ONA Issues

futurejournalismproject:

Gendered News

From entertainment to finance to politics to sports, the Guardian Datablog explores how women and men are published in leading UK news sources, and how often articles by gender are shared across social networks.

In the interactive they’ve produced, you can sort across different criteria as well as drill deeper into specific publications and their sections.

At a macro level, UK news publishing is much like what we see in the United States: it’s dominated by men with less than 30% of news articles published by women across the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Guardian.

Drill down a bit, or look at gender participation by subject area, and you see women dominating topics like “lifestyle” and “entertainment” and men dominating, well, most everything else.

But the Datablog isn’t just looking at who gets published, but who gets heard.

You would think it’s one and the same but with the decline of the newspaper front page — and the Web site home page — as a conversation driver, it’s the social ecosystem of readers and their sharing habits that drives audience engagement and interaction.

Via the Guardian:

Online, who gets heard is determined by an ecosystem of actors: individuals sharing on Facebook and Twitter, link-sharing communities, personal algorithms on Google News, and citizen media curators. Newspapers only offer part of the information supply; we readers decide who’s heard every time we click, share or use our own voice…

…Of course, the reach of an article is much more complicated than likes and shares. What gets seen is often dependent on the time of day and the influence of who shares a link.

The definition of likes and shares also changes. Since our measurements in early August, Facebook’s counters have been changed to track links sent within private messages. This year, newsrooms experimented with Facebook social readers and tablet apps to grow their audiences. Bernhard Rieder’s network diagram of the Guardian’s Facebook page illustrates yet another social channel for news. Publishers sometimes can’t agree on what their own data means.

Despite these limitations, data on likes and shares offer the best outside picture of audience interest in women’s writing in the news.

Read through for analysis and more about the methodology and tools used to suss out the data. As usual, the Guardian also lets you download the data so you can work with it yourself.

Image: Screenshot, UK News Gender Ranking: What They Publish vs What Readers Share, via The Guardian. Select to embiggen.