Women in Journalism

Press Gazette reported on November 28 that Women in Journalism (WIJ) relaunched its website.

Women in Journalism is a networking, campaigning, training and social organisation for women journalists who work across all the written media, from newspapers and magazines to the new media.

WIJ was established 12 years ago. It grew out of a demand for women to be more effectively represented at senior level in newspapers and magazines, and has since evolved into a forum for women in journalism at all levels.

The organization boasts its contribution to a significant increase in the number of women editors and deputy editors in national newspapers.

It also organizes bi-monthly seminars to give women journalists chances to think about 'How to ask for more money', 'What features editors want', 'Get your own column' and 'How to write a bestseller'.

10 years ago in Korea

I began working as a reporter in 1996 at the Kukmin Daily in Seoul. The Kukmin recruited 6 reporters in that year including myself, a half of whom were female. Such a ratio of men to women was unprecedented in the male-dominating industry.

The imbalance in gender was the problem of not only mains stream media but also new media that started to appear on the Internet in the early 2000s. The citizen reporters of Ohmynews were also a male-dominating group. According to the company’s 2003 statistics, 76.6% of them were male.

New Trend?

However, the trend has changed for the past decade. More and more women has applied for jobs in the media for the past years. Their competitiveness surpasses that of male applicants in most cases.

Therefore, Korean media have difficulty in recruiting male reporters because fewer of them defeat women competitors at examinations for recruiting journalists. Some companies give advantages to male applicants to strike a gender balance.

I remember that I was surprised by the dominant number of women at the first meeting of Sheffield University’s new MA journalism students in last September.

I told one of the female students how I was surprised but she replied “It’s natural. Whichever country or university you go to, journalism is a women’s subject.”

Why Women Love Journalism?

Elizabeth Day, a female reporter for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed an article to British Journalism Review in 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 21-25). Its title was Why Women Love Journalism?

I think she is the right person to answer this question. She was named Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March, 2004, thanks to both her hunger for exclusives and her stylish writing. Please read her article!

Two Realities

I agree to the argument that women are ill-represented in senior posts of media industry. But the new trends that I witnessed in Seoul and Sheffield are sure to reflect the reality.

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Are Bloggers Journalists? NUJ Said “Yes”

A 20-year-old blogger became a formal member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) this week.

The NUJ general secretary said that he is the Union’s first member with a job title of “blogger”.

Does this mean that the journalists’ organization formally recognizes blogging as an area of journalism?

Who is that blogger?

He is Conrad Quilty-Harper (in the photo) , a history and politics student at the University of Hull. But he is currently taking a year off to work for Mahalo, a website that defines itself “a human powered search engine”.

Mahalo, based in Santa Monica, California, hires people to select best links and produce spam-free search results for popular keywords. Conrad is one of those hired.

A blogger paid by AOL

He also writes for Engadget.com, which is a popular technology news blog. It consists of the works of several bloggers. Conrad is one of those bloggers who are paid by Engadget.com. T

The blog is a member of Weblogs Inc., a blog network purchased by AOL in 2005. So, technically Conrad is working for a MSM (main stream media) company.

“I was the first questioner at a Steve Jobs press conference”

He has previously blogged at Joystiq.com and TUAW.com, and has vigorously participated in a large number of Flickr groups.

Conrad boasts that he threw the first question to the Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a press conference in the last September where reporters from major media including BBC, FT, and the Guardian attended.

Apply – Rejected – Complain – Accepted

In the first place, his application for membership was rejected by NUJ in the last October. NUJ replied his email application saying:

“While you are studying full-time you will not be eligible for full or temporary membership, and as you are not doing a journalism/media course, you are therefore not eligible for NUJ student membership.”

Conrad complained to NUJ that he is currently not a student because he suspended his study for a year to work as but a “full-time” blogger. Then, NUJ invited him to its London Freelance branch meeting and decided to admit him as a member.

The first member who earns his living from blogging

The NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging”

He added in his blog: “Who says we're not attracting new media workers? Membership in new media was up almost 11% over the past year.”

Is blogging journalism?

When the NUJ rejected Conrad’s application for a membership, the issue was not his work, blogging, but his status as a student. The Union approved his application as soon as it confirmed that he is not a student at least technically.

It seems that the NUJ had no objection to the idea of including bloggers in the category of journalists, as long as they are “full-time professional” ones. This means that NUJ has already regarded a blog as a journalistic media where people can get news with quality.

In Conrad’s case, few reason can be found to reject his application. His specialty in technology and the quality of the information he provides have long been highly valued. Above all, he devotes his entire working hours and energy to news reporting.

A critic to citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann, wrote for the New Yorker on August 7, 2006 that good Internet journalism needs people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.

Even to his criteria, Conrad will hardly be excluded from the category of journalists. However, His case should not be generalized to put the entire world of blogging under the umbrella of journalism. A significant level of professionalism should be needed.

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Is Google Dangerous?

“Google is hugely dangerous. It now affects everything we do online.

“Google is the number one topic of conversation at News Corp.

“We absolutely can’t afford not to be brilliant on Google News.”

The editor-in-chief of Times Online, Ann Spackman, made these comments at the Society of Editors conference on November 6 in Manchester. She showed her concern about Google during a session entitled the Future Is Ours. She attended the session as a panel to discuss the future of newspapers and made these comments when asked her view on Google. She also said: “Google is the biggest influence on the news business. Its move into DNA is a massive threat.” Her remarks attracted attention from many journalism news sites such as journalism.co.uk, Press Gazette, and greenslade. Why is Ms. Spackman so worried about Google?

Is Google a News Brand?

Google itself produces no news. The search engine just provides its users with news produced by someone else - newspapers, broadcasters, or news sites. It is a platform through which people get access to various news contents. You can click hyperlinks to news stories on Google News pages or search news by key words. But, Google has a function of journalism – news selection!

Thousands of news producers pour countless stories onto Google every day, but its news pages are limited in space. Only a tiny portion of those articles can get a link on it. Especially, if a huge story breaks out, hundreds of different versions of same story rush in. Who choose which story or whose story to appear on the main page of Google News? Google does! Google News pages are designed to have an inverted pyramid structure just as a newspaper does. The more important is a story, the better positioned. Who decides top stories on Google News? Even though far from a news brand, Google does the same thing as the editor-in-chief of the Times does in his newsroom – deciding news value.

I typed “Pakistan” in Google news search window at 12:29 pm on November 9 to catch up with stories about its opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. On the top of my search results was Bhutto under house detention in Pakistan of an American newspaper, San Jose Mercury News. Why does this story of that newspaper come first? It is because of Google search engine’s algorithm.

The Power of Google Algorithm

Ms. Spackman elaborated on why Google is a threat to news business at an interview with Press Gazette after the session was over. She said that newspapers have to optimize their sites for Google not to lose enormous traffic coming from the search engine. News sites depend financially on the advertisement revenue that is hugely influenced by the size of such traffic. If the traffic is highly susceptible to Google, it means that Google has the power to financially control news sites. When Google tweaked its search algorithm last month, WashingtonPost.com was one of several major sites whose PageRank temporarily dropped, she noted. Google also controls a large amount of advertising online, particularly since its acquisition this year of online advertising firm DoubleClick.

Power without Responsibility

Ms. Spackman was asked her view on Google during the conference session by an attendant who described it as "a trusted brand for news", according to journalism.co.uk. If the person reflected the reality as it was, Google's news selection must be regareded by people as a form of journalism. People are getting addicted to it as they have been to a certain brand of newspaper. This means Google can weild influence upon public opinion just as news media do. But it is free from the responsibilities every news medium takes for granted, because it does not produce any news.

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