Female editor claims online media to be dominated by men
Women have made huge leaps forward in the workplace over the past 50 years, with more now in boardrooms and on equal wages than ever before. But as the media moves to an online environment, will that trend reverse itself once again, and lead to a dominance of males?
Anne Spackman is an important person, being editor of Times Online, the web presence of The Times newspaper. And as you may have guessed already from the name, she is a woman. But that doesn’t stop her thinking that online news will soon become wholly dominated by men, mainly because journalists increasingly need technical skills.
She told Gemima Kiss of the Guardian:
“People who get excited about technology are, on the whole, blokes,”
“Being excited about technology is quite a useful thing because never mind how much training you get, if you are someone that spends time experimenting, making videos and exploring the blogosphere you have a knowledge base that’s really valuable.”
“If I look at the younger people we employ, that’s more something that men do.”
Spackman had earlier told the Society of Editors conference that she could see how men would soon come to dominate the medium of online news reporting:
“What we need now is a level of journalistic creativity combined with real technical skills, and that’s very different from journalists like me that started doing reports from the Women’s Institute shows. We’ll see less of those people driven to journalism through their curiosity about other people’s lives, and it will be those people at the junction between editorial and technology that will have the exceptional value.”
“The vast majority of those are men, so as a result there will be an industry more full of men than there are now. And I can’t believe it’s me that’s saying that.”
So is this true? Are young women who are looking at a career in the media more likely to veer towards the traditional forms of print newspapers rather than instant online reporting? And even if that is the case, is it because women are less tech savvy than men?
Anne Spackman clearly knows her stuff, as they don’t employ just anyone to be the editor of the Times Online, but even she admits to being more of a technophobe than her teenage son. When she landed the job 15 months ago and went home to tell him the good news, his response was: “You? You don’t even know when to double click.”
Online media is evolving fast, and people working in the industry have to learn to evolve with it. I didn’t really think gender would ever be an issue online, where face to face meetings are kept to a minimum, and a certain level of anonymity is possible, but it seems there is still a battle of the sexes raging.
The battleground this time is technology, the one thing you need some knowledge of to be an online journalist, apart of course from just an ounce of talent.
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