By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; N01
As the news director of WTTG-Fox5, Katherine Green gets stacks of tapes and résumés from reporters and anchors who want to work in her newsroom. Some applicants are young and green, some older and seasoned. But the most common characteristic is: Most are women.
By Green's estimate, women applicants outnumber men about 3 to 1. Bill Lord, Green's counterpart at WJLA (Channel 7), sees much the same ratio, and he says the percentage of women has increased year by year.
"It's actually more difficult now to find a strong male anchor than a strong female," Green says. "Why? I'm not really sure I can answer that."
People in the TV news business have been wondering the same thing.
When women made their first strides into television newsrooms some four decades ago, their presence was something of a shock to the male establishment (a period of change humorously portrayed in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and more recently in the Will Ferrell film "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy"). But nowadays, the gender roles are reversed. Women make up the majority of anchors and TV reporters and have many key behind-the-scenes jobs. And, as Lord and Green have found, that trend is increasing.
And men? Outside of a few traditionally male bastions -- the sports guy, the weathercaster, the boss -- men are disappearing from TV newsrooms.
Perhaps the most visible symbol of the ascendancy of women is Katie Couric, who in September will become the lead anchor of CBS News -- the first woman to hold such a job without a male co-anchor at a traditional broadcast network. But the trend is apparent across the country, in cities large and small. Although the male-female anchor pair is still the industry standard, two-female setups aren't unusual in local markets. Wendy Rieger and Susan Kidd co-anchor the 5 p.m. news on WRC, and women deliver the news solo on various newscasts throughout the week. Viewers rarely see men paired as anchors, or even going it alone -- the norm a generation ago.
Women reached statistical parity with men on the anchor desk in the early 1990s, and their ranks have been climbing since. The number of female anchors reached a record high last year, accounting for 57 percent of the positions in a nationwide survey conducted by the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Just as impressive are the gains in the rest of the newsroom. Women account for more than half of TV reporters (58 percent) and such middle managers as executive producers (55 percent), news producers (66 percent) and news writers (56 percent).
At the bottom of the career ladder are even more women: Almost two-thirds of bachelor's degrees in journalism and mass communications were awarded to women in 2004, according to research by Lee Becker of the University of Georgia. These days, when educators like Becker or Craig Allen of Arizona State University look over their broadcast journalism classes, they often don't see a single male student looking back.
"Young men are just not interested," says Allen, who runs the broadcast news program at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. "There's been almost an evacuation of men from this field."
News managers look on these numbers with a mixture of pride and mild alarm. Pride because decades of equal-opportunity employment rules, inclusive hiring policies and viewer acceptance of diversity have opened up what had once been a preserve of men, and primarily white men. But concern, too, since the male exodus threatens the traditional anchor model, in which a male-female duo is sitting at the head of a symbolic nuclear family. There is also some debate about whether the "feminization" of the newsroom has led to a more female-oriented news agenda.
"We're not at the four- or five-alarm stage yet, but I do think the trends are very concerning," says Jerry Gumbert, chief executive of Audience Research & Development, a Fort Worth-based consulting firm. "There's a growing sense in newsrooms that good men are becoming harder to find, and that we're becoming too female-heavy."
So where have all the guys gone?
Many observers suggest that their departure reflects the transformation of TV news from a "glamour" business to a low-wage, no-growth field with limited career potential. With TV stations laboring under the same financial pressures as others in the mainstream media, men might be discouraged by television news and might be finding better opportunities elsewhere.
Although the rewards of making it to the top of the business remain great -- anchors make millions of dollars and reporters typically make more than $200,000 a year at the network level -- there isn't that much room at the top.
Fox News Channel, the top-rated all-news cable network, for example, employs fewer than 100 anchors and reporters. The biggest local station in Washington, WJLA -- whose newsroom is combined with cable's NewsChannel 8 -- has just 43 reporters, sportscasters, weather people and anchors.
Employment in the business, at all levels and positions, amounts to only about 25,000, says Bob Papper, a Ball State University professor who conducts the RTNDA's surveys.
As a result, newcomers tend to start their careers in small markets, at less-than-modest salaries. The median annual salary for a reporter working in the smallest third of TV markets is $20,000, according to the RTNDA.
From there, it can take years to climb to a larger and better-paying station. The heady days of the '80s and '90s -- when all-news cable stations were blossoming and broadcast stations were expanding their newscasts to more hours of the day -- appear to be over. For a young person, Papper concludes, "you could make the argument that it's [more lucrative] to go into the military than it is to go into TV news."
Given such conditions, Papper theorizes that women have a natural advantage over men on TV: "If you take the typical 22-year-old woman, dress her up and put makeup on her, she looks like an adult. With a 22-year-old guy, you can do just about anything and he still looks like he's going through puberty." As a result, a woman "can get a better job on the air and advance more quickly than a man," who may get discouraged and leave the business entirely.
A more important question might be whether any of this has changed what viewers see on the screen. That is, has the influx of women in the TV news workforce changed the news itself?
Although cause and effect are hard to separate, there's no doubt that the news looks much different today compared with how it did before women were a factor in producing the news.
"When I look back 30 years or so, to when my career began, there was so much more emphasis on officialdom and official process," says Barbara Cochran, former head of the CBS News Washington bureau. "Ninety-nine percent of the people we covered were men, and white men at that."
Nowadays, says Cochran, who is president of RTNDA, the canvas is much bigger, partly because of the influence of women: "We don't just do process stories. We do stories that tell you more about what it's like to live in our society. Having women bring their experience into play has made a big difference."
When Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a newsletter that tracks network news, recently compared "CBS Evening News" broadcasts from November 1968 and November 1998, he found striking differences. In the earlier era, he says, the subjects tended to be limited to government, politics and the Vietnam War, and it was unusual for a woman to be a news source (a report about the Catholic Church's policy on contraception, for instance, quoted only men).
By the late 1990s, subjects that had all but been ignored years earlier -- abortion, child care, sexual discrimination in the workplace -- were part of the serious news agenda, he said. Women also regularly reported the news, and were often interviewed on it.
Tyndall found something even more remarkable when he looked at the brief tenure of Elizabeth Vargas as the lead anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight" (Vargas went solo during this period after newsman Bob Woodruff sustained serious injuries in Iraq three weeks after being named co-anchor). The hallmark of the Vargas era, he said, was an increased emphasis on "sex and family" issues, those presumably with a strong appeal to women. In March and April, for example, ABC devoted more time to stories about contraception, abortion, autism, prenatal development, childbirth, postpartum depression and child pornography than CBS and NBC's nightly newscasts combined, Tyndall found. Since being replaced by Charles Gibson, the number of such "family" stories has tailed off on "World News Tonight."
In a somewhat ironic coda, Vargas stepped down as co-anchor in late May, citing her pregnancy and family responsibilities.
Nevertheless, Gumbert, the consultant, worries that anchor chairs and reporting ranks might become so female-dominated that male viewers will be alienated. "I think it's going to be problematic," he says. "The average viewer wants balance, both in the kinds of stories that are reported and who appears on camera. They want to see a reflection of their community. Once that balance gets pushed too far in one direction, then the editorial decision-making will change significantly, too. It can't help not to, because what interests men and women is different."
That day, however, might not be right around the corner. Despite women's gains, men still overwhelmingly are in charge of stations' news operations. Almost 80 percent of news directors and 68 percent of assistant news directors were men, according to RTNDA's most recent figures.
But that seems destined to change, too, the more women dominate the middle-management tier from which top executives usually are hired. Women already head newsrooms in several major cities, including two Washington stations -- Green at WTTG and Vickie Burns at WRC.
After eight years on the job, Green is the city's longest-tenured news director. She arrived here after a typical journey through the ranks, working first as a reporter and then as a producer in Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa and New York before becoming news director for a Baltimore station. Her move to Washington -- the eighth-largest TV market in the country -- was facilitated by Laureen Ong, WTTG's former general manager.
"It might sound a little crazy," Green says, "but a woman may be a sharper judge of [news] content than a man. When you're a female manager, you're required to have the skill sets of both a man and a woman. As a woman growing up in a male-dominated business, you have to develop traits like aggression and competitiveness. But a woman has traits that a man might not develop. So she may be a little more sensitive in certain situations."
That, however, is not an argument for going it alone, she says: "There are times when I'm very glad there are lots of men in the room. It takes a community of brains to make the right decisions."