#IWD: Chie Elliott – ‘Sidelining of TV’s older women could be reflective of society’s warped views’

Blogger and freelance journalist Chie Elliott (@orangeblossomer) has written a wide-ranging piece to mark International Women’s Day and its relevance to the media/publishing industries. The post can be read in full on her own blog at this link.

It wasn’t that long ago that BBC boss Mark Thompson came under fire for replacing a mature female judge in a popular dance show with a pop star 36 years her junior.

The fact that in television, older, grey-haired male presenters carry on commanding respect well into their retirement age, whereas their female counterparts get sidelined as their age starts to show, could be a reflection of a society’s warped views about women, and not exclusive to the industry.

Women’s value and employability should not be conditional to age or appearance, but women in highly visible jobs such as television or film, do not always seem to have a choice. Anna Ford, a journalist worshipped by her male peers as something nearing a sex goddess in her heyday, decided to retire in April 2006, at 62, saying:

“I might have been shovelled off into News 24 to the sort of graveyard shift.”

The BBC’s  drive to recruit older female newsreaders, announced soon after the Strictly Come Dancing judge swap saga, strikes me as laughable. I can visualise a screaming headline: “Older women join ethnic minorities and the disabled under positive discrimination scheme.” Or, more bluntly, as The Independent put it: “Must be Female. Young Need Not Apply”.

Similar posts:

• Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists
• #WANIndia2009: Women editors-in-chief and women readers – should we be having this discussion?
• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)
• #IWD: Gaby Hinsliff – ‘Too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in’
• #IWD: Sarah Booker – ‘Journalism is a profession where anyone can prove themselves’

The truth about funding investigative journalism 2.0

A proper bit of digging, by the people at online-only news site Business Insider (read about its background here), has led to Nicholas Carlson’s revelations about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and as the site says, “startling new information”, about the company’s early days.

But as BI’s Silicon Valley Insider team revealed, this type of work doesn’t make for a sustainable online publication business model. In a flurry of tweets Business Insider editor-in-chief and CEO Henry Blodget explains why (you can view them in a gallery at this link).

It’s important. It’s great. But it is also fantastically expensive and time-consuming.

But the truth is, if we tried to do 3 a day, with our staff, we would DROP DEAD. We’d also go bust. Neither being a happy outcome.

(Hat-tip: The Editorialiste.)

Similar posts:

• Vanityfair.com: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget vs Reuters’ Felix Salmon
• Business Insider lets readers ‘embed’ posts
• Bloomberg providing news content to Yahoo Finance
• #followjourn: @MarpleLeaf, editor and blogger
• #FollowJourn: @greigcameron/chief reporter

#IWD: Sarah Booker – ‘Journalism is a profession where anyone can prove themselves’

This post, written by regional journalist Sarah Booker, to mark International Women’s Day, is also posted on her blog: SarahBooker.wordpress.com.

Judge people on merit. That’s a philosophy I’ve always had and how I judge others.

As a teenager I opted to study physics at O-level, rather than biology, purely because it was a “boys subject”. It didn’t matter that I’d come top of the year in biology, I had a point to make. We girls were encouraged to challenge gender stereotypes and consider careers in engineering.

Those of us who didn’t take this road were confident enough to fulfil our ambitions. During my years as a journalist some of the most inspirational people I have worked with have been women.

Part of me feels lucky as I have never felt discriminated against in the newsroom. Any sexism I have experienced has been in jest and not bullying. Jokes about not understanding the off-side rule, or the line “of course I forget you are a girl”, are brushed off with a laugh.

I have worked as the only woman in a news team, and been part of a female dominated newspaper office. Many of the journalists I admire who report on and work in online journalism are women.

However, at meetings with other Johnston Press web editors I’m frequently the only woman. I have always felt welcomed and valued at these meetings, bringing my take on various issues, and suggesting new ideas.

All of us are there on merit, and judged on merit, and that’s all that matters. I’ve always thought journalism is a profession where anyone can prove themselves. Women are in positions of power throughout the industry, which suggests there is no glass ceiling here.

I just hope girls growing up today see their future in terms of what they find interesting and can do, rather than what is expected based on a chromosome.

Does Sarah’s view fit in with your own observations and experiences? Please do leave a comment about your own thoughts on women in journalism, to mark today’s International Women’s Day.

Similar posts:

• #IWD: Chie Elliott – ‘Sidelining of TV’s older women could be reflective of society’s warped views’
• Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists
• Blogger to pursue legal action over Independent on Sunday headline
• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)
• Controversy over Time Magazine cover showing mutilated Afghan woman

#IWD: Gaby Hinsliff – ‘Too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in’

Former Observer political editor Gaby Hinsliff, explains why she has taken on the task of guest-editing LabourList for the day, to mark International Women’s Day. She says “there are too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in”. Guest-editing allowed her the chance to give new writers and fresh perspectives an airing, she writes.

Read her post in full at this link. An extract:

I’m generally suspicious of anything wimmin-only: it smacks of condescension. My first instinct was to commission something about why a female-only blogging day is a rotten idea.

(…)

My only rule was that the writing should stand on its argument, not its author. Ideally you wouldn’t even notice they were all female: after all, did you notice that every single byline here last weekend was male?

Similar posts:

• Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists
• #IWD: Chie Elliott – ‘Sidelining of TV’s older women could be reflective of society’s warped views’
• Wired Journalists: The #followwomenjournas movement
• #WANIndia2009: Women editors-in-chief and women readers – should we be having this discussion?
• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)

CCJ: Journalists love polls but are they useful?

Journalists love polls, notes the Committee of Concerned Journalists, but what are the drawbacks? Using examples from the US, Jon Margolis writes:

“[A]ccurate” is not a synonym for “meaningful,” and it is time to consider whether journalists are so poll-happy that they are suckers for anything with a chart and a margin of error even if the end result distorts rather than clarifies reality.

(…)

Public opinion polling is useful, but only if the public has an opinion on the subject under review. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes its opinion really doesn’t matter. And sometimes it shouldn’t.

Full article at this link…

Similar posts:

• The First Post: ‘The BBC is not impartial’
• An experiment with UK newspapers’ coverage of political polls
• Innovations in Journalism – Opinion Tracker
• Timely apology for Guardian as Zuma casts his vote
• What does it take to get a front page apology?

Did NY Times’ blog culture lead to incident of plagiarism?

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has a critical (well-linked) analysis of events leading to reporter Zachery Kouwe’s resignation from the title last month.

As previously noted on this blog, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson complained to the New York Times over a particular article of Kouwe’s, on the NY Times’ DealBook blog. The NY Times investigated and found other examples of copied passages.

In Hoyt’s piece, which I recommend reading in full, he asks whether the “the culture of DealBook” had led to subsequent events:

How did his serial plagiarism happen and go undetected for so long? Why were warning signs overlooked? Was there anything at fault in the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked? And, now that the investigation is complete, what about a full accounting to readers?

He also suggests:

At a time when cut-and-paste technology enables plagiarism, when news and information on the web are treated as commodities, these are conversations worth having throughout the Times building.

But over on his Reuters blog, Felix Salmon, whilst praising the public editor’s critique, raises another issue: the New York Times’ unwillingness to link out.

…[I]s there something inherent to the culture of blogging which breeds a degree of carelessness ill suited to a venerable newspaper?

(…)

The fundamental problem with Kouwe was that when he saw good stories elsewhere, he felt the need to re-report them himself, rather than simply linking to what he had found, as any real blogger would do as a matter of course.

Finally, you can read Kouwe’s own comments about how the misdeed occurred: he told the New York Observer how he would throw others’ material into WordPress, intending to re-write it later. From the NY Observer interview:

Mr. Kouwe says he has never fabricated a story, nor has he knowingly plagiarized. “Basically, there was a minor news story and I thought we needed to have a presence for it on the blog,” he said, referring to DealBook. “In the essence of speed, I’ll look at various wire services and throw it into our back-end publishing system, which is WordPress, and then I’ll go and report it out and make sure all the facts are correct. It’s not like an investigative piece. It’s usually something that comes off a press release, an earnings report, it’s court documents.”

“I’ll go back and rewrite everything,” he continued. “I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there. I think that’s what probably happened.”

Similar posts:

• NY Times reporter resigns following plagiarism accusations
• Babel @ Bedlam: Plagiarism, the digital age and why it’s not just the NY Times
• Editor&Publisher: ‘Maureen Dowd admits wrongdoing, NYT will correct’
• Silicon Alley Insider: Should web stats lead editorial decisions?
• Editor&Publisher: Bill Keller says future of NYTimes’ public editor still ‘much debated’

#followjourn: Christopher Phin/deputy editor

#followjourn: Christopher Phin

Who? Phin is deputy editor of MacFormat magazine.

Where? MacFormat is published monthly in print in the UK, and is online over at www.macformat.techradar.com, where they have a mixture of news, features and blogs. You can also follow the  paper on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MacFormat.

Contact? Follow Phin on Twitter at www.twitter.com/chrisphin, or on his blog, Receding Hairline

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Similar posts:

• #FollowJourn: @gbarl/editor
• #followjourn: @willcooper – Will Cooper/news editor
• #FollowJourn: @baeight/editor
• #FollowJourn: @welshrosie/hyperlocal writer
• #followjourn: Caroline Nodder/editor

Thomson Foundation: Making of Oscar-nominated Burma VJ documentary

Last night Burma VJ was beaten to the Academy Award for best documentary, by The Cove, a film about the killing of dolphins in Japan.

But to read more about the making of Burma VJ, the story of undercover video journalists during the 2007 uprising in Myanmar, read this blog post over at the Thomson Foundation Blog:  ‘The secret training mission behind 
Oscar-nominated blockbuster‘.

Thomson Foundation provided training for the secret cameramen.

Similar posts:

• Burma VJ film nominated for ‘Best Documentary’ Oscar
• Thomson Reuters Foundation launches Emergency Information Service (EIS)
• Reuters: Michael Moore will release documentary online for free
• BBC World Service: Podcast: Citizen journalism – democracy or chaos?
• Online tribute to global journalism trainer Russell Lyne

#IWD: International Women’s Day for journalists

Today is International Women’s Day, a global day “celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,” partnered by Thomson Reuters.

• You can follow a Reuters live blog here: http://live.reuters.com/Event/International_Womens_Day_2010_2

• On Twitter, the team is @women_on_IWD (with hashtag #IWD)
  

Lots of publications have related coverage, including the Mirror, with a special supplement out today. Here’s a twitpic from Sarah Brown (@sarahbrown10), who was a guest editor (left).

Journalism.co.uk will be publishing a number of themed articles throughout the day, addressing gender issues in journalism / media. If you’d like us to publish or link to your own piece, please get in touch: judith [at] journalism.co.uk or @jtownend on Twitter.

Similar posts:

• Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)
• Was Sarah Brown a Fabulous guest editor?
• Where does Twitpic row leave journalists?
• #IWD: Gaby Hinsliff – ‘Too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in’
• #IWD: Why do men dominate newspaper letter pages?

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – audio and video inspiration

For video and audio slideshow ideas check out the National Press Photographers Association competition galleries, with new winners posted each month. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Similar posts:

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – ideas for data mashups
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – creating well-designed news
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – ‘New Journalist’ slideshow
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – constructing the perfect press release