Women's place at the Fourth Estate: Constraints on voice, text, and topic

Abstract

In this paper I examine the position of women as news reporters and editors – as journalistic authors and animators – in relation to their male counterparts, and consider changes in news coverage as their numbers increased in the newsroom over the past 50 years. I compare profession-internal guidelines which encapsulate gender ideologies pervasive in the larger culture – starting with a popular 1959 career guide – alongside journalistic genre forms, using as specific examples ‘women's pages’ and ‘page one’ in the New York Times. The change from a backgrounded position on the ‘women's pages’ to greater visibility in more prestigeful news contexts is indexed through macropragmatic factors such as byline (who is entitled to be recognized by name) and story topic (what counts as salient in the journalist's world), both of which can be viewed in terms of their nonreferential index value within the community of journalists. Profession-internal critiques suggest that despite increased opportunities for women over time, the place of women at the Fourth Estate is still limited – and the discourse-level evidence supports that, affording a potential explanation for more global gender disparities in news media coverage.