Features
IWMF Announces 2008 Courage in Journalism Award Winners
The International Women's Media Foundation today announced the winners of 2008 Courage in Journalism Awards:
- Farida Nekzad, Afghanistan. Nekzad frequently receives phone calls and email messages threatening her life but remains committed to work toward a free press and greater equality for women journalists.
- Sevgul Uludag, Cyprus. A journalist for nearly three decades, Uludag has covered missing people and mass graves for both Turkish and Greek newspapers in Cyprus. She has received death threats and has been the subject of hate campaigns for her investigative reporting.
A third woman journalist has also won a Courage Award; her name will be released at a later date due to concerns for her safety.
The IWMF will also honor Edith Lederer with the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award. Lederer, chief correspondent at the United Nations for the Associated Press, was the first female resident correspondent in Vietnam in 1972. She has worked on every continent except Antarctica since she began her journalism career in 1966.
This year's awards will be presented at ceremonies in Los Angeles on October 16 and New York on October 21. Award winners will attend a reception and panel discussion in Washington, D.C., on October 9.
- Click here to read the press release.
- Learn more about or help support the Courage Awards.
IWMF Names 2008-09 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow
The International Women's Media Foundation announced today that Jenny Manrique, a Colombian freelance journalist, has received the 2008-09 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship. The annual fellowship gives a woman journalist working in print, broadcast or online media the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism and social justice issues.
Manrique writes for Comunicaciones Aliadas, a non-governmental online magazine based in Peru that focuses on Latin American news, particularly human rights. She has covered subjects such as kidnapping, drug trafficking and refugees and hopes to investigate Colombian paramilitaries and their ties with multinational corporations during her IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship.
- Click here to read more about Manrique in the press release.
- Learn more about the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship.
- Help support this program.
Sally Sara Concludes Stint as IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow
Sally Sara, an anchor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has completed her year as the 2007-08 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. She is now traveling in Asia conducting research for a new book. Before she left, Sara visited the IWMF and spoke about her experiences as the Neuffer Fellow.
- Watch video clips of Sally Sara talking about her time as the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow.
- Click here to read more about Sara.
- Learn more about the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship.
- Help support the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fund.
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What is Missing from the Latin American Media
Media organizations in Latin America are “missing part of the story” because they ignore the voices of women, both as journalists and as news consumers, says Liza Gross, managing executive editor at El Nuevo Dia, the largest circulation daily in Puerto Rico.
According to the Grupo de Diarios America (GDA), a consortium of 14 influential newspapers in 12 Latin American countries, 48 percent of its readers are women. Yet women’s voices and concerns are often absent from the news in Latin America, says Gross. “Representation of women and women’s interests, concerns and issues are not integrated into all of the news.”
No Equal Opportunity
Although the number of women in the media varies from country to country in Latin America, Gross says, “as a rule, there is not equality of opportunity for women. Generally, women in Latin America are where women in the U.S. were 30 years ago.” This observation was supported by an IWMF survey conducted in 1997. Some 66 percent of Latin American women who answered the survey said that fewer than 10 percent of the decision-makers in their countries are women.
A native of Argentina, Gross was publisher of Exito, the Spanish-language daily of the Chicago Tribune, for four and a half years before joining El Nuevo Dia. In addition to reporting from and on Latin America, she has taught journalism for the Latin American Journalism Program at Florida International University. She joined the IWMF board of directors last year, and along with board members Ysabel Duron of KRON-TV in San Francisco and Maureen Bunyan, primary anchor for WJLA, the ABC news affiliate in Washington, DC, Hilda Garcia Villa, content and programming director for AOL Puerto Rico, and nine other leading women in the media, she is a part of the strategy team for the IWMF’s Latin American Women's Media Initiative, which was created to bring more women’s voices into the Latin American media.
Cultural Shift Required
“The women journalists of Latin America want to share power, so they can turn what they see as lack of policy or negative policies to the benefit of women, to offer different perspective on content, to give women the voice of authority where often it has been missing or buried deep,” says Duron. She moderated Women’s Leadership in the Media, a panel discussion organized by the IWMF and held at the Inter-American Press Association’s mid-year meeting in El Salvador in March. “This will require a cultural shift for men in Latin America. … They say they care and are concerned about women, but sharing power will require a new attitude.”
The panel’s aim was to bring women’s concerns to the attention of the Latin American media. It included Liza Gross and Silvia Miro Quesada, editor of newspaper services for El Comercio in Lima, Peru. IAPA is a membership organization for American newspapers and magazines that works for freedom of expression and the press throughout the Americas.
“Women still feel a reluctance on the part of men to put them in positions of power,” says Gross. “Men are not sure that women can do what leadership requires – handle a large group of people, take care of the coverage and coordinate the daily routine of a newsroom, for example.”
A New Generation of Leadership
Putting a new generation of women into leadership positions in the Latin American media is another goal of the IWMF’s Latin American Women's Media Initiative. “It is critical that more women decision-makers are created and that the voices of women are heard in news coverage in Latin America,” says Bunyan, who chairs the Latin American Women's Media Initiative. “This matters, not only to women, but to the process of democratization."
One path to change is through networking, says Gross. Another is taking the non-traditional route by becoming a good manager. “Most journalists, male or female, don’t like to focus on management. But that’s what I did to help myself and the arena was wide open.” She says that women should also consider working on the technological side of the newsroom or in an area like project management.
She also suggests that female media consumers can and should ask for changes in the media.
Still, change won’t take place overnight, cautions Gross. What is needed is “perseverance, perseverance, perseverance. We need to bring these issues back to the table again and again.”
May 2003