“The state of women in journalism today is one of those half-full, half-empty things. We no longer sit in the balcony, but neither do we have the best seats in the house.” (Enda)
During the past few decades, women in journalism as well as women in other fields have demonstrated what we always knew: Women could do any job at least as well as men. At newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, women have changed the definition of news. As more and more women entered newsrooms, they brought new, fresh ideas. Stories about education, welfare, children and the elderly have landed in greater numbers on the front pages of the nation’s most respected newspapers.
Women see things differently than men do. Each perspective improves news coverage and without each, a part of our society would be less noticed and the picture of who we are would be incomplete. Earlier newspapers did not cover the waitress struggling to keep her family together or the single mom striving to balance work and home or the female college graduate blazing a trail in the corporate ladder.
Women’s sections in the newspaper were born in the late nineteenth century “as one of the innovations propelled by Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World” (Enda). Pulitzer created reading material targeted specifically at women to wrap around the advertisements for department stores and various products used in the home. By 1900, many newspapers were publishing women's pages filled with society news and advice on fashion, homemaking, manners, and romance. Such material continued to dominate women's pages for half a century. The male editors and publishers who controlled American journalism paid little attention to the quality of the stories, “fully satisfied to fill the space with flowery prose describing debutante balls, superficial advice to wives and mothers, and frivolous stories on the latest trends in fashion” (Streitmatter).
Back in the '50s, male editors did not care what was put...