From the IWMF Executive Director
Advocating for Women Journalists Around the World

Cracking Glass Ceiling in the U.S.

Before being hired by The Boston Globe, Renee Loth, now the paper’s editorial page editor, was turned down four times for a job at the newspaper. She says that this early experience taught her perseverance, a quality that has helped her in her successful career at the newspaper.

Loth shared her career strategies as part of a panel of successful women in the media during Women Reaching for the Top: Initiatives for Media Leadership, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the IWMF’s leadership training series for women journalists. The series, which began in 2002 with day-long leadership training workshops in New York, Miami and San Francisco, continued in 2002 with a workshop in Washington, DC, and in 2003 with the workshop Loth attended in Cambridge. The series concluded with a two-day advanced leadership workshop, Taking the Lead: Building Your Influence in the Newsroom.

The introductory, one-day interactive training workshops were designed to help mid-level women in the print, broadcast and Internet media define their own leadership style and learn about the different capabilities required for leadership, including assertiveness, conflict resolution, risktaking, self promotion and the ability to communicate. In addition, panels of successful women in the media offered their strategies for reaching the top of the media.

The IWMF developed the series to help more women reach top management rungs in the media, which continues to be an obstacle. According to the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Newsroom mployment census, women are 33.4 percent of newsroom supervisors. In broadcasting, women are 19 percent of television news directors, according to the Radio-Television News Directors Association annual survey of women and minorities in radio and television news for 2003.

“This is a period of rapid change and uncertainty at my newspaper,” reported one participant in her post-workshop evaluation. “The skills and resources I gained at the workshop have helped me navigate the changes and keep my head on straight (most of the time!) as this period of uncertainty continues.”

Taking the Lead in U.S. Newsrooms

The two-day advanced workshop, which was held in June 2003 in Washington, DC, built on skills and information from the one-day workshops and delved further into leadership with sessions on personal leadership development, team building, and coaching and performance management.

Jill Geisler and Pam Johnson from the faculty of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based Poynter Institute, which provides training and education for professional journalists, were the trainers for the final program. In preparation for the workshop, they gave the participants homework that included getting on-the-record feedback from supervisors, co-workers and people who work directly for them. During the workshop, Geisler and Johnson helped the journalists use the feedback as an opportunity to improve their management style and skills. They also led participants through exercises designed to help them become newsroom leaders by identifying their personality preferences using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, learning how to resolve conflict and developing an effective coaching style for employees.

Women Reaching for the Top and Taking the Lead were funded by the McCormick Tribune Foundation with additional support from the Philip L. Graham Fund, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, JPMorgan Chase, Knight Ridder, The Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bringing Women’s Voices into Newsrooms Around the World

The IWMF continues to expand its reach with programs for women around the world. Along with the Internews Network, an international nonprofit that supports independent media, the IWMF sponsored a two-week training program for women journalists in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2002. The program placed special emphasis on covering women’s issues after the fall of the Taliban.

The IWMF also continued developing its Latin American Initiative. In October 2002, IWMF board members Maureen Bunyan of WJLA-TV in Washington, DC, and Liza Gross, executive managing editor of El Nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico, did a presentation on the IWMF for the board of the Inter-American Press Association meeting in Lima, Peru. In February 2003 the IWMF took part in a forum held at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, Austin. Finally the IWMF organized a panel, Women’s Leadership in the Media, for the mid-year meeting of IAPA, held in San Salvador in March 2003.