Vol. 35, No. 4, Fall 2007

Survey: Title IX Coverage Influenced
by Attitude of Sports Journalists

More than 80 percent of newspaper sports reporters surveyed about Title IX believe their papers have fairly covered the controversial federal law, and about half of those reporters believe the law hurts men’s sports, according to a study released by Penn State researchers this summer.

About one-third of those surveyed believe the 35-year-old law should be changed.

Reporter attitudes toward the law and an overall lack of diversity in newspaper sports operations could impact coverage of Title IX, which was enacted in June 1972 and guarantees equal opportunity for girls and women at U.S. schools that receive federal funding. Critics of the law believe it has enhanced women’s sports at the expense of some men’s sports.

“If reporters believe that Title IX is the culprit behind losses to men’s sports, they may be less likely to scrutinize statements by sources who want to weaken the law,” said Marie Hardin, associate director of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, housed in the College of Communications at Penn State. The Curley Center conducted the telephone and Internet survey of 371 sports journalists from late April to early June.

BlogHer Network Joins Ranks of
Top Women’s Networks Online

BlogHer, Inc. (www.blogher.com), the Web’s number-one guide to blogs by women, announced in Octoberr that the BlogHer network now receives more than 4.23 million unique visitors per month, making BlogHer one of the leading networks for women online, the company said.

In a statement, the company said that ccording to Nielsen Netratings, BlogHer.com and BlogHer’s publishing network of 955 blog affiliates achieved 4.237 million unique visitors and 17.7 million pageviews in September 2007. BlogHer.com’s 60 editors and BlogHer’s blog affiliates write across categories of interest to women online, including parenting, health, food, lifestyle, technology, business and politics, and all member blogs are continually vetted for content quality, category relevance, blog frequency and adherence to editorial standards.

Business and News Magazine Covers
Still Male Territory, Survey Finds

Few women were the subject of cover stories in the major weekly news and business magazines in 2006, according to an analysis of every issue of Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek and Time released in August 2007.

Beverly Wettenstein, an historian and author of A Women’s Book of Days, also studied the magazines to determine if a woman was the cover story subject, author or photographer.

Wettenstein’s analysis suggests that a woman’s chances of appearing on a cover improved if a magazine created editorial content specifically about women for that issue.

Contact Wettenstein at Wettenstein@aol.com or call 212-861-5425.

GreenStone Media Folds; Success of
Women’s Radio An Open Question

GreenStone Media LLC, formed in 2005 as a women’s talk-radio network, ceased broadcasting August 17, 2007. We excerpt here from GreenStone CEO Susan Ness’s farewell note to listeners:

“ The radio industry is highly concentrated, and we could not get carriage on stations owned by most of the major radio groups. Our station affiliates were mostly in small markets, making it almost impossible to prove that the concept works.

“ While we created great programming, tragically, we did not have the capital to press on. It was a longer and more expensive process than a small, independent programming company could shoulder in today’s turbulent marketplace. We’re proud of our talent and the progress we’ve made. And we had just begun to gain traction on other platforms. But we couldn’t responsibly predict success in a future near enough to match our investors’ resources.

“We believed (and still believe) that women need a voice on commercial radio, and that radio needs women’s voices. We encourage others to build on the groundbreaking work we’ve done to serve this important—and clearly underserved–market.”

Briefs

Columnist Ellen Goodman has analyzed the political blogosphere and found it lacking in female chromosomes: “ I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men-only, while seven percent were by women-only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the 'coed' mix was overwhelmingly male. … In fairness, half of all 96 million blogs are written by women. But in the smaller political sphere, what is touted as a fresh force for change looks an awful lot like a new boy network.” Read her piece at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/08/10/e_male/

Speaking of the boys’ network: A survey by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland found that journalism and mass communication school deans, directors and department heads:

• Are 90% white
• Are 64% male
• Have an average age of 55.

“Someone should remind [cigarette manufacture] R.J. Reynolds that here’s nothing sexy about emphysema or dying of cancer,” wrote California Congresswoman Lois Capps in The Washington Post (“Poisonous in Pink: Women’s Magazines Hop Into Bed with Big Tobacco,” Oct. 12). Capps recounts her attempt, along with 40 of her congressional colleagues, to persuade leading women’s magazines to drop tobacco advertising, especially Camel No. 9, which is marketed specifically to young women.

Research in Depth: Purging Dissent

Research in Depth: Sexy, Tough or Inept? Depictions of Women Terrorists in the News

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!