Women's eNews: Working to achieve gender balance in the media

March 15, 2006 by

Fashion, celebrity gossip and fad diets need not apply.

Women’s eNews doesn’t necessarily cater to the average women’s magazine reader, according to Rita Henley Jensen, editor in chief and founder. Instead, the website, independent in 2002, aims to keep the editors, opinion makers and leaders of the community informed.

“We provide women, and those who care about women, basic information they need to advocate for themselves, build communities,” Jensen said.

From battling problems of women not being quoted in stories that affected them to issues of women simply not being covered by the mainstream media, Jensen has devoted her professional career to changing the way stories involving women’s interests are covered.

Born out of a 1996 roundtable discussion hosted by Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), Women’s eNews is an Internet-based non-profit news service that employs mostly freelancers, some of whom are men, to cover issues ranging from international events to sports to culture. The site also boasts two editorial cartoonists; one, Ann Telnaes, has won a Pulitzer for her work.

“Feminism was a dirty word,” Jensen said of the mid-nineties. “Women’s issues weren’t being adequately covered.”

The Women’s eNews staff estimates that about three million readers scan the seven to eight stories they post a week. Though the service charges for reprinting their stories, online subscriptions are free, and it subsists primarily on donations.

When the service began, Women’s eNews did not cover international stories, Jensen said. But a rise in international readership was “too compelling” to ignore. Women’s eNews now has a series called Africa’s Rising Leaders, which highlights female leaders in post-colonial Africa.

Jensen says the current movement toward quality for women in government “global and unstoppable.”

“There’s been a real innovation of leadership in the area of democracy,” she said, referring to Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, among others.

In April 2003, Women’s eNews launched an Arabic language version of the site in response to a high number of hits from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others, and a United Nations report that tagged a “women’s empowerment” deficit in the Middle East.

Jensen said in the future she’d also like to add a Spanish language version.

She expressed the hope that one day Women’s eNews will become unnecessary, that equality in the press will one day be achieved.

“Ideally, I’m a little like a dentist that’s promoting fluoride,” Jensen said.

And if the “media gender gap” is bridged sometime in the future?

“We’ll shut [the site] down when the Supreme Court has five female members,” she said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

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Dissatisfied with media coverage, Congressperson resorts to blogging

November 3, 2005 by

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) embraced the idea of starting his own blog because his conservative outlook is often misrepresented by mainstream media outlets, according to Tancredo’s communications director Will Adams.

The plan was to cut out the middle man – i.e. the mainstream press – and speak directly to the people.

Almost two years later, Tancredo’s website boasts two separate blogs: a general blog, which allows readers to post their own responses and questions, and Reform Now, which focuses on immigration reform.

Reform Now, launched in September 2005, doesn’t allow readers to post their responses, but takes a significantly different tone from many politicians’ blogs, Adams said. Adams describes the Border Bluff of the Day, a segment that features a quote or statement from an opponent and then refutes it, as “smart-aleck.”

Because Tancredo’s blogs are based in his official government website, the responses on his general blog must be closely monitored to prevent posting of obscene and offensive content. But having someone assigned to reviewing responses is “draining,” according to Adams.

Adams says this is one of the reasons that other politicians have hesitated to create blogs of their own.

However, Adams says that the Republican Party leadership is taking blogs more seriously.

“When you get a lot of politicians seeing people pay attention, you start to see competition for interesting content,” he said.

Adams cited Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) as an example. Hastert started his own blog, titled “Speaker’s Journal” at the end of October. Entries so far have focused on a variety of issues, including economics, the War on Terror and online freedom of speech.

Ultimately, the nature of a blog’s content differentiates between “who’s serious versus who’s just advertising [themselves],” Adams said.

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