There's No Crying in Newsrooms
What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead
By (author) Kristin Grady Gilger, Julia Wallace Foreword by Campbell Brown
Publication date:
05 July 2019Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781538121498
There’s No Crying in Newsrooms tells the stories of remarkable women who broke through barrier after barrier at media organizations around the country over the past four decades. They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view and think about the world. These women, who were calling in news stories while in labor and parking babies under their desks, never imagined that 40 years later young women entering the news business would face many of the same battles they did – only with far less willingness to put up and shut up.
The female pioneers in “There’s No Crying in Newsrooms” have many lessons to teach about what it takes to succeed in media or any other male-dominated organization, and their message is more important now than ever before.
The female pioneers in “There’s No Crying in Newsrooms” have many lessons to teach about what it takes to succeed in media or any other male-dominated organization, and their message is more important now than ever before.
Riffing off Tom Hanks’ line in A League of Their Own, "There's no crying in baseball," for their title, veteran journalists, editors, and educators Gilger and Wallace cogently demonstrate why the admonition is equally apt in newsrooms. Journalism is a field in which men have always dominated, and any woman who wanted to compete needed to demonstrate that she wouldn’t fall victim to her gender’s stereotypical emotional fragility. It wouldn’t be easy. Sexism and sexual harassment were rampant. Expectations for women were not only doubled, they were quadrupled. Hypocrisy reigned in story assignments, travel arrangements, job promotions, and, of course, salary equity. The authors interviewed nearly 100 women media leaders, from CNN’s Christiane Amanpour to Vox ’s Melissa Bell, to assess the changing image of women in journalism, how they achieved success, and what they envision as the industry’s future. The result is a commanding critique of the current state of women in media, boosted by constructive advice applicable to workplaces other than newsrooms. A crucial resource for women leaders in any field.