Women and the Future of News

Suggested Speakers

Mash metrics, public affairs and business purpose with women, the most underengaged consumers. @Suffragist #ona17 #womennews

Session Description

Women and the Future of News looks at model efforts to create and capture audiences of women for news. Moderated by the New York Times’s Marie Tessier, author of “Suffragist: Women, the Web and the Future of Democracy,” from MIT Press, forthcoming 2017. Guests will include leaders of women’s enclave news communities that combine the metrics and the civic and business purposes of digital news to raise women’s voices in public affairs. Two examples: Jessica Grose, executive editor of Lenny Letter, a project of Lena Dunham, Jennifer Konner, and Hearst; and Qimmah Saafir, entrepreneur and editor in chief of Hannah Magazine, a startup publication exploring the many facets of black women’s lives. The session will start with an overview of women’s historic underengagement with news, look at the historic dearth of women’s voices in media, where women comprise just more than a third of reporters and editors, show that women are the most lucrative consumers, and demonstrate that women’s voices are stuck at one-third of the voices in news comments worldwide. Enclave communities are in development in news organizations, and offer a different paradigm for conversations of public affairs. Other possibilities for guests are editors of Rookie or Imaeyen Ibanga of NBCBLK. Sydette Harry of the Coral Project is also an authority on black women’s communities online. Jessica Grose is asking Lena Dunham if she’d like to participate.

How does your submission contribute to the diversity of the conference?

The session contributes to the diversity of the conference by pushing boundaries and expectations about women news consumers, in a field where just over a third of reporters, editors and producers are women. The session will address intersectional feminist issues with journalists of color and allot half of the discussion time to non-white audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Also, the session will review facts about the dearth of women's voices online, where men still have the vast majority of front page bylines and even write the majority of stories about reproductive rights. Women are outnumbered in news comments 3:1 worldwide, data show, and that means digital publications are failing with their most lucrative consumers.

What will your audience have gained by the time your session is over?