GELF “Overlooked Women In Media” Panel, September ’09 (VIDEO)

Rachel: I want to flip that, and ask if the openness of social media and the Internet, and the ability to get out there and create a brand for yourself on Twitter and social platforms is something to combat those feelings, because it’s so inviting, and the barrier entry is so low and you can see there are these ready-made examples that show how easy it is. So has social media and the ease of the Internet made it easier for women to get the hell out there?

Glynnis: (to Rachel) I’m only comparing the two of us because we work together, but when we started going on Twitter four months ago, my Facebook privacy settings are all set and Rachel’s page is all open and she has something like 8,000 Twitter followers so that’s a built-in audience that you carry personally in the media world. Ana Marie Cox has a million Twitter followers which means if she retweets a link of yours its now gone to an audience of one million people. That’s a lot of power, but “publicly branding,” as you phrase it, comes easier to some people…I don’t like to check-in on Foursquare and let people know where I am, I don’t tend to Twitter out my thoughts, but I am dependent on Twitter. I use Twitter in the morning, almost at this point for news, but I’m not somebody that likes to share myself as “Glynnis MacNicol, the brand” in a public sphere. I would say that at this point that might be hindering slightly, because when we launched the site Rachel had a built-in audience of 8,000 people, so when we were doing stuff and sending out links and trying to build up the site…that’s a built-in audience they are carrying with them, built on a personal brand they’ve developed. So I think it can be difficult, it’s been difficult for me and it’s not something I’ve embraced. Which arguably is going to my detriment, because when I do stuff I’m dependent on other people to promote it for me. And that makes me less attractive as a media person in certain spheres. David Carr, a New York Times media reporter, has reinvented himself on Twitter. Mark Knoller is the CBS radio political correspondent has 10,000 Twitter followers and has reinvented his career by developing a following on Twitter. So it’s a powerful tool and I think it’s more difficult for women to brand themselves in these spheres. I don’t know if I’m right about that or if I’m speaking personally but its definitely something I’ve been very much aware these last few months.

Rachel: I will say this about Twitter: I’ve had numerous people tell me I’d get more followers if I put a picture of myself up (as my icon) because then people would know I was a girl.

Jess: In terms of women being taken more seriously, I think (branding yourself on social media) is not necessary. Because I think these 140 word chunks aren’t necessarily the best way: not everyone can be clever and smart in that sort of limited range. Some people are great at it: I know at Slate John Dickerson is fantastic at it, and he’s got the right mix of personal and political insights. But again if the problem is getting people to take you seriously, the people who get the most followers like Ana Marie Cox, do share a bit of personal information. And it certainly gets you out there more, but perhaps not in the way that you want.

Rachel: Alexandra Leo, the comedy editor of The Huffington Post, recently did a list of the top 50 funny comedians on Twitter and there were like four or five women. And this is in comedy, where you are supposed to be funny and they were like Sarah Silverman, Joy Behar, whereas other NY UCB-scene comics with lower followings but still emerging comics were (unintelligable?). 45 spots there is a lot of freedom, five spots for women a little less so. And I saw Alex at a party and she said she tried, but so many female comedians she’d love to see on Twitter aren’t on Twitter, aren’t using that forum. So there’s two parts to that: It’s not just the serious people, and the other part is the self-selecting, showing up part.

Glynnis: But I don’t show up (on Twitter)…I don’t love it and that’s not going to change, it’s got nothing to do with not showing up, I don’t like it.

Anna: I don’t want to say that I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter, I have a like-hate relationship with it. I look at it every three weeks, I might say some stuff and then I can’t deal with it, then I’ll come back three weeks later. And I think a lot of it is that a lot of the people I (?) follow on Twitter are braggarts and it’s kind of gross to watch them. “Ah I just got back from a really hard yoga session” or they had dinner at this place or this place…and this is probably what goes on on Facebook, people make fun of Facebook updates for the same reason. I just don’t think I have something interesting to say all the fucking time, I just don’t, and I don’t think anyone else does. I have to feel really engaged in something (like Obama’s speech) to feel that I need to share it, whether it’s with 30 people or a million people. I think I have maybe 400 followers, not that many, but a lot of it seems like narcissism and people bragging about what they’ve done and stuff you don’t really care about but it seems they want you to know that they work out lot or go to fancy restaurants or hang out with famous people. And I think that has ruined Twitter for me, I understand that it is a very very very very powerful thing and when I’m in moods when I’m into it and I’m following people and I’m kind of getting off, so to speak, on what they’re saying, I get it. It’s just exhausting.

Glynnis: I have to argue the flip side of that, because when I wake up in the morning I’m dependent on Twitter. I follow a lot of media people so my morning Twitter feed is a lot better than CNN, because I’m getting the news from the people reporting it. Sometimes it feels like I’m traveling with the president from the reporters I follow…it’s weird that this information is accessible and public…but I think it has a lot to do with the people you follow, the people I follow are very heavy in media so its extremely useful to me in my job, because when I get up in the morning I will literally scroll through to see what happened over the night, and it’s like an overnight news feed with all these links up. I follow Ann Curry who gets up at 3:30 for her job and will Twitter breaking news, so by the time I get out of bed 5 minutes later I have this comprehensive overview. And of course thrown in there is Jake Tapper Twittering about his kid being potty-trained and his next Tweet is breaking news, so I tend to mentally filter it out, but I find it the most useful thing for me right now. RSS feeds, CNN, breaking news: its superior to any of that. So that’s my argument against the “I went and got a massage” (tweets). Obviously that’s in there too, I have those people, but I think it has a lot to do with who you follow, and is very useful to me as a news source.

Caroline: I started using Twitter very early on and pretty much no one was reading it, it was just a couple of people I knew with whom i was friends with. So it was very “Oh my goodness it’s snowing outside” or “Oh I just went running,” and it definitely had nothing to do with my job. And eventually I became aware of the fact that people were actually reading it, and it kind of creeped me out a little bit at first and for a short time made the entire thing private. But what I realized is that its great for if you are someone who is regularly writing stories or columns and you want people to keep following. I think it absolutely helps to have them know a little bit about you, and be able to follow from that perspective. I found the things that get the most responses are the things that are personal but not excessively personal. I am very careful about not posting anything too personal, because I don’t like it when it affects or loops in someone around me that may not be aware of the fact that you are posting about them. Also I’d say I’m a pretty private person but the two tweets I’ve posted in the past month that have gotten the most “at” replies has been a) My discovery that Starbucks is once again serving Pumpkin Spice lattes and b) I went to a running store and got fitted for a new pair of shoes, and they scanned my feet with this info-red thing. And that one got replies from someone who actually owned a running store in another state who was asking what my impression of the shoes I’d gotten and wanted feedback. So things that are personal but relatable, telling people something about your life that aren’t necessarily about restaurants you’re going to, or including who you’re doing (something I avoid very much). There’s definitely a balance to opening up a little bit about you and it being supplemental to your writing. For example, I’ll sometimes link to a story I write the day after, and it’s something a lot of people have written about, and I’ll say “Hey what do you think about this?” because I wanted feedback, I wanted to hear what people said. So I think keeping up the conversation is good to. But its an art, and everyone wants to figure out how to make Twitter work best for them, so I definitely understand why some people don’t want to.

Rachel: I expected everyone to say that social media has made it easier for women to get their voice out and brand themselves, so I was a little surprised by those answers. Twitter and Tumblr and all these places have such a low barrier of entry that they’ve made it very easy -if you’re smart, if you’re credible, if you’re fast-reporting (which is always biggest) – to enter the conversation and to do good work and to get noticed. I always give advice that people should get on Twitter and different platforms, and that’s my perspective so that was very interesting. I want to ask a final question: We’ve established there is a problem: that there are barriers from without and there are barriers from within, so we do nothing if we do not ask how to make it better. How do we address, combat, and soar above all those impediments?

Glynnis: I think its the responsibility of the people in the industry to pull others along with them, I think that’s the most basic solution. I was just thinking that covering the elections and conventions last year was a very good lesson (in being new to this very hardcore scene) in who was willing to help, and who was really not willing to lend a hand. And at the risk of sounding name-droppy, both Rachel and I found that Peggy Noonan was above and beyond willing to sort of lend a helping hand, to be encouraging and step out, which I have to tell you was more unusual because she was a woman than because of how successful she was. It’s been my experience that in those circles men are much more willing to lend a helping hand and provide the extra support than woman at that level of success are. So being on the receiving end of that from Peggy Noonan made a real impression, she was just so warm and helpful and welcoming, and it struck me because it felt very unusual. It was not a common occurrence for a woman at that level to reach that far down to lend a helping hand.

Anna: When you’re talking about Peggy Noonan, I think a lot of women need to be disabused of the notion that (even if it’s true) there are only enough spots for them, because they’ll stop looking at other women as competition the same way, often times, women will see each other as competition for male attention. I think we need to stop looking at each other as threats even if in reality there are only so many spots at the top for women. I don’t want to regard fellow females as threats: I think that there is room for everybody. I think we can make room for everybody. But beyond that, what to do about being taken seriously in the media? I don’t have any grand master plan, I think you just keep complaining about it, over and over and over again. I do believe that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so I think you just keep pointing it out all the time. People might get annoyed with you and say “Shut up we know this already.” Just keep doing it over and over and over again. I do think it makes a difference Rachel, I really do, and I think you do that a lot and its good. But I don’t think you should be intimidated out of giving out(?) I think you should always point that kind of stuff out and even when things seem a little more level, keep doing it.

Caroline: My opinion is that you’ve got to work with a few notches. There have been a lot of opportunities when I could have played the gender card and I could have said this is not fair and you’re singling me out because I’m a woman and I didnt because I almost wanted to save up those points. There was a very, very well publicized incident in tech journalism when Sarah Lacey was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg on stage at the South by Southwest conference in 2008 and she kind of had a meltdown on stage because the audience was giving her a really frickin’ hard time. Was it sexist? Yes I think so. I think they were giving her a hard time because she wasn’t asking the questions they wanted her to ask, granted there are other tech journalists like Kara Swisher that i do not think would have gotten that kind of response because they would have known the audience better and known what they were going for, but Sarah was absolutely getting a bit of an unfair reaction. That said, she was doing interviews after that where she definitely was very vocal about the fact that she was singled out because she was a female, that there are not that many female tech journalists, and I don’t think she should have played that card. I think yes the audience was giving her a hard time, but yes she screwed up too. I think she should have owned up to that, and I think that as a result of that- I have a lot of respect for Sarah for being a very high-profile woman working with a lot of very high-profile people in Silicon Valley- but I think that was not the right impression of her to give because it looked like she was not owning up to her errors, like she was asking for forgiveness because she was a woman. So I did not agree with her reaction on that and I think in general sometimes, especially in a situation where you could be at fault, there will be bigger situations in which you are rightfully bringing up the fact that hey, this is not fair to women in media. And sometimes I think you’re going to have to let those little incidents go by in order for those bigger situations to really have the gravity and have the effect from you.

Anna: I want to respond to that: I think you’re talking about personal career stuff and I agree with you in that sense, I think there are many instances in which we can complain about our treatment and rightfully point to sexism, racism, etc. That’s not what I was saying. What I’m saying is that when looking at the media as a critic and pointing that stuff out over and over and over I think that it’s very powerful. I don’t think it does anyone any good to do that repeatedly in their own personal career. That should be used sparingly and in the case that you just mentioned, she messed up, you should take personal responsibility before you start going elsewhere. But definitely I think as a media critic (to Rachel) and that’s why I was referring to you, I think the stuff that we do on our site people get very angry at us “We know this already, there aren’t enough models of color” we constantly get posts about fashion history etc, etc and people complain and complain and complain. But I know its probably doing some good if people start to complain, it means we’re beating a dead horse.

Jess: I don’t know how much I can add to what was already said, I can only speak to my personal career and I completely agree with what Glynnis said and I owe much to Anna too, in encouraging me to write specifically about politics which has always been an interest of mine but as Rachel said earlier I felt like I didn’t know enough to speak on: I didn’t know the names…people could bring up “Bill H.R. 784” and I was walking into that level so I thought that I shouldn’t even bother even speaking on it. So Anna and to another degree my current bosses have always been incredibly encouraging to learn more about and to write on it so I think women mentoring other women has been the most helpful thing to me and having a thick skin and letting most things roll off and continuing to try…because it is pretty tough and you do have to roll with the punches.

Rachel: We’re going to open the floor to questions but before we do, in line with what Glynnis said about women in the profession giving a push to other women, I asked each of them to come with a recommendation of other women in media that they think is worth attention and the spotlight. I did a whole post on it today so you can go to Gelf and read the interview with all of us with all 50 people listed.

Jess: I found this question hard because it was either people I know that other people don’t know so I don’t know to what degree this person is known or unknown, there’s a woman who writes for New York Times Magazine, her name is Rebecca Skloot and she’s a fantastic science writer and I think she’s really smart. I don’t understand your level of “known-ness” so you probably know who she is: she’s really great, really smart, I think her pieces are always really interesting and she writes for Double-X sometimes too. So Rebecca Skloot is great.

Caroline: Again I was sort of like “How many people know about this,” but I think that Sarah Haskins on CurrentTV is one of the funniest and most provocative women in the media out there. She does this series where she makes fun of advertising initiatives, it’s called “Target Women” and its women-geared advertising campaigns that she absolutely rips apart. But she doesn’t get moralizing or morally offended by it, she just makes fun of it and makes it look completely stupid and I think it’s effective in the same way that something like The Daily Show is, sometimes it takes just really irreverent humor to expose something for what it is.

Anna: Caroline stole one of my ladies, I also think Sarah Haskins might be better than I really think she is because whenever she puts up a new video we’ll embed it, all these other female blogs embed it, I think she’s got a screenwriting deal…she’s doing okay. The woman I’m going to mention has been writing for me, has written for Double-X, her name is Latoya Peterson, I think she’s fantastic. She’s 23 years old, that’s the thing that really blows my mind, she’s 23-years old and she’s so self-possessed, both in person and in her writing and she’s so devoted to researching and backing up the posts that she does. She runs a blog called Racialicious and I believe the title is “The Intersection of Pop Culture and Race” but it’s a lot more than that and the stuff she writes for us sometimes has to do with race, sometimes with, you know, a show on HBO but I think she’s a star…I think she’s going to be a star. And as few female writers that there are that are brand names, there are even fewer black female writers that are brand names and I’m talking about journalists, non-fiction writers. And I think that she’s fantastic and I think she will be a star.

Glynnis: The woman who popped into my head when you said that was Megan McArdle who blogs business at The Atlantic, who I’m not sure is overlooked, but as a strong female business writer I’d love to see get a more mainstream platform or be slightly more of a household name because she’s just so smart and a powerhouse in an industry that’s just lacking in a female voice.

Rachel: Since Anna mentioned a woman of color I will mention Danielle Belton who does the blog called The Black Snob and she has no shortage of opinions at all. And I recruited her at The Huffington Post once, and I think she’s fantastic. Lets have a couple questions.

Riva Richmond: My name is Riva Richmond and I’m a writer, freelance tech writer at The Times and Wall Street Journal. I recently saw on Twitter that male journalists have three times as many followers as women journalists on Twitter. And it made me wonder what that is about, what you might think oh that, and whether there is some way in which women aren’t seen as having the same credibility as men journalists. I have to say I haven’t really felt that in my career so much, but I thought that was a pretty astounding statistic.

Caroline: One thing I noticed when Gelf did their interviews with us, I mentioned it in mine (and again, I’m a tech journalist so I’m not sure if this applies to other fields of journalism but I assume it does) is that it’s much much easier for a woman to stand out if she’s on camera all the time. I have female colleagues, other women in the industry who do tech journalism or punditry, if they go on camera all the time they’re going to have way more followers than even the guys. But I think about my colleagues, and again our newsroom is pretty much divided down the middle, but the male reporters seem more likely to tweet, and are more assertive about publicly promoting their Twitter accounts. I don’t know if its a self-promotion issue or if some of the women personality-wise don’t want to be involved but I hadn’t heard that statistic before, that’s very interesting.

Audience Member: I’d be curious to hear you guys talk about Maureen Dowd. I know what happened with Hillary, and I’d be curious to hear what everyone has to say.

Rachel: My feeling on Maureen Dowd is that she frustrates the hell out of me because when she’s good she’s so good but I’ll read Frank Rich and he’s got a really dense column with a lot of links and clearly a lot of thought has gone into it and I’ll read Maureen Dowd and she’ll be more interested in these bon mot columns or like calling Obama Bambi or making some facile comparison and it drives me really bonkers. I stopped reading her during elections because she drove me crazy.

Glynnis: At two separate jobs I’ve been advised to stop writing so much about Maureen Dowd because she irritates the hell out of me and she irritates me in a way that’s like a train-wreck and I still read the column. Although this past week’s column, I literally only got through the first three paragraphs barely. She frustrates me on so many levels, she’s clearly so smart and so talented with words…750 words is not a lot of space to get a very smart point across. And the way she chooses to use that, and how smart she is, I find insulting not just to myself but what she could be doing. Like Rachel said, every once in awhile she knocks one out of the park and it even makes me angrier because I want her to be that good all the time. Particularly during the campaign she could have offered so much insight into what was going on and didn’t. She exaggerated some sort of sweeping generalizations and her inability to be supportive of powerful women I find very challenging to read and I think she is a real product of her time and upbringing to the point where I feel like she’s not bringing anything to the conversation except frustration and I would love to see The New York Times gives her space to someone who could do a better job at this point. I also think she could have been the original blogger: her tone and the way she talks is so bloggy and she’s been doing it so much longer than anyone else, it’s like we all caught up to Maureen Dowd and she just stayed where she was.

Anna: I was going to say that maybe she’s burnt out, that’s the way I feel when I read her. I also feel like I owe her some credit: she does two columns a week as you said the amount of space she’s given to write in is pretty small, I once wrote something of that size for that paper and it was one of the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Because the small amount of space, because it’s the New York fucking Times. Frank Rich for his part has to write once a week and gets big big big space to write in, and I feel like he really gets to distill or let the mood percolate a little bit longer and he can kind of put up this bang-up column. So he’s more enjoyable to read but he has more space and more time to do it. (Maureen) bugs me at times, but I’m also biased. When she went after Hillary Clinton I got annoyed, when she goes after Sarah Palin I sat there and cheered. She seems like a product of a certain time and I think maybe she’s just burnt-out. I think maybe I’m just tired of her shtick, it never kind of ends, it’s always the same thing. I think she’s branded herself, and yeah she’s stuck in a certain place and she hasn’t matured, she hasn’t reinvented herself.

Glynnis: I would just like to say I’d like the opportunity to only writer 1500 words a week and get that paycheck.

Anna: I would too, but I also think it’s a big deal and a lot of pressure…

Glynnis: Look at Gail Collins.

Anna: Yeah well Gail Collins is kind of hilarious and whenever Gawker kept going after her I think I went in there and commented “Why are you going after her?” She’s pretty funny and a breath of fresh air. I mean she had a column today that was about last night’s speech that Obama had made so she must have turned it around in 90 minutes, 120 minutes and it was pretty good so anyway Maureen Dowd…she was more impressive when she was a reporter than she is as an op-ed writer, now she’s tiring to me.

Jess: Well I’m going to be a contrarian, I kind of like Maureen Dowd, I like that she is endlessly a provocateur, and she doesn’t irritate me in the same way because when she’s being being ridiculous, I don’t take her seriously. I mean she’s just been such a character for so long and provokes in the exact same way that when she gets gets in that jag it just rolls off because I’m like that’s just Maureen being Maureen. So I think it’s good to have women like Maureen Dowd who are willing to be unpopular and say say things that are deliberately provocative and be disliked. And I just think she’s sassy so I like Maureen Dowd.

Caroline: I don’t mind her in general, I think her job is very difficult. Given 750 words and to do that twice a week, yes her shtick is going to get old, just given the turnaround time and how much she has to crank out. I think it’s a different medium but having Rachel Maddow around and so prominent is interesting, because you have, maybe for the first time, another female provocateur that’s talking politics, who is not afraid to be very opinionated. I think that’s both a good and bad thing for someone like Maureen Dowd who was the only one for so long. I think it gets highlighted that Dowd often times is saying the same things, and using the same people and not really exposing that much. I sometimes think it’s like she’s shooting a paintball gun at a wall and she’s packing this 750 word thing with money quotes and hoping one of them will work and be the quoted one. But she doesn’t really bug me, because there are other funny provocative women writing about politics, but I do think that yes, she’s getting tiresome.

Rachel: I just want to say for the record that that was clearly not a dumb question.

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