Women Journalists, Could We Be Perpetuating the Glass Ceiling?

There’s an interesting piece on the Poynter website today called How to pitch (stories) like a girl.  Author Jillian Keenan is bemoaning a report from a group called the OpEd project, which tracks gender representation in print editorials.  Not surprisingly, women wrote only 20% of Op-Eds in traditional papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post during the group’s 2011 survey period.  Women were more active in so-called “new media” outlets, like the Huffington Post and Salon – but they still authored just 38% of Op-Eds in those outlets.

This prompted a discussion of the persistent male dominance in print bylines overall.  Keenan reports on a packed event held in Brooklyn last night that addressed the issue and posed a fairly obvious remedy – female journalists need to pitch more stories.  She says the panelists – editors and freelance writers – talked about how women are more likely to view a rejected pitch as a personal rejection and be discouraged from pitching the same editor again, whereas men often take that same pitch rejection as a challenge and respond with a slew of new pitches.

I’m proud to say, women are extremely well-represented in my chosen field of public radio journalism, and I consider myself a fairly strong, confident, and assertive professional woman in that field.  But I will grudgingly admit that I’ve fallen into this exact trap in the past.  I once told a national editor earlier in my career how discouraged I’d become after he rejected several of my pitches in a row.  He was genuinely shocked, and even troubled, that I’d felt that way.  Looking back, he probably only rejected a handful of pitches, but as a result, I don’t think I pitched him again for several months.  What an over-reaction!  And what a waste!  When I later worked with that same editor, we had a great working relationship, and he was very complimentary of my stories.

So, did I respond that way because of my gender?  Who knows.  But reading the stories of other women who’d had the same experience was enough to make me consider it.  Certainly gender bias in the media will not be solved simply by women being more assertive in their pitching (someone has to decide whether to accept those pitches, after all), but it’s definitely worth guarding against this possible pitfall.

Are You Burying the Lead? Take This Simple Test

I heard this lead on a radio newscast the other day:  “United Flight 88 is en route to Newark, New Jersey.”

Ok I give up … why is this news?

It wasn’t until the second line that I found out why – Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng was on board, having won the diplomatic fight to come to the US after escaping from house arrest in late April.

I’m sure the journalist who wrote this lead had been writing this story all morning, was sick of leading with the same top line every hour (“Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is on his way to the US”), and decided to shake things up.  But as it happened, this was the only newscast I heard all day (it was a Saturday), and that was probably the case for a large number of listeners who were similarly confused that the progress of a regularly scheduled flight to Newark was considered the most important story of the day.  No doubt all of us who’ve been involved in newscast writing have been guilty of this – thinking we need to vary things up so much from hour to hour that we end up burying the lead.  Variation in the wording of your stories is indeed crucial, but burying the lead is inexcusable.

Newscast writers, here’s a simple way to keep yourselves honest:

When you’ve put together your newscast, pull out the first sentence from every story and put them in a list.  Would they make sense if you read them on the air as headlines?  Do you know what the top stories of the hour are after reading your list?  If not, chances are you’re being too cute and burying your leads – so take another shot at it!

Journalists are People Too – But Can We Still Do Our Jobs?

The recent news about civil unions and gay marriage, here in Colorado and across the country, has sparked some interesting conversations with my fellow journalists about objectivity and conflicts of interest.  A gay journalist here told me he felt strange reporting on Colorado’s civil unions bill and was unsure if he needed to recuse himself in some cases.  That started me thinking and talking to other colleagues about how we as journalists should handle stories with connections to key parts of our identities – parts that we either cannot hide or should not be expected to hide.  If a journalist is openly gay, will readers, viewers, or listeners believe he can report on civil unions in an unbiased manner?  If that’s a valid question, the same issue could be raised for a black or Hispanic journalist reporting on the racial profiling bill in Congress.  What about a practicing Catholic reporting on the abortion debate?  We take great pains to hide our political and social beliefs from public view, but what happens when the very fact of who we are carries certain assumptions, right or wrong, about what those beliefs might be?

As with any other story, we as journalists should be honest with ourselves when faced with a situation like this, and we should step back if we feel too close to the topic to be able to report it objectively.  I don’t believe, however, that we should be expected to automatically recuse ourselves.  This is where the role of an editor becomes absolutely crucial.  Reporters should always talk to their editors about possible conflicts at the story pitch stage, and the decision on whether to go forward with the coverage must be a joint one.  The editor will also be able to provide crucial outside perspective throughout the reporting process, prodding the reporter to be even-handed in her investigations of both sides of the story.  The editor also must be extra vigilant in the final edits, reading the story through the eyes of someone who might know the reporter’s religion, race, sexual orientation, etc and might therefore be looking for bias.

There is also the even thornier question of disclosure.  A fellow journalist pointed out that many business reporters are required to disclose on air if they hold shares in any company they’re covering on any given day.  Surely, he argued, something as personal as someone’s sexual orientation or race or religion would have as much or more influence on a journalist’s opinions and beliefs.  Shouldn’t the audience have the right to know those things if they are relevant to the subject of the story?

I would argue, no — mainly because including such personal details about the reporter could threaten to overshadow the story itself.  There is a point at which the value of disclosing any possible conflict of interest is outweighed by the need not to stray into the all-too-common territory of personality-driven journalism, in which the reporter becomes the story.  I think this would cross that line.

In the end, as with most ethical dilemmas in journalism, the work should speak for itself.  If the reporter and the editor have made a decision that the reporter can tell the story objectively; if the editor has committed to extra vigilance as the reporting goes forward; and if the editor certifies that the final product is the result of balanced investigative reporting and research and that it is presented fairly and accurately, it should be above reproach.