“In Journalism, We Are All Men”

Abstract

This study uses qualitative data to examine how male and female professionals in newsrooms experience and vocalize gender both in their lifeworlds and in media production in general. The research was based on semi-structured interviews with 18 Portuguese journalists. The responses were analysed through phenomenological and feminist lenses and indicated the issues men and women considered salient or negligible within our realms of inquiry. The study used the lived experience of the media professionals to identify two clusters of meaning that help explain how material practices and norms in journalism are lived and understood in the newsroom: gender views in journalism and gender differences in day-to-day professional life. Overall, the findings confirm that organizational factors and the traditional gender system play important roles in journalists’ attitudes and perceptions about the role of gender in their work. The results are significant because they show how gender is simultaneously embodied and denied by both female and male journalists in a process of phenomenological “typification” and adoption of a “natural attitude” towards the gender system that may prevent the disclosure of new possibilities and understandings of the objective social world and of our gender relations.

KEYWORDS:

• feminist media studies
• gender in the newsroom
• interviews
• journalism
• phenomenology
• women in journalism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the managing editors of the two newsrooms who accepted the project's team participant observation as well as all the journalists who kindly took the time for our long interviews. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and insightful feedback on the first version.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This article draws from a larger research project which also included participant observation in two national multimedia newsrooms. For purposes of anonymity all the names of interviewees were changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [grant number PTDC/IVC‐COM/4881/2012].