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Survival Guide for Women EditorsA compilation of hard-won wisdom - Introduction 
What is the point of getting newspaper leaders — 45 women and five men — together to talk about how they rose in the newspaper industry, how they stay sane, and how they communicate with co-workers of both sexes?
What is the rationale for giving those same women and men an assignment: Write down your advice to women who want to use power effectively and compassionately? Describe your experiences as you found your way to the post of high-level editor or publisher. Translate the bits and pieces of your life at home and at work into tips for others.
Those were the orders from organizers of the 2002 J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, Women in Newsroom Leadership. So, on a rainy afternoon in late September, every workaday reporter’s fantasy took place: The editors and publishers were ushered into rooms, given computers and told to spill their guts. Now.
The point?
It concerns finding a way to help women rise through the ranks. The seminar and writing assignment were linked to “The Great Divide,” a survey commissioned by the American Press Institute and Pew Center for Civic Journalism. That study, conducted in late summer 2002 by Selzer & Company, found that nearly half of women editors said they wanted to move up but had concerns about advancement. This group, dubbed “career conflicted” by researchers, shared many characteristics that differentiate them from men and other women who edit newspapers. They struggle because they lack the full range of tools to succeed. They lack interpersonal skills that push careers forward. They have not had a mentor and they want help.
This Survival Guide for Women Editors is a compilation of what came out when, that day in Reston, the editors and publishers marched to their computers to try to write about something personal that matters deeply. As Paula Ellis put it: “to pay tribute, in a sense, to the many men and women who offered me quiet gestures of support throughout my career by passing those gifts along.”
For Ellis, president and publisher of The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and the rest of the participants, the assignment came at an especially busy time — a fiscal year’s end, when minds were on matters such as budgets and training in uncertain times. Like Ellis, many were thinking of how to pay the seminar its due, but also get home in time for their children’s never-ending fall school activities.
On top of that, some writers found it difficult to write for an essentially anonymous audience. Sure, one can assume readers would largely be women in newsrooms, but everyone has different issues. The essays would also be read by anyone curious about what’s going on in his or her boss’s head. And because the essays are subjective, what a way to discover how top managers perceive — or misperceive — themselves!
There also was an awareness of an endless body of literature on women in leadership, making it a challenge to bring something new to print. Some were more comfortable than others with the assignment. “I was mostly embarrassed about writing it. There’s nothing I detest more than arrogance or bragging,” said Julia Wallace, editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wallace added that she tried in her essay to offer advice “without pretending to know all or even some of it.” And then there were the men in the room.
Throughout the three-day seminar, the five male participants listened and reacted to women’s perceptions of newsroom life. There were no heated exchanges or protestations.
But in his essay, included here, Jim Crutchfield says that in discussing how not to discriminate by gender and how to deal with male managers, the women ignored the problems of black women and gave short shrift to marginalization of all kinds. As a black male, Crutchfield, president and publisher of the Akron (OH) Beacon Journal, writes that he felt some of the same emotions — of being interrupted and dismissed, for example — at the conference that he has felt throughout his life.
He calls upon women to use the sensitivity with which they credit themselves and which they contend makes them different from men, to work to end all stereotyping.
In these essays, you’ll find some advice repeated often. Some is not presented as advice, but as life stories from which you may draw whatever you choose.
What is the point? This largely will be determined by you.
But perhaps we can all agree on one of the tips offered by Rena Pederson, editor at large at The Dallas Morning News:
“Never try to give a speech with a throat lozenge in your mouth.”
A DVD featuring anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., one of the foremost authorities on gender differences, addresses the findings in a study that was the basis for API’s 2002 J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, “Women in Newsroom Leadership.” Her comments, as well as that of several newspaper professionals, is now available on a DVD produced by API and made possible by a grant from The Gannett Foundation.
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To download the entire book (8.3 MB PDF file) 