Author Archives: Judith Townend

#IWD: Why do men dominate newspaper letter pages?

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It has always fascinated me why male names dominate the readers’ letter pages in newspapers, the original home for crowdsourced comment. What’s more, it’s a trend that plays out online too: men are already significantly noisier on Google Buzz, for example, and dominate online comment in subjects like politics and media.

I was pleased to discover around this time last year that the unequal gender split bothered one @patroclus too (aka writer Fiona Campbell-Howes) who actually set about documenting the trend in 2008 with the blog Guardianletters.blogspot.com/.

She never got any real answers from the newspapers she studied and eventually she let the blog run dry. But the old posts are still there to see, with some revealing graphs, too. The chart below, for example, shows the percentage split between men, women and indiscriminate for April-May 2008 at the Guardian and Observer.

Most recently, the theme was picked up by Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in January 2010.

“Why is the letters page, of whichever newspaper you care to choose, invariably dominated by men?” the programme asked. The Observer has actually called for more women to write in.

Jenni Murray talked to Stephen Pritchard, readers’ editor at the Observer, and Sarah Sands, deputy editor of the London Evening Standard. Pritchard and Sands seemed to agree that time was a crucial factor – maybe women had less of it. Sands also identified a reluctance on the part of women to declare their opinion publicly.

But does the lack of time and innate modesty theory really hold true, when we look at the amount of female time spent, and number of views shared, on MumsNet, or fashion and food blogs and forums?

I’d be interested to see some more research in this area. It’s a theme that journalist Gaby Hinsliff picks up on in her introductory post for today’s International Women’s Day themed LabourList. Of political blogging, she says “there are too many women waiting to be invited to blog, where men just pile in”.

Like Hinsliff, I’m reluctant to see female-only gimmicks used to remedy the situation, but simultaneously intrigued by the louder male voice, a phenomenon that may be key in understanding why men dominate executive boards across so many industries. Yes, we have a lot of female journalists in the newsroom, but only a handful of women make it to the top levels of the media industry – and even fewer become CEO or editor.

The truth about funding investigative journalism 2.0

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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.)

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

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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?

CCJ: Journalists love polls but are they useful?

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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…

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

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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.”

Thomson Foundation: Making of Oscar-nominated Burma VJ documentary

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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.

#IWD: International Women’s Day for journalists

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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.

in Mirror Ed's office working on International Women's Day su... on TwitpicLots 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.

New York City police to issue press passes to bloggers

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This week New York City Law Department issued press passes to bloggers for the first time. In its new rules, to be adopted by the New York police department, will “expressly incorporate online-only media such as blogs”.

The changes follow a lawsuit filed in November of 2008 that challenged the existing credentials system, as reported by Journalism.co.uk at the time. In January 2009, three bloggers received press accreditation after suing New York City, following the Police Department’s refusal to give them press credentials because they work for online news outlets. Rafael Martínez Alequin – (Your Free Press), Ralph E. Smith (The Guardian Chronicle) and David Wallis (featurewell.com) launched the action after being denied credentials in 2007.

Following this week’s announcement, Norman Siegel, one of the attorneys involved in the lawsuit, said the department had “streamlined and improved” the press accreditation rules. “The new rules will enable journalists to gather and report news in a more successful manner than before. Online journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio journalists.”

The detail:

Under the proposed new rules published today, to obtain a press credential, an applicant must show that he or she has covered, in person, six news events where the City has restricted access, within the two-year period preceding the application. In addition to employees of traditional news gathering organisations, the new rules cover self-employed newspersons and other individuals who gather and report the news. The new press card will be issued every two years.

A press card allows its bearer, with the approval of police, to cross certain barriers established by the City at news events. Many non-City entities also rely on the City press card to distinguish who is a member of the media.

Calling journalists to blog on International Women’s Day (Monday 8 March)

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On Monday 8 March, it’s International Women’s Day, a global day “celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,” partnered by Thomson Reuters.

To mark the occasion, Sky News is having a day of female-led broadcasting. The broadcaster announced:
“From sunrise to midnight, the news channel will be presented and produced exclusively by women in support of the globally renowned day, which honours the economic, political and social achievements of women with hundreds of events around the world.”

Reuters will be liveblogging here: http://live.reuters.com/Event/International_Womens_Day_2010_2

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on media owners “to take steps to raise women’s profile in the news, both as professionals and as news topics,” ahead of its survey to be released in Bahrain on Monday.

“The situation is deplorable,” said Aidan White, IFJ general secretary. “Media organisations remain dominated by men the world over. Women must be given equal access to leadership. When that happens it will create a sea change in the news agenda and the way media professionals are treated.”

Here at Journalism.co.uk (where the editorial staff is predominantly female anyway), we thought it might be fun to host some themed comment on our blog. If you (male or female!) have a relevant post you’re burning to write, please let us know and we can publish it here – or link to your site/blog. Please contact judith [at] journalism.co.uk or leave a comment below.

  • Which parts of the industry are particularly male-dominated? Does it matter?
  • Has online technology helped balance the gender-split?
  • What would you like to see change within the industry?
  • What are your observations of male-female divide in the workplace?

Is the BBC really falling out of love with blogging?

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From reading recent media news you might think the the BBC’s passion for blogging was cooling.

First off, we learnt (via the Times initially, and then confirmed by the BBC) that the corporation is to significantly cut back its web content and reduce the number of online staff.

Then on Tuesday evening, BBC political editor Nick Robinson said he no longer read the comments on his own Newslog. Rather than widening the political debate, commenters were “people who have already made their minds up, to abuse me, to abuse each other or abuse a politician”, he said at an Election 2.0 debate at City University London.

Finally, as academic and blogger Alfred Hermida flagged up, the BBC Strategic Review labelled the blogosphere as “vast and unruly”. The report says:

Above the vast and unruly world of the blogosphere, professional media power may actually concentrate in fewer hands. Individual plurality may increase but collective, effective plurality decrease – with societies around the world left with fewer reliable sources of professionally validated news.

Professor Hermida, who specifically researches the BBC,  was surprised by the language and suggests reminding director general Mark Thompson that the BBC is part of the blogosphere itself:

Perhaps Forrester analyst Nick Thomas when he says that “Mark Thompson does not ‘get’ digital in the way that even his much-maligned predecessor John Birt did.”

But before we get carried away with the BBC’s blogging / web apathy, let’s take a step back. Malcolm Coles’ easy-read guide to the Strategic Review comes in handy here.

For one, as Coles notes on Econsultancy, halving the number of sections on the site is not quite the same as halving the size of the site. “The overall quality will be improved by closing lower-performing sites and consolidating the rest,” he reports.

And proactive web interaction will be developed. From Coles’ post:

The BBC also plans to open up its programme library (outside the areas with high commercial value) “over time” within BBC Online as a publicly accessible ‘permanent collection’.

The review says it will make programmes available on demand “alongside the component parts of those programmes (segmentation), programme information (full catalogue) and additional, complementary content (programme support”. And the site will look to deliver audiences through propositions like the BBC’s Wildlife Finder “which maximise the public value of archive programming”.

(…) It’s pledged to “turn the site into a window on the web” by providing at least one external link on every page and doubling monthly ‘click-throughs” to external sites: “making the best of what is available elsewhere online an integral part of the BBC’s offer to audiences”.

Anyway, read the report – or Coles’ summary – for yourself. PDF at this link.