‘When I started [in journalism], females were a little bit of a novelty,’ said The Morning Show co-host Kylie Gillies, in a 2013 interview with news.com. Some might call this an understatement. In 1986, when Gillies was a 17-year-old cadet, women represented less than one quarter of Australian television news presenters. At the time, Australian reporters…
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From the beginning, Nellie Bly was a woman not to be messed with. When she read an article in The Pittsburgh Dispatch entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’ – which was, according to the article, making babies and doing the household chores – she was angry enough to write a response to the paper under…
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‘In 1982 I reported on fighting between Polisario Front guerrillas and Moroccan troops in the Western Sahara, and in 1988 had an adrenaline-drenched experience when caught in a South African artillery attack, during Angola’s battle of Cuito Cuanavale.’ This is Jill Jolliffe, writing in Finding Santana, her book about travelling to meet an…
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Somayya Jabarti has made Saudi Arabian history as the nation’s first female newspaper editor, after being appointed to the top job at the national daily Saudi Gazette. English language broadsheet’s departing editor, Khaled Almaeena chose Jabarti for her strong work ethic. ‘It was not a question of gender but of merit that decided and earned…
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Women in the workplace is not a new concept. Neither are women in the media. Yet for some reason, both are governed by old-fashioned schools of thought. The issue of women in the media has been fairly prevalent recently, with studies showing the widening pay gap between female and male journalists, as well as…
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‘Since it’s your first time interviewing him, wear a skirt and you’ll be fine.’ This is the advice a female reporter was given as she planned for an interview with a police officer, which she passed on anonymously for the world to see. The majority of the tumblr fare I indulge in is ‘for the…
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To call Denise Leith’s What Remains a book of fiction wouldn’t be quite right but it isn’t non-fiction either. This incisive look into the world of war reporting is built around facts and actual events but Leith infuses her story with a gripping narrative and peppers it with characters so real you forget they are…
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Many aspiring journalists have one common problem. How do I get my foot in the door? How do I start my career? Any journalist will tell you that starting off is hard, and it requires a lot of work. But how to begin? Freelance journalists Joanne Brooker, Andrew McMillen and Dean Saffron stress to keep…
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I just finished a phone interview with a film director for an article I’m writing for next issue (don’t ask who, or which film, you’ll just have to wait for the mag to come out). Phone interviews are stressful: you don’t know when the batteries in your tape recorder are going to go flat, or…
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