of society throughout the world that are not covered. Work weeks and months on longer stories no one else knows about or has the resources to uncover. Post those online and in special editions. That is the future of professional journalism. Let the bloggers and the citizen jour nalist go to the city council meetings and have trained editors sift through the text.
We have every other niched and narrow editorial need we could possibly want a gazillion times over online from blogs to citizen journalism sites. For goodness sakes, we even have Pete’s Weather.

Pete\'s Weather

which covers the weather on one block in Chicago. One of my students found this working on a class assignment for me in one of the storefronts Medill has at Lawrence and Ashland avenues in Chicago for sophomore students in the 301 class.
Printed Blog? Pete’s Weather? Viable, sustainable ideas. But what will last for the long haul is great, solid, investigative and narrative journalism done by great reporters and writers who do this kind of necessary work full-time.

Hard Copies Ease Hard Times?

Washington Post story

The election hangover has subsided, but not the renewed journalism high many of us are feeling. Hundreds of thousands of people across the country stood in lines at local news stands and news outlets to get a hard copy of fresh news the day after the historic election of Barack Obama November 4. And it was not just newspaper people. Everyone wanted to hold in his or her hands the old fashioned ink on paper version of that historical event.

It goes back to what I have been saying and writing about for years. The daily newspaper has been declining in circulation for 20 years, but it will not completely disappear. There is a need to repurpose the content and to capitalize on the audience’s appetite for a physical representation of world events, history,local life. I believe with the crowded media landscape, newspapers need to find the niche of specialty storytelling, performing a service other media and citizen journalists cannot. That means newspapers are story papers, delivering excellence in long form writing, investigative journalism, analysis, superb narrative about issues, anniversaries, historical events, all in context. Even Time magazine is selling hard and soft cover books on the election already. People still want to hold history in their hands.

My student advisee this quarter on a journalism residency at the Miami Herald, Kirstin Maguire, wrote about the hard copy phenomenon in two separate stories.
Miami Herald Story
Miami Herald Story

People don’t go to the newspaper today to find out what happened yesterday. As hybrid consumers of news and information, they have heard about and digested the day’s events on the radio, TV, the Internet; chances are they have already blogged about it themselves. But what is needed is for trained journalists who understand the necessity of solid, balanced and accurate reporting gathered with ethics and integrity, to offer deeper context, analysis and depth. There is a difference between a casual blogger and an investigative journalist. And it is more than a press card.

I sat in on a design class last week of my Medill colleague, Susan Mango Curtis, when her guest speaker was Jonathon Berlin of the Chicago Tribune. He is a key force behind the redesign and visual pop of the paper. He told the students, “Choose the right thing to do with the right media.” He meant that a story can be enhanced with video, audio, stills, graphics, interactives, but he advised not to just do it all or do one because that is all you know how to do. Journalists need to know why they are telling a story a certain way. To differentiate the newspaper product from all else that is available to consumers, journalists must produce stories that go deeper, he said. “We’re asking our journalists to do more now than ever before.” The Chicago Tribune sold 600,000 extra copies the day after the election.

Media is changing and the revolution has not slowed.

Last week National Public Radio announced that Vivian Schiller, senior vice president of NYTimes.com, is moving to NPR the first week of January as the new president and ceo of the highly respected radio entity. Nothing can better demonstrate the alliance, convergence, disruption and coordination of formerly separate media entities than this move. With a background in print at the Times, web and broadcast at CNN and Discovery Times Channel as well as film documentaries, Schiller brings with her the artillery necessary for a media company to cope in changing times. I expect perhaps in the future for NPR to figure out a way to allow the audience to hold in its hands physical versions of audio stories– not just books as they do now or donwloadable CDs– but stories in printed form.

A few weeks ago I attended a conference in Chicago run by the International News Media Marketing Assoication INMA.
INMA
John Lavine, dean of Medill, headed a panel about the future of news. Newspapers need to have “a portfolio of niches that does unique things well, that offer differentiated news that is valued and engaging,” he said.

Lavine said every person looking for news and information on each and every platform asks himself or herself the question, “What is worth my time?” According to Lavine, newspaper editors, reporters and owners need to ask the question, “Do the first 100 people who see it (the newspaper) regularly, refer that to another person?”

The thousands of people who stood in line from Chicago to Miami to Washington, D.C. waiting for a hard copy of the hard news that was the election coverage asked that question, “Is it worth my time?” The answer the morning after on November 5, 2008 was a world-resounding “yes.”

And that is good news for all of us who love the news.

The Everyman Election

    In a few days, the election that has centered around the anecdotal stories of ordinary citizens will have a winner. And a loser. The New York Times called the Everyman 30-minute  Obama Infomercial “a closing argument to the Everyman,” citing its heavy reliance on anecdotal stories of everyday people. The $3 million ad is even called “American Stories, American Solutions.” It is an aggregate of individual narratives, each making a point about the state of this country. Obama keeps repeating, “Everybody has a story.” All together, he says, “That’s the story of America.”

What is so significant at this time of Joe the Plumber politics, when one individual who is neither named Joe or is a licensed plumber, can come to symbolize a point in out culture when the everyman story is of more importance to the electorate than the ideologies, policies or intentions of its politicians.

On the Republican side, we have been listening to Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin defend her “everywoman” appeal, even when she has to explain her $150,000 wardrobe for her and her family on the campaign trail. She is still a working hockey mom, and she still seeks to appeal to Joe Six Pack and the ”real Americans” in this country.

Media has responded to all this everymania with more and more stories that anecdotalize the economic fall out, the healthcare crisis and the implosion of confidence in our country’s very infrastructure. 

I have been more than slightly remiss in posting here as I have been working so hard on another book in the last six months. It is the dual narrative of my three sons’ athleticism, specifically, their wrestling since they were each 10 years old, and how that coincided with my own fight with cancer. My son, Weldon, won fourth in state in Illinois AA High School Wrestloing at exactly the same time I was recovering from surgery and radiation. That is my next book. 

I am still thinking and trying to understand the changes and challenges in media in the past several months, from layoffs to the elimination of the print product. Much of what I said would happen in my book, Everyman News, has happened. I wrote about how the content must be the commodity, not the delivery mode. It does not matter if a story is ink on paper, it matters it is an an anecdotal narrative of everyman.

As I near completion of this new book and I start back to teaching my classes at Medill, I will continue to post. I am also working on a study of international newspapers and their use of narrative in their pages so I am swamped.

The next few days will be extremely telling, in how the messages shift regarding this election and how the media continue to rally around the importance of everyman and how each individual story counts, along with his or her vote.

The Silence Heard Round The World

        I am getting ready for a panel at the upcoming Association for Educators in Journalism & Mass Communications conference August 5-8 here in Chicago about what is missing in news coverage and opinion in domestic and international media.

       Well, women are missing. We are invisible. And while it may only be an historic omission, it is time to correct the past and make a deliberate attempt to represent gender equity in staffing, story ideas, sourcing and presentation. Here’s some of what I plan to say at the conference:

 We do not want to be gender blind. We want to be gender visionary. We can require the field be level in our classrooms and on our campuses.

Katie Orenstein, founder and director of the OPEd Project notes that male submissions to editors for op/eds far outweigh female submissions with ratios from three to 1 to nine to 1. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal have a range of 10-20 percent women’s bylines. In the Washington Post, 88 percnt of the bylines are male. At The Christian Science Monitor, 30 percent of the bylines are female.

It is not just in this country where the inequity exists. At the Asia Media Summit in 2004, 12 put of 90 speakers were women, according to the group, Network of Women in Media, India. “When it comes to numbers, there are just too few women at the top,” said Dat NgPoh Top, group editorial and education adviser to the The Star in Malyasia. In a survey on Arab Women and the Media, done by the Center of Arab Women for training and research, of 173 articles published in what was termed “women’s media” in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, only two editorials were devoted to women’s issues.

A consortium of European stations created the presentation, Screening Gender, which seeks to show how gender impacts routine news coverage. I urge you to seek it out:

 http://www.yle.fi/gender/. In 1996, five public broadcasting companies – YLE/Finland, SVT/Sweden, NOS/the Netherlands, DR/Denmark and NRK/Norway decided to pool resources to encourage greater diversity in their programming. This network was later joined by ZDF/Germany .

According to the website, “the co-operation of the network includes joint research and training events, as well as exchange of good practices and experiences. This network was introduced to broadcasting professionals from all over Europe at the EU Prix Niki Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece, in October 1997.  The project Screening Gender was launched in July 1997 as a three-year initiative and it has received financial support from the European Commission‘s Fourth Community Action Programme on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.”

  What they found is that gender is portrayed differently from camera angles to source selection. Although it was last updated in 2000, it can still be used as an effective teaching tool. It discusses how to deal with “the silent wife” in an interview and where to place subjects on video. It also states in the report, “Gender portrayal, or the depiction of the feminine or masculine as a gender role, is a cultural phenomenon, embedded in historical processes. Gender roles, in other words, are not fixed, but changeable.”    

The study, “Gender in Journalism: by Monika Djerf-Pierre released in June 2008 found that underrepresentation of women in media is a global problem. In Sweden, which ranks number one in the Global Gender Gap published by the World Economic Forum, for instance, journalism is male-dominated. While half reporters are women, 75 percent of media leadership are men. Similar disparity is reported in the UK. In Spain, 46 percent of journalists are female, though only 24 percent hold management positionsw. In Italy. 27 percent of newpspaer journalists are female and 37 percent are in television news, and 38 percent of public spokespersons are women.   

A July study released by the Center for the Study in Women and Television and Film at San Diego State University showed that 70 percent of newspaper film reviewers were men. A spokesperson for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists said , “This important study shows in concrete and shocking terms that women—more than 50 percent of the population—are still being left out of a national discussion  of sweeping cultural and financial significance.” This perhaps explains the poor reviews for Sex and the City and Mamma Mia.   

In a November 2007 panel on Women and News at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, columnist Ellen Goodman, said, “…many of us had the belief back then that we would integrate the news and the masthead the way we had integrated the help-wanted ads. Women would not only become full participants in political life, but women’s issues family, children, values, would become equal news.”

Goodman continued, “Women today constitute about a third of full-time journalists at daily newspapers and about the same percentage at all the other news media, but that’s roughly the same percentage that it  was 25 years ago. What happened to the idea that we would sort of naturally bubble up? I’m afraid that the fizz went a little flat.”          

          It is time to bring back the fizz. What is missing is relevant reporting of global issues of dynamic and immediate importance to women and I am not referring to lifestyle stories of the f-words, food, fashion and family. We are missing equal coverage and souring of politics and civic interests, economy, education, healthcare, environment, science, technology, business, as well as entertainment. A 2007 Pew study showed that men follow political news more closely than women , and there is a distinct information gap  between the genders. So what comes first? The absence of news relevant to women or women’s lack of information?    

Here are some of my tips:

Gender Gap 101: What To Do About the Gender Information Gap

Michele Weldon/ AEJMC Chicago 2008

• Do news exercises on framing information for audiences: How would you write this story for an audience of mostly women ages 24-39?, etc.
• Hold brainstorming sessions for story ideas that are inclusive. Look for ways to add a gender perspective to different stories. Aim for stories beyond lifestyle issues that are focused on women.  

·       Require a diversity of sources in every story. Is there a balance of male and female sources, different ages, race, background, ideology?

·       Give examples of great writing from women journalists as well as men.

·       Do byline counting as an exercise on any random day on a newspaper front page, website or newscast.

·       Do an exercise counting stories that would be of particular interest to women—in major media outlets and compare.

·       Have a goal in every story to have students ask, “Am I inclusive, did I represent the gender issue fairly?”

·       Bring in speakers and guest lecturers who are successful women journalists.

·       In multimedia reporting, be sure that the stories show men and women equally.

·       On group projects, be sure the assignments are fair and equal in the group.

·       Show examples of  sexist language, placement or stereotypes when you find them.

·       Sensitize students to the sexism of description and casual language. Why is a woman described this way and a man not all? 

·       Compare domestic media with global media in coverage of women’s issues, major news events involving women as newsmakers.

·       Ask students what coverage do they feel is missing?

·       Be sure all your materials—quizzes, syllabi, handouts, Power Points—are fair and gender balanced.

·       Be sure your sources are mainstream as well as specifically aimed at women, ie womensenews.

·       Look for stories that specifically affect women as an audience. Be sure all students are expected to do this. Young men as well as women can write about date rape and domestic violence; avoid the ghettoization of women’s news for women journalists.

·       Emphasize the need for balanced coverage to be good journalists. Tell them about herding. Tell them they deserve better.

·       Help students see that they need to fill this gap and not contribute to and perpetuate the historic imbalance of gender coverage.

 

 

 

 

News and the City

While it seems every MSM outlet on the planet was pontificating on the adventures of Carrie and her girlfriends from “Sex and The City” in stories about the movie about the television series, real news was happening around the globe. But the space was there for the girls from New York.

OK, I went to the opening night showing of the ultimate smart woman who likes fashion flick, but I acknowledge that it wasn’t real news. Even if the television crews were waiting outside the theater when four of us friends dressed as Carrie and Charlotte and ourselves emerged from the 7 p.m. show.

The night before the opening I had a book disscussion and signing at the River Forest Public Library, where about 20 people interested in where the news had gone in the newspaper wanted to air their views. Some were young journalists wondering what the future holds, some were older readers wondering what the future holds and some were older journalists who wanted to talk about the past. Two were my sons who wanted to help sell books.

There was a bigger crowd at the Lake Theater in Oak Park the following night. With better shoes.