My seven favorite female journos on Twitter

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I was an avid Twitter-er (shameless plug: FOLLOW ME! @meganpaolone) throughout undergrad, mainly documenting my daily escapades through photos and complaining about how much homework I had, but I didn’t really understand the true value of the platform until coming to Newhouse. Since then I’ve cultivated a very selective “following” list, made up mostly of journalists and writers, a lot of them women.

To earn a spot on my following list, there’s generally just a few qualities that I look for: 1) While my own tweets aren’t generally snarky, I do enjoy some sass. Think Gawker/Jezebel. Snark isn’t everything, but it certainly is one of the first things to hook me. 2) I’m also the type of person that gets 90 percent of her news via Twitter links, so I appreciate engaging, informative tweets. Quotes are OK, but copying headlines verbatim generally earns you an “unfollow.” 3) Finally, I appreciate (and really respect) those tweeters who have managed to strike an acceptable balance between useful and personal. Photos of your cat/kids every once in a while: OK. Daily updates of your brunch progress/foursquare check-ins: Unfollow.

The seven ladies (yes, seven — I like to be different) I’ve listed below, I think, have excelled in combining most of these qualities in their everyday tweeting:

  1. Susan Orlean Susan Orlean
    I really just want Susan Orlean to be my best friend. She’s an author, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing writer to a slew of other big-name mags, but most of all she’s hilarious. I started following her because of her commentary on writing/editing, but her feed has turned out to be a trove of treasures. Also, her Twitter avatar is a photo of her with donkeys. Adorable.

  2. Liz HeronLiz Heron
    Liz Heron is the director of social media and engagement at the Wall Street Journal, and her tweets are jam-packed with useful information. Usually it’s a lot of data, surveys and stats about journalism and social media, but she also tweets about current events.

  3. Lisa WilliamsLisa Williams
    Lisa Williams is a fellow at the MIT Media Lab and just won the Knight News Challenge for data visualization. She runs a website for journalists who want to learn how to code and program called Life and Code, and the majority of her tweets are about journalists becoming fluent in Web languages/data viz and how it can help their story telling.

  4. Clara JefferyClara Jefferey
    I started following Clara Jefferey (co-editor at Mother Jones Magazine) after my obsession with MoJo started early last year, and her tweets have only gotten better. She tweets a lot of what’s coming out of MoJo’s website and blogs, but she also tweets intelligently about a wide variety of topics: movies, politics, environmental issues, etc. She pulls out the occasional funny tweet, and she’s a Mom with a capital “M” and proud of it. Bonus: she retweets often and hilariously.

  5. Lauren BansLauren Bans
    I’ve blogged about her before, but Lauren Bans, writer and associate editor at GQ, is a hysterical Twitter personality even if you’re not into journalism. When she spoke at Newhouse, she talked about her highly curated Twitter account (she deletes tweets if they don’t get immediate feedback), and how she gets antsy if she hasn’t tweeted in more than three hours.

  6. Dana StevensDana Stevens
    OK, I will admit that Dana Stevens is mainly on this list because I love reading her reviews on Slate (she’s their movie critic), but she also posts a lot of reviews/movie-related tweets on her Twitter account. Yes, a LOT of her feed is @-replies, but she’s usually engaging followers in a conversation about movies. When she does actually tweet though, it’s worth the wait.

  7. Margaret SullivanMargaret Sullivan
    Margaret Sullivan is a must-follow simply because she’s the public editor at the New York Times. Her account is a great window into the innerworkings of the Times newsroom, and her blogs are thoughtful and insightful.

Said to Lady Journos: sad but true

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This week, a tumblr page (less than a month old) called “Said to Lady Journos” came to the attention of the mainstream blogosphere. Buzzfeed wrote about it. Poynter and HuffPo wrote about it. And, in the process, it’s gained a TON of followers. Why? Probably because it’s so true, and so relatable. Because so many female journalists can connect with the comments (mostly sexist) submitted to the curator of the site.

The comments on the site come from both coworkers and sources. Here are a few examples:

  • “What’s a pretty girl like you doing getting involved in politics?” — Local Republican candidate to female beat reporter after being questioned about a contentious redevelopment site
  • “I’m going to talk slowly so you get this right, honey.” — Small-town Arkansas mayor to a general assignment reporter writing about a new development project
  • “Oh, did someone say you could do your homework up here?” — Football announcer in the press box, to a sports reporter laying out her stat sheets and notebook
  • “You’re pretty cute for a reporter. You can put that in your story.” — A guard at a gated community, to a female reporter

Like the headline of the Poytner story says, this tumblr is “depressingly relatable.” I’m happy that, since I’m very early in my career, nothing like this has happened to me yet, but I can unfortunately predict that it’ll only be a matter of time.

The spread of this site has created a lot of buzz about the idea of sexism in work environments (not just journalism-related ones!), and Columbia Journalism Review put together a list detailing how to deal with harassment on the job (mainly for journalists, but applicable to many professions):

  • Drop Him. Find a different source.
  • Call him out. Journalists especially are armed with wonderful vocabularies with which they can fight back.
  • Go over his head. Talk to his supervisor if the problems persist.
  • Keep a diary. Creating a paper trail can benefit you in the long run if you decide you want to report him later on.
  • Carefully spread the word. If you’re being harassed by a coworker, he’s probably also harassed others.
  • Forge allies. Confiding in other women (and men! The non-creepers can be a big help) can be great friends in these types of situations.

Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and submit to Said to Lady Journos, says Friedman in the CJR piece. BUT, the best part of being a female journalist despite these antiquated comments? You can write exactly what these jerks said, because you’ll just be doing your job.

Lauren Bans of GQ speaks at Newhouse

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The magazine department at my school (the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University) puts on a speaker series every semester, and this spring they’re featuring three big-name speakers: Lauren Bans, associate editor at GQ Magazine; Keija Minor, editor-in-chief at Brides Magazine; and Matt Stopera, co-founder of Buzzfeed.

Bans has worked in a number of places including The Daily (RIP), Slate’s Double X Blog and now GQ. Today, she came and spoke to a room of nearly 150 students about writing, editing, interviewing and working in the mag industry. To put it simply, she was awesome.LaurenBansPoster_final

Bans, known for her absolutely hilarious tweets, was honest and smart. She’s written some amazing pieces, like Inside Patriot Camp. It was refreshing to know that someone who is so talented, went to an Ivy League university (Brown) and lives/works in New York city can be that down to earth.

Over the course of her talk, which was mediated by Professor Harriet Brown (who’s also a writer/editor herself), Bans delved into a number of topics including:

  • There’s no such thing as “over reporting.”
  • Staffers at GQ fist bump when they greet each other in the morning.
  • Thinking visually for iPad and other interactive magazine platforms.
  • Having interns transcribe her interviews, and forgetting to turn off the recorder when she pees.
  • Pitching stories and angling them to fit a particular audience.
  • How masochistic it is to read the online comments on your own stories.
  • How GQ is a “writer’s magazine.”
  • The best types of interviews: candid.
  • How underrated “just being nice” is when you’re conducting interviews

Most of all though, Lauren Bans is a sort of paradox. She’s a woman working a Gentleman’s Quarterly.

Even though she works at a men’s magazine, Bans is a feminist, but not just any feminist; she’s a “fucking feminist.” Brown, laughing, thanked her for her willingness to use the dreaded “f word.”

A tweet from my classmate, Dee Lockett:

It was reassuring to hear Bans talk about her politics, how sometimes she has to be the girl to tell all the office “bros” no if they’ve gone too far. She said she hates being that woman, but knows that it has to be done sometimes.

It was, however, annoying to hear some of the students in the audience ask her about her feminism. When one male student asked her this question (paraphrased):
Student: “So, how do you balance ‘being nice’ with being a feminist?”
Bans, looks at him: “Well, I don’t really see the two as mutually exclusive.”

She recovered quickly, and gave him a thoughtful, polite answer, which is more than I probably would have done in that situation.

It’s sad to say that we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where “feminists” are seen as bra-burning, man-hating she-devils. What happened to feminists simply being proponents of women’s rights? I proudly call myself a feminist, and I hope that some day, most people in our society don’t look down upon that. I really commend Lauren Bans for really putting it all out there, especially as a woman who has to “bro out” to be considered one of the guys working where she does.

Online bylines: still more male than female

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As Poynter reported on Feb. 22, new media is no better than “old media” in terms of bylines: men’s bylines outnumbered women’s by nearly a 3:1 margin.

Conducted by the Women’s Media Center, the 2013 study says that there is a “crisis of representation in the media”:
“We live in a racially and ethnically diverse nation that is 51% female, but the news media itself remains staggeringly limited to a single demographic.”

Here are two of the more journalism-geared findings from the report:

  • “By a nearly 3 to 1 margin, male front-page bylines at top newspapers outnumbered female bylines in coverage of the 2012 presidential election. Men were also far more likely to be quoted than women in newspapers, television and public radio.”
  • “As newspaper employment continues to tumble, so does the number of women in key jobs.”

And some good news:

  • “The percentage of women who are television news directors edged up, reaching 30 percent for the first time.”

Honestly, these stats were pretty surprising to me. Many, if not most, of my professors at Newhouse are female. My MNO (magazine, newspaper and online journalism) contingent is two-thirds female. I expected the real world, especially online-only media outlets, to be the same.

I understand that often still it’s men running the show, but I didn’t expect there to be such a huge disparity in the number of “male bylines” versus female ones on the Web. I hope that as my generation begins to enter the new media landscape, we can also help to shape it by leveling the ground between men and women.

The full WMC report can be read here.

Male journalists still making more money than women

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FOLIO just published the results of their annual survey of magazine editorial salaries, and the results are not entirely surprising: male editors are still making more money than their female counterparts.

Also unsurprising: editors based in the Northeast tend to have the highest salaries. Higher cost of living and all that.

Interestingly, most consumer publication editor salaries have stayed pretty consistent since 2008 with only a few minor fluctuations that are probably pretty normal, despite many in the industry exuding feelings of doom about their future jobs.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the survey is the growth in both male and female mean salaries in the last five years. While men’s salaries only grew about 11 percent ($74,000 to $84,900), women’s grew a whopping 23.52 percent from $61,800 to $76,300. This growth is promising for women hoping to break into the magazine industry in the next couple of years (like me). If the growth continues, it’s looks likely that women’s salaries will be on par with men’s soon, and might even surpass them.

See the comparative growth below:

Screen Shot 2013-02-27 at 4.14.36 PM Screen Shot 2013-03-03 at 2.15.18 PM

And two more interesting lady-journo news stories from the past couple of days:

  • GQ writer Marin Cogan breaks down the difficulties of being a female journalist in Washington, playing off the essentially false depiction of the female reporters on the Netflix show House of Cards. Kate Mara’s portrayal of young reporter on the Hill with a disregard for ethics (she ends up sleeping with a congressman played by Kevin Spacey) has been stewing in my mind since I watched the show a couple of weeks ago. This piece says everything I would have tried to, with a lot more first-hand knowledge and experience than I have.
  • After an unexpected pregnancy, a 25-year-old Daily Iowan photographer documents her journey toward giving up her baby for adoption. It’s an effective human interest piece, made more powerful by the fact that the photographer, Callie Mitchell, took most of the photos herself. “My baby, not my child,” is a very real piece that details a rarely discussed but happens-more-than-you-think journey.

Sexism at The Oscars

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I already knew that Seth MacFarlane was an jerk.

Even though he’s created one of my least favorite shows in recent memory (sorry if there’s any Family Guy fans out there, but diabolical babies and talking dogs aren’t really my thing), I was willing to give him a chance. Nothing could be worse than the Anne Hathaway/James Franco debacle of 2011, right? RIGHT?!

Wrong.

Instating McFarlane as host seems to have been the Oscars’ producers way to appeal to a younger demographic, one that would also overwhelmingly appeal to young men based on McFarlane’s past work: Family Guy and raunchy talking-bear comedy Ted. The show’s viewership has increased in recent years (after hitting an all-time low in 2008), with a 20 percent increase in 18-to-34-year-olds, (its highest number since 2007), and hiring McFarlane to host seemed to be their solution to continuing that trend.

Despite a ratings success, however, the overall show was tasteless, and unnecessarily took jabs at women. Here’s why:

1. The Boob Song and William Shatner
OK, Oscars. I get that you’re trying to be all self-reflective and acknowledge that McFarlane was a terrible choice for a host before critics could bash you in their reviews, but there are plenty of other ways to do that. Boobs are funny, right? Because women have boobs and that’s all they’re good for, right? Hilarious. Even bringing in “future William Shatner” to lambaste McFarlane’s hosting couldn’t save the show. I get that his jokes are lowbrow, but if you’re going to spend the entire first 20 minutes of the show bashing him, why ask him to do this job in the first place? As the New York Times’ media/pop culture critic David Carr put it, it’s a little too “meta” to play off your own bad reviews before you’ve even been poorly reviewed:

One sort-of-OK thing to come of this segment? Jennifer Lawrence’s reaction, even though it was pre-recorded.

2. The Chris Brown/Rihanna joke
“Django [Unchained] is a movie where a woman is subjected to violence or, as we call it, a Chris Brown and Rihanna date movie.”
Jokes about domestic abuse aren’t EVER funny. Tarantino said he used Django Unchained to bring about a modern conversation about slavery and violence in the Antebellum South and race relations today, NPR reported Monday. This is a conversation that logically extends to violence against the women, and humans in general, throughout the film. You don’t joke about rape.

3. Apparently Jennifer Aniston is a stripper
“Of our next two presenters, at least one is honest about being a former exotic dancer,” said McFarlane. Silence followed.
Just because her co-presenter Channing Tatum was actually a stripper before coming to Hollywood, doesn’t mean that Jennifer Aniston is too. Just because she’s beautiful, doesn’t mean she stripped her way into an acting career.

4. Quvenzahné Wallis is ONLY 9 years old.
Yes, George Clooney dates younger women. That’s fine. McFarlane’s joke highlighted that Wallis has about 16 more years before she can start dating Clooney, emphasizing how young she is. Clearly a joke, but insulting nonetheless. Plus, The Onion’s disgustingly offensive tweet on the subject didn’t help.

5. Women are stubborn
According to McFarlane, Jessica Chastain’s character in Zero Dark Thirty is an example of “a woman’s innate ability to never let anything go.” Yes, women are nags, men don’t stop to ask for directions. Let’s perpetuate antiquated stereotypes.

6. “The flu”
Much like domestic violence, I’d say eating disorders (primarily seen as a “female disease,” though that’s changed in recent years) are usually pretty off limits in the realm of mainstream humor. That didn’t stop McFarlane though, because starving yourself is clearly a healthy and progressive way to fit into that fabulous dress: “And those of you who gave yourselves the flu two weeks ago to ‘get there’? It paid off.”

7. Salma Hayek is hot
“We have no idea what they’re [Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem] saying but we don’t care because they’re so attractive.”
Because Salma Hayek is SO HOT, that’s the only reason we need to make an attempt at understanding her English, which can be muffled at times by her accent. As Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic points out, these instances exemplify why McFarlane’s humor was so meaningless and empty: “Humor, after all, can be an incredible weapon for social progress, but it can also be regressive: The more we pass off old stereotypes, rooted in hate, as normal … the longer those stereotypes, and their ability to harm people, will be in place.”

Despite McFarlane’s banal humor, there were some powerhouse moments for women this year. The live musical performances by Adele and Shirley Bassey after a lackluster “50 years of Bond” montage; a win for Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence (their speeches were certainly highlights, as was Lawrence’s fall/recovery on her way to the stage); Catherine Zeta-Jones’ ability to STILL look amazing while performing numbers from the now decade-old Chicago; the appearance of FLOTUS, though it may have been slightly misplaced.

So why were women the butt of so many jokes at the Oscars this year? Slate’s Dana Steven’s summed it up better than I ever could: “Has Jennifer Lawrence ever made a savvier career move than tripping over her pale-pink giant-skirted brocade gown on the way to the podium, then making it back to her feet on her own, waving off the proffered help of both Bradley Cooper and Hugh Jackman? No wonder Seth McFarlane’s worried. We’re one reproductive-technology breakthrough away from not needing men at the Oscars at all.”

This year’s Oscars, it seems, were the beginning of the end for men in show business, with Seth McFarlane as the first casualty. Bring back Tina and Amy.