INMA Finds Continuing Gender Gap in
Worldwide Newspaper Readership

The International Newspaper Marketing Association has released a study documenting the continuing slide in newspaper readership among the world's women.

"Exploring the Newspaper Readership Gender Gap" by Carly L. Price shows that women throughout the world read newspapers less frequently than men, in spite of the fact that women and men in many countries have shifted closer through the decades in terms of income, education, interests and societal roles. To obtain a copy of the report, go to www.inma.org/bookstore/2003-femalereader.cfm

Women Media Leaders Panel Discusses
Convergence, Quality, Future of News

The International Women's Media Foundation in September convened a panel of some of the best-known names in U. S. journalism today to discuss media convergence, ethics, the definition of news, and women in the media. The IWMF received funding for the panel from The New York Times Foundation, with the Carnegie Corporation's Vice President of Public Affairs Susan King, an IWMF director, hosting and serving as moderator.

The panel was really too large to accommodate debate and discussion, although the participants commented on each other's observations as they made their own. This issue contains our summary of some of the most arresting comments made by the individuals on the panel, all of whom are at the top of their game and many of them the first women in the jobs they hold.

Feminist Perspective Still Missing from Public
Affairs Debates in Mainstream Media

Writing in the Women's Review of Books (October 2003), Laura Zimmerman says that a myth of neutrality and objectivity in "op-ed pages, elite opinion journals and Sunday morning news programs" has actually had the effect of silencing feminist perspectives in public debate.

Zimmerman, cofounder and codirector of the Center for New Words, a nonprofit organization promoting women's voices and ideas (and formerly New Words Bookstore in Cambridge, MA), says the result has been that "audiences become habituated to male voices and bylines and dependent on white male gravitas to explain what's happening in the world. As we witnessed at the time of 9/11 and later during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, national emergencies push women even further to the sidelines."

To read Zimmerman's piece, go to www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview/ and click on Back Issues, then on 2003, then on October 2003.

Boxed In: Women Still Outnumbered
Behind Scenes and On Screen in Primetime

Men outnumbered women by about 4 to 1 in key behind-the-scenes roles during the 2002-2003 primetime season, according to the latest data from San Diego State communication professor and MRTW supporting subscriber Martha Lauzen.

Women comprised 22% of all creators, executive producers, producers, directors, writers, editors, and directors of photography working on situation comedies and dramas airing on the broadcast networks last season. This percentage has remained virtually unchanged for the last four television seasons.

Working Women in Mainstream Magazines: A Content Analysis

This content-analytical study, conducted by Juanita Covert of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the representation and portrayal of working women in magazine articles and the topics in articles written about or for working women. Because of the exploratory nature of the study and the new measures created to examine magazine content and gender stereotypes, this is presented as a pilot study.

Feminist Consciousness and the Production of a Contemporary Women's Section

For nearly a century prior to the 1970s newspapers across the country included sections devoted entirely to women. Not only were these pages designated for women readers, the section titles across the tops of these pages made this fact perfectly clear. These sections contained content typically understood to fall within the feminine sphere - including society news, recipes and advice columns on relationships and family. During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, however, newspapers stopped providing women readers with a section of their own. But not long after newspaper editors eliminated women's pages, sections targeting and named for women came back. Papers of all sizes have reconstructed explicitly named women's pages.

This research paper, written by Dustin Harp of the University of Texas, presents analysis of interviews at one newspaper currently producing explicitly named women's pages. While providing a case in which to better understand how news workers conceptualize and construct a contemporary women's section, this case study offers a means for analyzing these sections in relation to contemporary feminism. It considers the connection between feminism and a newsroom staff's perceptions of how and why they produce the section.

Plus News Briefs, People and Book Reviews

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