Volume 39, No. 4, Fall 2011

The Op-Ed Project Sees Early Success with Program Alums

The Op-Ed Project was launched in 2008 with the goal of increasing the number of women’s voices on the opinion pages of newspapers and in other media where opinion is increasing as a staple but where women’s opinions are a small minority of the content. Founder Katie Orenstein and associate Anne DePree report encouraging results from participants in the public seminar programs The Op-Ed Project organizes; from those who in another program that pairs new op-ed writers with experienced ones; and from women who become fellows of The Op-Ed Project and commit to a year-long program of specific publishing goals.

“The average success rate for our programs is 25 percent, which is based on number of op-eds published, not the number of individuals published. The success rate of those who use the mentor-editor pool is nearly 60 percent. The success rate of our fellowship model is over 100 percent at the halfway point, based on the number of op-eds published, not the number of individuals published,” say Orenstein and DePree.

“The success rate of public programs varies widely, however, the first Chicago session had 26 people, which has generated 25 op-eds … we think those are extraordinary statistics.

“The main area where women's voices are well-represented are on topic matters pertaining to women. Consequently, this is one area that we don't focus extra attention on. Areas where women are underrepresented in general are areas in which additional women's voices can be valuable; for example, technology, business, military.”

The Byline Blog on the OEP website tells the story of recent successes: http://theopedproject.wordpress.com/

‘The Gender Report’ Analyzes Female Sourcing, Bylines in Online News

A welcome addition to the analysis of gender and media is The Gender Report, the brainchild of Jasmine Linabury and Joy Bacon, young journalists who have turned their attention to gender and online news.

The Gender Report, launched in January 2011, has undertaken a number of studies of online news sources. For its main study, The Gender Report regularly records findings from top U.S. online news sites — both those connected to traditional media and those that are online-only. In addition to this regular brief analysis and other studies, this site also features posts about trends observed over time, resources on the subjects of gender and journalism, examinations of coverage of gender and women in the news, links to other related sources online and a gender online news feed. For details on any of these initiatives, visit www.genderreport.com

Petition Campaign Asks Facebook To Close Pages with Sexual Violence

Facebook now has hundreds of millions of registered users, among them some who have perverted use of the service and violated its terms. Facebook has been slow to enforce punishment for violating its terms of use, and now users who abhor Facebook pages that promote sexual violence have gone the petition route.

People across the globe are joining a Twitter campaign asking Facebook to remove pages that promote rape and sexual assault. The social media action is part of an ongoing campaign on Change.org with more than 180,000 supporters.

Facebook users are locating offensive pages and tweeting them with the hashtag #notfunnyfacebook to pressure Facebook to remove pages that violate the company’s terms of service, which claim to ban content that is “hateful, threatening,” or that contains “graphic or gratuitous violence.” One such page title reads, “What’s 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife.”

Visit the campaign’s petition page at http://www.change.org/petitions/demand-facebook-remove-pages-that-promote-sexual-violence.

Reality TV Resets Tween, Teen Girls’ Expectations About Own Lives

As reality TV has become staple entertainment for young people and adults alike, tween and teen girls who regularly view reality TV accept and expect a higher level of drama, aggression, and bullying in their own lives, and measure their worth primarily by their physical appearance, according to Real to Me: Girls and Reality TV, a national survey released in October by the Girl Scout Research Institute.

The study found that the vast majority of girls think reality shows "often pit girls against each other to make the shows more exciting" (86%). When comparing the propensity for relational aggression between viewers and non-viewers of reality TV, 78% vs. 54% state that "gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls."

For more information, visit www.girlscouts.org

Rolling Stone Covers Play Women Hot and Heavy, Not So Men

A study by University at Buffalo sociologists has found that the portrayal of women in Rolling Stone over the last several decades has become increasingly sexualized, even "pornified." The same is not true of the portrayal of men.

Erin Hatton, and Mary Nell Trautner, assistant professors in the UB Department of Sociology, are the authors of "Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone," which examines the magazine’s covers from 1967 to 2009. The study was published in the September issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture and is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k722255851qh46u8.

Research in Depth — How Lindsey Vonn, her Vonntourage, and NBC influenced newspaper coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Games by Maura B. Rosenthal and R. Samantha Lewenberg

Research in Depth — Boys will be Boys: An Analysis of the Male Image in Old Spice Advertising in the 1950s and the 2000s by Katherine Krauss

Analysis – Constructing Tina Fey, Comic Everywoman by Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D.

Plus News Briefs, People, and Books, Flicks, etc.!

Media Report to Women has hard copies of back issues dating to its founding in 1972. Indispensable for research!