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Desperately Seeking Women Readers: U.S. Newspapers and the Construction of a Female Readership
Desperately Seeking Women Readers delves into the history of U.S. newspapers to examine the construction of female readership. Pages designed specifically for women transformed over time as the newspaper industry looked for ways to capture women readers. Harp investigates the creation and collapse of these pages before considering contemporary case studies to explore the recent revival of sex-specific pages. Interviews with professional journalists reveal the difficulties with defining news for women and the problems inherent in constructing newspapers in a sex-specific way. With a clear and descriptive style, Harp offers a fresh, original topic in communication scholarship. Desperately Seeking Women Readers is ideal for undergraduate and graduate coursework, as well as for curious readers of U.S. newspapers or historical and contemporary women's issues.
136 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2007
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January 16, 2024
In reviewing Desperately Seeking Women Readers, I have a couple of advantages over author Dustin Harp. First, I worked in newspapering as reporter and editor for about 25 years, a lot longer than Harp worked in the business. My time on newspapers included the years of the last two approaches to women’s news that Harp outlines.
Secondly, I have the perspective of an additional 14 years since the book’s publication in 2007 to see how things worked out. I will refrain from criticizing her work for something that Harp could not have known in 2007. That still leaves plenty of room to run.
In Harp’s slim book we see the discredited Marxist dialectic of the oppressed v. the oppressor being used to analyze decisions about news and staff. Although Harp doesn’t use those terms, it’s clear she intends “marginalized” women as the oppressed and white male editors (who else?) as the oppressors. Because there are only two sexes, they easily fit into a dialectic.
This Marxist framework leads to many errors of analysis. In general, numerous individuals, divided along lines other than sex, can participate in a conflict. Men and women can affiliate around common interests, such as religion, politics, and economics, that they consider just as important or more so than their sex. But Harp, like Marx, prefers to limit herself to the realm of dichotomy.
The primary value of Harp’s work is in chronicling three phases of newspapers’ attempts to attract women readers. Newspapers first introduced women’s pages in the 1890s to capture advertisers who wanted to sell their products to women.
She then looks at why some papers in the 1970s replaced women’s pages with style or feature sections meant for a broader audience while at the same time integrating news of interest to women into all areas of the paper. Then in the late 1980s, with female readership falling off, some newspapers again published designated women’s sections. Each change was meant to attract women readers and the advertisers who targeted them.
Along the way, the book’s readers have to endure numerous, repetitive, and tedious complaints from women staffers about how powerless they were and how it was the fault of male editors. Women’s section editors complained that male managing editors discriminated against them, paid them less than newsroom reporters, and held women’s sections in low esteem (p. 46).
To support her case, Harp cites an article from the American Journalism Review, which, like many of the newspapers whose stories it used to review, is no longer published. The article reported that because men held the majority of newsroom and decision-making positions, the women felt intimidated and silenced. “Often, the [male] editor who shouts the loudest is the one whose story makes it on page one….Women editors who pitch women’s stories risk being labeled the ‘workplace mommy’ or the ‘workplace feminist.’” (p. 57)
The American metaphor of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” has been around since at least 1870. Odd that these complaining women editors apparently were unaware of it and its meaning. Odder still that they were unaware and intimidated by the competitiveness within a newspaper, found both among the men as well as the women staffers. Most news operations had reporters and editors with huge egos who fought for attention and resources, and to protect and enlarge their turf.
Because Harp focuses only on the complaints of women staffers, she missed the other part of the story. Many male reporters and editors often had similar complaints of being discriminated against, of not being listened to, and of not being supported. One male reporter turned editor I worked with complained nearly every day of his almost 40 years at the paper about how managing editors mistreated him.
Another male colleague, an entertainment editor who resigned in 1981, famously shared his exit interview statement with friends in the newsroom. In the lengthy statement of complaints he said, “There are many talented and intelligent staff members who could make valuable contributions to the company. Their input is NEVER solicited, and when input is offered it is systematically ignored.” That hardly sounds different from the complaints Harp gathered from women staffers.
Those are just two examples. There are many more.
Harp also seems never to have asked any newspaper women why they stayed in jobs where they felt discriminated against, underpaid, and intimidated. If they believed they had skills that could command more respect and money elsewhere in the marketplace, why not go there? If they wanted to stay in newspapering and believed their approach to news would lead to more subscriptions and ads, why not start their own newspapers and put the male-dominated competitors out of business? But that would require taking responsibility as well as risk for your actions. It’s much simpler to blame others.
Harp spends a great deal of space on the debate within newspapers over whether women’s news should be gathered into a special section or incorporated across all sections of the paper. Again, Harp falls back on the Marxist dialectic of opposites and offers only two choices, compile women’s news into its own section or weave it throughout the paper.
In her conclusion, Harp argues for distributing women’s news throughout the newspaper’s pages. “To tolerate a women’s section is to accept that men dominate the newspaper industry and to put up with women’s limited ability to define news…Supporting the newspaper industry’s segregation of women’s news allows those in the newspaper industry to ignore its patriarchal structure and not work toward the integration and empowerment of women.” (p. 111)
Harp had no problem with magazines and TV targeting women with separate content, but doing it in “daily newspapers is problematic and dangerous for women.” (p. 110) The distinction is nonsensical.
This is the kind of stuff that the professionally offended worry about. Newspapers had many sections over a week: News, Local, National, International, Editorials, Sports, Arts, Features, geographically zoned sections, and so on. This was just a means to index the news, not a political comment on each section’s worth. Readers didn’t care what newspapers labeled the pages, they just wanted to know how to find the information they were looking for. As we’ll see, newspaper readers found options other than the ones Harp proposed.
Harp also spends a great many words on how newspaper folks defined women’s news. Not surprisingly, there were as many topics defined as there were people offering an opinion. They included traditional topics such as health, relationships, fashion, advice columns, and family. Then there were issues such equal pay, harassment in the workplace, and violence against women. (p. 72)
Readers really didn’t give a damn as to how reporters and editors defined news. Readers cared only for finding the information they wanted. In fairness, Harp announced her intent to understand how reporters and editors “construct” women’s news. (p. 3) But looking at news this way, from the inside out, leads Harp into errors about reporters’ insight on what readers wanted.
As Harp points out, each change in the way women’s news was reported and packaged was intended to attract more women readers. As she notes, by the late 1980s female readership was in a steep decline. Between 1970 and 1990 adult women daily newspaper readers dropped by 18 percent compared with a decline among male readers of 12.5 percent. Other studies showed steeper declines. (p. 53-54) Her analysis of the causes for the decline points to the usual suspects: news that stereotyped women, then it was packaged the wrong way because there were too few women in newspaper leadership and men were making the decisions.
Because Harp’s focus on newspapering is so narrow and is viewed through a Marxist analytical lens, her image of reality is distorted. There is a clearer picture to be had.
First, let’s clear up some things about readership. Harp never defines the term and seems to confuse readership and circulation, or paid subscriptions. Newspapers generally measured paid circulation numbers not readership, which has nothing to do with buying a paper.
It is the advertising department, not the news department, that studied and defined reader attributes such as age, sex, income, education, and other factors. Ad executives use that info to target which advertisers to sell to.
Every newsroom is different, and generalizations unreliable, but at the newspapers I’m familiar with journalists didn’t use demographics to target their stories. Most would have considered it unethical to do so because it might also lead to the suggestion that they do not cover some topics to avoid offending certain readers.
Because newspapers are delivered to households, circulation is commonly measured as the number of copies delivered for every 100 households in the circulation area. During World War II newspapers sold about 115 copies for every 100 households. That had dropped below 80 copies for 100 households by 1980 and was down to about 66 copies for every 100 households by 1990. Circulation stood at 53 copies for 100 households by 2000 and about 35 copies in 2009, at the end of the so-called Great Recession of 2007-2009.
If Harp had looked at circulation, she would have seen that the number of households buying a daily newspaper had been on a steady downward slope since about 1950. The birth of the internet in the mid-1990s slightly sped up this trend but didn’t cause it. Around the time Harp’s book was published, the downward slope had become a cliff and newspapers tumbled over it.
Women readers may have been fleeing newspapers at a faster rate than men, as Harp noted, but that just made them trend setters. All readers were fleeing newspapers.
Before the 1990s, the mass media market had become fragmented with specialized and community newspapers, city magazines, a variety of radio stations, cable TV, and network and independent TV stations. Direct mail marketing, desktop publishing, telemarketing, specialized retailing, and an array of others eroded the traditional mass advertising market of the newspaper.
Marketing power shifted from the general mass distribution of information to what was becoming a custom, individual information market. The market was segmenting content, the opposite of what Harp advised newspapers to do.
No matter how newspapers changed content, it wasn’t going to reverse the downward spiral of circulation and advertising. That’s because newspapers’ problems weren’t related to content. Digital innovations were making the newspaper business model obsolete. Virtually everything used to produce a newspaper, from news and advertising staff to printers and printing presses, was worthless, in a business sense.
The internet freed readers of the need to subscribe to the bundle of hard news, features, sports, opinion, entertainment, advertising, and all the rest that made up a daily newspaper. The internet in effect unbundled the newspaper’s content.
Through the internet, readers could find virtually any content they wanted mostly for free from sources around the world anytime they wanted it. What’s more, the internet combined audio and video with the printed word and still photographs.
Harp doesn’t even mention the internet until the last two pages of her book and never says anything about digital innovations. In many cases, newspapers were eliminating sections because they were being forced to reduce the number of pages they printed, even making the pages smaller.
This was the ultimate power shift. Reporters and editors no longer decided what content readers should see. Readers now not only decided what content they wanted and when to get it, they also used the mobile devices to provide photos and content for blogs, websites, and news sites.
Secondly, I have the perspective of an additional 14 years since the book’s publication in 2007 to see how things worked out. I will refrain from criticizing her work for something that Harp could not have known in 2007. That still leaves plenty of room to run.
In Harp’s slim book we see the discredited Marxist dialectic of the oppressed v. the oppressor being used to analyze decisions about news and staff. Although Harp doesn’t use those terms, it’s clear she intends “marginalized” women as the oppressed and white male editors (who else?) as the oppressors. Because there are only two sexes, they easily fit into a dialectic.
This Marxist framework leads to many errors of analysis. In general, numerous individuals, divided along lines other than sex, can participate in a conflict. Men and women can affiliate around common interests, such as religion, politics, and economics, that they consider just as important or more so than their sex. But Harp, like Marx, prefers to limit herself to the realm of dichotomy.
The primary value of Harp’s work is in chronicling three phases of newspapers’ attempts to attract women readers. Newspapers first introduced women’s pages in the 1890s to capture advertisers who wanted to sell their products to women.
She then looks at why some papers in the 1970s replaced women’s pages with style or feature sections meant for a broader audience while at the same time integrating news of interest to women into all areas of the paper. Then in the late 1980s, with female readership falling off, some newspapers again published designated women’s sections. Each change was meant to attract women readers and the advertisers who targeted them.
Along the way, the book’s readers have to endure numerous, repetitive, and tedious complaints from women staffers about how powerless they were and how it was the fault of male editors. Women’s section editors complained that male managing editors discriminated against them, paid them less than newsroom reporters, and held women’s sections in low esteem (p. 46).
To support her case, Harp cites an article from the American Journalism Review, which, like many of the newspapers whose stories it used to review, is no longer published. The article reported that because men held the majority of newsroom and decision-making positions, the women felt intimidated and silenced. “Often, the [male] editor who shouts the loudest is the one whose story makes it on page one….Women editors who pitch women’s stories risk being labeled the ‘workplace mommy’ or the ‘workplace feminist.’” (p. 57)
The American metaphor of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” has been around since at least 1870. Odd that these complaining women editors apparently were unaware of it and its meaning. Odder still that they were unaware and intimidated by the competitiveness within a newspaper, found both among the men as well as the women staffers. Most news operations had reporters and editors with huge egos who fought for attention and resources, and to protect and enlarge their turf.
Because Harp focuses only on the complaints of women staffers, she missed the other part of the story. Many male reporters and editors often had similar complaints of being discriminated against, of not being listened to, and of not being supported. One male reporter turned editor I worked with complained nearly every day of his almost 40 years at the paper about how managing editors mistreated him.
Another male colleague, an entertainment editor who resigned in 1981, famously shared his exit interview statement with friends in the newsroom. In the lengthy statement of complaints he said, “There are many talented and intelligent staff members who could make valuable contributions to the company. Their input is NEVER solicited, and when input is offered it is systematically ignored.” That hardly sounds different from the complaints Harp gathered from women staffers.
Those are just two examples. There are many more.
Harp also seems never to have asked any newspaper women why they stayed in jobs where they felt discriminated against, underpaid, and intimidated. If they believed they had skills that could command more respect and money elsewhere in the marketplace, why not go there? If they wanted to stay in newspapering and believed their approach to news would lead to more subscriptions and ads, why not start their own newspapers and put the male-dominated competitors out of business? But that would require taking responsibility as well as risk for your actions. It’s much simpler to blame others.
Harp spends a great deal of space on the debate within newspapers over whether women’s news should be gathered into a special section or incorporated across all sections of the paper. Again, Harp falls back on the Marxist dialectic of opposites and offers only two choices, compile women’s news into its own section or weave it throughout the paper.
In her conclusion, Harp argues for distributing women’s news throughout the newspaper’s pages. “To tolerate a women’s section is to accept that men dominate the newspaper industry and to put up with women’s limited ability to define news…Supporting the newspaper industry’s segregation of women’s news allows those in the newspaper industry to ignore its patriarchal structure and not work toward the integration and empowerment of women.” (p. 111)
Harp had no problem with magazines and TV targeting women with separate content, but doing it in “daily newspapers is problematic and dangerous for women.” (p. 110) The distinction is nonsensical.
This is the kind of stuff that the professionally offended worry about. Newspapers had many sections over a week: News, Local, National, International, Editorials, Sports, Arts, Features, geographically zoned sections, and so on. This was just a means to index the news, not a political comment on each section’s worth. Readers didn’t care what newspapers labeled the pages, they just wanted to know how to find the information they were looking for. As we’ll see, newspaper readers found options other than the ones Harp proposed.
Harp also spends a great many words on how newspaper folks defined women’s news. Not surprisingly, there were as many topics defined as there were people offering an opinion. They included traditional topics such as health, relationships, fashion, advice columns, and family. Then there were issues such equal pay, harassment in the workplace, and violence against women. (p. 72)
Readers really didn’t give a damn as to how reporters and editors defined news. Readers cared only for finding the information they wanted. In fairness, Harp announced her intent to understand how reporters and editors “construct” women’s news. (p. 3) But looking at news this way, from the inside out, leads Harp into errors about reporters’ insight on what readers wanted.
As Harp points out, each change in the way women’s news was reported and packaged was intended to attract more women readers. As she notes, by the late 1980s female readership was in a steep decline. Between 1970 and 1990 adult women daily newspaper readers dropped by 18 percent compared with a decline among male readers of 12.5 percent. Other studies showed steeper declines. (p. 53-54) Her analysis of the causes for the decline points to the usual suspects: news that stereotyped women, then it was packaged the wrong way because there were too few women in newspaper leadership and men were making the decisions.
Because Harp’s focus on newspapering is so narrow and is viewed through a Marxist analytical lens, her image of reality is distorted. There is a clearer picture to be had.
First, let’s clear up some things about readership. Harp never defines the term and seems to confuse readership and circulation, or paid subscriptions. Newspapers generally measured paid circulation numbers not readership, which has nothing to do with buying a paper.
It is the advertising department, not the news department, that studied and defined reader attributes such as age, sex, income, education, and other factors. Ad executives use that info to target which advertisers to sell to.
Every newsroom is different, and generalizations unreliable, but at the newspapers I’m familiar with journalists didn’t use demographics to target their stories. Most would have considered it unethical to do so because it might also lead to the suggestion that they do not cover some topics to avoid offending certain readers.
Because newspapers are delivered to households, circulation is commonly measured as the number of copies delivered for every 100 households in the circulation area. During World War II newspapers sold about 115 copies for every 100 households. That had dropped below 80 copies for 100 households by 1980 and was down to about 66 copies for every 100 households by 1990. Circulation stood at 53 copies for 100 households by 2000 and about 35 copies in 2009, at the end of the so-called Great Recession of 2007-2009.
If Harp had looked at circulation, she would have seen that the number of households buying a daily newspaper had been on a steady downward slope since about 1950. The birth of the internet in the mid-1990s slightly sped up this trend but didn’t cause it. Around the time Harp’s book was published, the downward slope had become a cliff and newspapers tumbled over it.
Women readers may have been fleeing newspapers at a faster rate than men, as Harp noted, but that just made them trend setters. All readers were fleeing newspapers.
Before the 1990s, the mass media market had become fragmented with specialized and community newspapers, city magazines, a variety of radio stations, cable TV, and network and independent TV stations. Direct mail marketing, desktop publishing, telemarketing, specialized retailing, and an array of others eroded the traditional mass advertising market of the newspaper.
Marketing power shifted from the general mass distribution of information to what was becoming a custom, individual information market. The market was segmenting content, the opposite of what Harp advised newspapers to do.
No matter how newspapers changed content, it wasn’t going to reverse the downward spiral of circulation and advertising. That’s because newspapers’ problems weren’t related to content. Digital innovations were making the newspaper business model obsolete. Virtually everything used to produce a newspaper, from news and advertising staff to printers and printing presses, was worthless, in a business sense.
The internet freed readers of the need to subscribe to the bundle of hard news, features, sports, opinion, entertainment, advertising, and all the rest that made up a daily newspaper. The internet in effect unbundled the newspaper’s content.
Through the internet, readers could find virtually any content they wanted mostly for free from sources around the world anytime they wanted it. What’s more, the internet combined audio and video with the printed word and still photographs.
Harp doesn’t even mention the internet until the last two pages of her book and never says anything about digital innovations. In many cases, newspapers were eliminating sections because they were being forced to reduce the number of pages they printed, even making the pages smaller.
This was the ultimate power shift. Reporters and editors no longer decided what content readers should see. Readers now not only decided what content they wanted and when to get it, they also used the mobile devices to provide photos and content for blogs, websites, and news sites.
January 21, 2008
Rather forgettable book on the rise and fall of "women's pages". Could have used a lot more examples.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews