Women score a few jobs in shrinking newsrooms

(Click to enlarge)

I wrote around this time last year about the annual newsroom census released by the American Society of News Editors and how women had fared over the decade. This year, the ASNE numbers show, women gained a few jobs (180) over 2010, but are still way off the totals seen in 2001.

In fact, the number of women in the newsroom (15,360) is down some 27 percent (5,702) from a decade earlier (21,062), mirroring the overall drop in the total census from a decade ago. In 2001, 56,393 men and women worked in the newsroom vs. 41,608 today. And we all know how the recession and growing online options pummeled newspaper advertising, leading to the Great Belt-Tightening and Newsroom Purge of 2007-10.

But it's interesting to see, in the ASNE chart above, how women have gained a bit of supervisory authority over the decade (the red pen marks drawing the comparisons are mine). Bear in mind, however, that the ranks of newsroom supervisors shrank in the decade, as the overall census declined. Since 2001, the ASNE numbers show, newsrooms have lost 2,900 supervisors' slots.

ASNE, which conducts the annual census to track newsroom diversity, bemoaned the losses seen by minorities, even as layoffs gave way to some cautious hiring at newspapers. By race, white men and women gained ground from a year earlier, while fewer black women, black men, Hispanic men and Asian men were reported in newsrooms. The ASNE numbers show about 15 more Hispanic women in newsrooms, while the ranks of Asian women are unchanged.

“The U.S. Census numbers clearly tell us that people-of-color populations are growing while our newsrooms aren't reflecting that growth," Ronnie Agnew, co-chair of ASNE’s Diversity Committee, said in a prepared statement. "This should be a concern to all who see diversity as an accurate way of telling the story of a new America.”

Can newspapers lure Gen Y with games?

Since its original release, The Matrix
has become a multimedia franchise.

I probably should have watched "The Matrix" the last time it was on TV. Or maybe I need to start reading comic books, particularly the superhero variety. Or perhaps I should become a gamer.

Then, apparently, I'd have a better understanding of transmedia storytelling, a phrase that has surfaced at a couple of recent journalism conferences.

First coined in the 1990s, it refers to the use of different media platforms to convey information, each contributing something to give greater context and depth to understanding the whole.

At the South by Southwest bash in March and at the American Society of News Editors annual meeting last week, the phrase came up in a kind of shorthand as gaming -- or a way to lure a younger generation to your newspaper and website through news games.

What the heck?! The scold in me, the one who embraces a daily diet of eat-your-spinach journalism, wanted nothing to do with adding sugar to make the news more palatable to Gen Y, the college-aged kids who are less likely than other generations to get their news from print.

But that's an uncharitable view.

Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., describes the light bulb that went off

Make it a to-do: Mobile

I wonder how many newsroom execs, just back from the annual meeting of the American Society of News Editors, put  MOBILE in big block letters at the top of their to-do list.

Capitalizing on smartphones as a news and revenue strategy figured into the keynote delivered by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the conference's opening and at a session two days later that featured Yahoo's Matthew Idema, a vice president in charge of local initiatives.

Idema offered a peek at his company's soon-to-launch smartphone app, which should have scared the bejesus out of the newspaper editors: It will offer where-you're-at weather, traffic, news, tweets and blogs, as well as nearby specials offered by businesses.

"(S)ounds like a potential 'newspapers should have created it first' moment," said one observer on Twitter.

Indeed, technology watchers like Gartner and Morgan Stanley have predicted that mobile devices soon will overtake PCs as the preferred tool to connect to the Internet -- they just differ on whether that will happen by 2013 or 2015.

Currently, about a quarter of American adults get some of their news via cellphone, the Pew Research Center reported last month. It described the typical "on-the-go" news consumer as a 34-year-old white male, college-educated and earning a comfortable living ($75,000 or more for about a third of them). In addition to grabbing news from multiple sites, he also uses his phone to send text messages, take pictures, blog and tweet.

With such an eager consumer, newspapers would be foolish not to reach out via mobile devices, right? Here's an even more compelling reason: Mobile is expected to grow rapidly into a lucrative advertising vehicle.

Yesterday, Borrell Associates, a research firm that analyzes local advertising spending, called mobile "the new disruptor" in advertising and marketing, and predicted it will skyrocket to some $57 billion in spending by 2014 -- from $2.7 billion last year.

Mobile coupons, sent via text messages, already are showing promise, according to the company, citing the example of a restaurant in Texas that paid $37 to send out buy-one-get-one-free coupons for burgers and added $1,000 in incremental revenue daily. Borrell called coupons the first "killer app" for mobile.

Newspapers have always made money by delivering eyeballs to advertisers. With a mobile strategy, they'd link on-the-go news consumers with nearby businesses via smartphone.

To miss that opportunity would mean passing up needed revenue -- a point not lost on one observer at Idema's Yahoo presentation:  "Be afraid newspapers. They'll drink what's left of your milkshake," she tweeted.

Look to future, not past, for digital 'do-over'

How can you tell old-media reps from the new-media ones?

• They wear suits instead of T-shirts at industry conferences;
• Few of them live-tweet at events;
• They haven't heard of Chatroulette or use Foursquare.

Or so claimed some snarky observers on Twitter during the annual meeting of the American Society of News Editors, which concluded today in Washington, D.C.

And, it appears, old-media types also would rather get a "do-over" on the just-concluded decade, when aggregators grabbed content from newspaper websites and made it widely accessible on the Internet.

"Do news execs know where their companies went wrong?" asked a headline at an online-journalism news site, reporting on a poll released at the conference. The survey, conducted in December and January by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, showed that members of ASNE and the Radio Television Digital News Association are worried about their operations' sustainability.

Asked what they could have done differently in the past decade (see chart), many editors in particular said they should have invested in new technology sooner and should have put their papers' online content behind a paywall.

Source: Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

"These answers could indicate that perhaps many of today’s news industry execs still don’t quite grasp what caused their companies to fall on hard times," said Amy Gahran, who posted the "Do execs know" item on the Knight Digital Media Center site. Her concern: their thinking could hamper old-media's adoption of new-media strategies in the future.

Indeed, "Charging for Digital Content: Fix or Folly?" was a topic for discussion yesterday at the ASNE conference, when two media executives and two media observers debated paywalls and other suggestions (philanthropy, government assistance, pledge drives) for propping up traditional -- but declining -- revenue from print ads.

They split evenly, 2-2, on whether free access to online content should be curtailed. The pro-paywall side had some support from the Pew survey, which found 10 percent of respondents working on charging fees for access, while 32 percent are considering the idea. (Of the others, 11 percent rejected the idea and 35 percent haven't even considered it.)

But Jim Brady, a former washingtonpost.com editor who is heading up a soon-to-launch online local-news site in the D.C. area, called paywalls "more folly than fix" because they ask people to pay for something they don't want to pay for.

Instead, he and Ken Doctor, a media analyst, said editors and broadcasters should develop strategies to charge for news access via mobile phones -- where more and more Web traffic is expected to shift in the near future and where smartphone users already are accustomed to paying for apps.

They said that's a better do-over than trying to take back content already set free by the aggregators.

Women short-changed as newsrooms shrink

A headline today on an online op-ed, "Still Missing: Women in the Media," spurred me to crunch some of the census numbers released this week by the American Society of News Editors.

By my estimates, women have lost ground in the country's newsrooms over the past decade, accounting this year for 36.6 percent of the overall work force at newspapers and their Web sites, vs. 37.1 percent in 2000. In real numbers, that's 15,180 women working today as supervisors, reporters, photographers, videographers, page designers, online producers and copy editors, vs. 20,876 in 2000.

What's more, that decade-ago total for women is still less than the number of white men alone -- 23,249 -- currently working in newsrooms. (The ASNE numbers are here.) Men today comprise 63 percent of the work force in U.S. newsrooms, with the vast majority of them white.

The census has been conducted annually by ASNE since the late 1970s in an effort to track newsroom diversity. And the numbers released this week showed that minorities lost ground as layoffs and buyouts continued at newspapers battered by the recession. That prompted UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc., the umbrella group for Asian American, Hispanic, black and Native American journalists' associations, to ask ASNE to help "rebuild our newsrooms with diversity as a key strategic value."

I couldn't find any similar call from women's press clubs, which have lobbied on behalf of female journalists for decades. (Note that it was only in 1998 that ASNE voted to include a count of women in the annual minority survey of newsrooms.)

But the "Still Missing" op-ed proffered other grievances: that fewer women are interviewed for news stories; that they aren't as sought after for commentary; that they own very few of the country's radio and TV outlets; that they're underrepresented on the boards of media companies jockeying for dominance.

Yet the author's overarching worry that women are being marginalized could easily have enveloped the newsroom census, too: "Sure, we’ve made great strides -- we’ve got Rachel Maddow and Katie Couric and Oprah. But our work for gender equality in the media is far from over. It’s as important as ever to tie the media reform movement to the advancement of women."

We're not out of the woods yet

Ryan Sholin posted this picture of ASNE "swag" --
a copy of the San Francisco Panorama -- to
Twitpic. Tweets quote Panorama's Dave Eggers
as saying he's looking for money to take
the publication monthly.

Our long national nightmare in the newsroom continues.

Or so says the American Society of News Editors, the trade group for top newspaper and Web site editors.

According to ASNE, the rate of decline in newsroom jobs at daily newspapers slowed last year to 5,200 -- from 5,900 jobs lost in 2008.

But that still put the census of full-time staff -- reporters, editors, photographers, layout and graphic artists -- at its lowest level since the mid-1970s: 41,500.

And among minorities, the 2009 hit was bigger on a percentage basis than for the newsroom work force as a whole: 12.6 percent of jobs lost, vs. 11 percent overall, ASNE said in a report released yesterday.

The association, which keeps tabs on employment at daily newspapers in particular to track minority hiring, called the numbers disappointing. "Without diversity in our newsrooms, we miss reporting on important stories in our communities," ASNE President Marty Kaiser, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said in a prepared statement.

Indeed, the Asian American Journalists Association today called on ASNE "to make diversity a key pillar of the news industry's financial future," as it underscored a drop in Asian Americans in newsrooms. (This table in the ASNE report shows the minority census in newsrooms over the last decade. This table shows the minority breakdown by job category. And this one shows the trends since 1978.)

ASNE is holding its annual conference in Washington, D.C., through Wednesday. Live-blogging, tweeting and reporting on sessions can be found here.

While the 2009 conference was canceled -- only the second time in the group's history (World War II was the backdrop for the hiatus in 1945) -- this year's meeting was promoted as less navel-gazing and more about "what is working now and what isn’t."

One active tweeter, a journalism professor from Arizona, liked what he saw: "... speakers are showing phenomenal number of very specific examples. Good teaching." But one online account of the conference so far likened the editors attending to "patients in the dentists' waiting rooms: anxious."

That's an apt description to be sure, given that newsroom layoffs and buyouts merely slowed in 2009 from the hurried pace of a year earlier and haven't yet reversed.