The influence of reporter gender on source selection in newspaper stories

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 81, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 139-154

  Armstrong, Cory L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER ROLE;

EID: 2942661645     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900408100110     Document Type: Article

References (55)

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5. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use";
6. Tara N. DeLouth, Brigitte Pirson, Daryl Hitchcock, and Beth Rienzi,"Gender and Ethnic Role Portrayal: Photographic Images in Three California Newspapers," Psychological Reports 76 (April 1995 ): 493-94;
7. James R. Hallmark and Richard N. Armstrong, "Gender Equity in Televised Sports: A Comparative Analysis of Men's and Women's NCAA Division I Basketball Championship Broadcasts, 1991-1995," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 43 (spring 1999): 222-35.
8. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene K. Daniels, and James Benet, Hearth and Home: Images of Women in Mass Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 28.
9. Liesbet Van Zoonan, "One of the Girls? The Changing Nature of Journalism," in News, Gender, and Power, ed. C. Carter, G. Branston, and S. Allan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 33-46.
10. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use."
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13. Wann et al., "The Inequitable Newspaper Coverage of Men's and Women's Athletics at Small, Medium and Large Universities."
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15. DeLouth et al., "Gender and Ethnic Role Portrayal: Photographic Images in Three California Newspapers."
16. Hallmark and Armstrong, "Gender Equity in Televised Sports: A Comparative Analysis of Men's and Women's NCAA Division I Basketball Championship Broadcasts, 1991-1995."
17. Sage and Furst, "Coverage of Women's Sports in Selected Newspapers."
18. Wann et al., "The Inequitable Newspaper Coverage of Men's and Women's Athletics at Small, Medium and Large Universities."
19. See, e.g., Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible?: How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
20. Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
21. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., and August E. Grant, eds., Framing Public Life (Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001);
22. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use."
23. Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz, "Overrepresentation and Underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as Lawbreakers on Television News," Journal of Communication 50 (spring 2000): 131-54.
24. Lana Rakow and Kimberlie Kranich, "Women as Sign in Television News," Journal of Communication 41 (winter 1991): 8-23.
25. Michael Hecht, Communicating Prejudice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 1998), 109.
26. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use."
27. Barbara Bate, Communication and the Sexes (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
28. Mei-ling Yang, "Women's Pages or People's Pages: The Production of News for Women in the Washington Post in the 1950s," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (summer 1996): 364-78.
29. Angela Powers and Frederick Fico, "Influences on Use of Sources at Large U.S. Newspapers," Newspaper Research Journal 15 (fall 1994): 87-97.
30. Jane Delano Brown, Carl B. Byee, Stanley T. Wearden, and Dulcie M. Straughan, "Invisible Power: Newspaper News Sources and the Limits of Diversity," Journalism Quarterly 64 (spring 1987): 45-54;
31. Marc Cooper and Lawrence C. Soley, "All the Right Sources," Mother Jones 15 (February/March 1990): 20-27.
32. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content, 180.
33. Diane Silver, "A Comparison of Newspaper Coverage of Male and Female Officials in Michigan," Journalism Quarterly 63 (summer 1986): 144-49.
34. Judy VanSlyke Turk, "Sex-Role Stereotyping in Writing the News," Journalism Quarterly 64 (summer/autumn 1987): 613-17.
35. Cory L. Armstrong, "Papers Give Women More Attention in Ethnically Diverse Communities," Newspaper Research Journal 23 (fall 2002): 81-86.
36. Sharon Dunwoody and Robert Griffin, "Structural Pluralism and Media Accounts of Risk," in Mass Media, Social Control and Social Change, a Macrosocial Perspective, ed. David Demers and Kurt Viswanath (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999), 139-58;
37. Robert Griffin and Sharon Dunwoody, "Impacts of Information Subsidies and Community Structure on Local Press Coverage of Environmental Contamination," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (summer 1995): 271-84.
38. Douglas B. Hindman, Robert Littlefield, Ann Preston, and Dennis Neumann, "Structural Pluralism, Ethnic Pluralism, and Community Newspapers," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76 (summer 1999): 250-63.
39. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content, 27.
40. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content, 27.
41. Powers and Fico, "Influences on Use of Sources at Large U.S. Newspapers," 94
42. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use."
43. Please contact the author for a copy of the coding guide used in this analysis.
44. All newspapers had to have a seven-day circulation and be available to the coders on microfilm through the University of Wisconsin-Madison's inter-library loan system or in hard copy to be eligible for the study. The list of 60 newspapers was cut to 30 with the idea of obtaining 15 of the highest circulating daily papers in the country and 15 of the smallest circulating daily newspapers to maximize the variance between the groups. From the list of 30, 18 papers were chosen based on availability. For example, the Arizonian Tribune from Mesa, Arizona, was not used in the final analysis because only four days were available on microfilm.
45. The front page was the first page of the newspaper, which includes both local and national news, along with the paper masthead. The local/metro section was the page of the newspaper that highlights local news, including government and crime stories. The lifestyle page focused on stories that traditionally interest women, including weddings, society news, home, family, or food. This list is not exhaustive, but is used for illustration purposes. The sports page was described as highlighting athletic news and scores.
46. The purposive sample used for this analysis resulted in large between group differences in circulation figures and moderate within group differences. However, because this study was examining differences between large and small daily newspapers, the decision was made to dichotomize the circulation numbers in an attempt to balance the within-group differences.
47. If the gender of the writer could not be determined by the name, attempts were made to contact the newspaper to determine the reporter gender. In 25 cases, both males and females were present in the bylines.
48. Krippendorff's alpha = .95. See Klaus Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980). Inter-coder reliability was tabulated using two coders and a pre-test analysis of 5% of the initial sample. None of the stories used in the pre-test appeared in the final analysis. After reliability was established, a single coder conducted all coding used in this dataset.
49. Krippendorff's alpha = .80
50. Krippendorff's alpha for female emphasis = .93. Krippendorff's alpha for male emphasis = .70. Coders for male emphasis had 82% agreement. The lower reliability likely resulted because the two-dimensional concept of public status, while a strong and innovative way of studying news content, is a relatively new idea. The main coder in this study had a firm grasp of this concept, but the second coder was less familiar with the overall nature of the concept. Once reliability was established, the main coder handled all coding for this analysis, so actual reliability was higher than these numbers represent. Thus, while male emphasis acts in the same manner as female emphasis, a higher standard of error is involved in the coding of male emphasis and these results should be interpreted with caution.
51. (Male emphasis: Mean = .85, s.d..44; Female emphasis: Mean = .52; s.d. .51). On a three-point scale, high emphasis was defined as a gender reference appearing in a headline. Medium emphasis was defined as appearing in a lead of the story. Low emphasis was defined as appearing later in the story.
52. David Kanervo and Ellen Kanvervo, "Small Town CEO's Views on Newspaper Coverage," Newspaper Research Journal 16 (summer 1995): 29-41.
53. Silver, "A Comparison of Newspaper Coverage of Male and Female Officials in Michigan."
54. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, "Women Making News: Gender as a Variable in Source Selection and Use."
55. Van Zoonan, "One of the Girls? The Changing Nature of Journalism."