Imbalance passed on from days of old, but we're working on it

The gender audit conducted by a Colorado State University group offers no surprises. Gazette journalists know intuitively our news coverage skews male, though less so than in years past.

Two years ago, asked to describe in a simple sentence The Gazette's intended audience, a group of neutral editors responded "white, middle-class businessmen." That may not be a good thing, but it makes sense. It could apply to most mainstream, mass-market daily newspapers in this country.

The news content you see on our pages every day is produced by professionals - reporters, copy editors, photographers, artists and so on - who inevitably filter the news through the experiences of their own lives.

Until the past decade or so, the professional staffs of this paper, and most others, were dominated by men. Certainly, the key decision-making posts generally were held by men.

So, naturally, when it comes time for deciding what is news, for identifying the newsmakers, topics and people of interest, men were the default. That's why the traditional bread-and-butter coverage of any metropolitan paper has been government and politics, business and sports. Women's news belonged on the feature and society pages.

However, contemporary society has been feminized. Government and politics, business and sports and just about every other aspect of our society are as much the province of women as of men.

As the CSU audit of The Gazette shows, this newspaper has moved somewhat less rapidly than society.

It's gratifying to learn from the audit that, in general, our coverage is viewed as "gender appropriate" - that is relevant to both sexes, free of insulting stereotypes and mostly balanced.

However, the auditors are correct when they note our over- coverage of some topics skews coverage toward men and produces an overreliance on men as sources and photographic subjects.

The 3-to-1 imbalance, men to women, in photos and quotes is not a good thing. If our goal as a civic newspaper is to accurately reflect life in our community in all its complexity and fullness, that conclusion alone indicates we have a considerable distance to go.

The auditors recognized, to our satisfaction, Gazette efforts to broaden sports coverage to more completely reflect the sporting lives of women. Overall, sports readership now is somewhat higher among women, but it has declined slightly among men.

That highlights the newspaper's fundamental challenge: how to broaden coverage in a way that brings female readers to the paper without alienating and losing male readers at the same time.

That is no easy challenge. For all of our efforts, The Gazette still shows a gender gap, more male readers than female.

As we put the finishing touches on the design and news content plan for a new Gazette, to debut later this year, we're planning to increase coverage of topics of prime importance to women - education, health and fitness, personal finance, family and relationships - while framing our bread-and-butter coverage in a way that addresses the information needs of men and women.

We'll ask the CSU group to re-audit the paper early next year. We'll let you know what they learn.

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