Women in journalism and media professions

Who is Women in journalism and media professions?

As journalism became a profession, women were restricted by custom and law from access to journalism occupations, and faced significant discrimination within the profession. Nevertheless, women operated as editors, reporters, sports analyst and journalists even before the 1890s.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, women began agitating for the right to work as professional journalists in North America and Europe; by many accounts, the first notable woman in political journalism was Jane Grey Swisshelm. A former correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, she persuaded President Millard Fillmore to open the gallery in congress so that she could report on congressional news. Prior to Swisshelm, Horace Greeley had employed another noteworthy woman in journalism, Margaret Fuller, who covered international news. Nellie Bly became known for her investigative reporting at the New York World. She was one of the first female journalists of her era to report by going undercover.

While many female reporters in the 1800s and early 1900s were restricted to society reporting and were expected to cover the latest in food or fashion, there were a few women who reported on subjects that were considered the domain of male reporters. One example was Ina Eloise Young. In 1907, Miss Young was said to be the only female sports editor. She worked in Colorado for the Trinidad Chronicle-News, and her areas of expertise were baseball, football, and horse racing. She covered the 1908 World's Series, the only woman of her time to do so. Another example of a woman in a non-traditional job was Jennie Irene Mix: when radio broadcasting became a national obsession in the early 1920s, she was one of the few female radio editors at a magazine: a former classical pianist and a syndicated music critic who wrote about opera and classical music in the early 1920s, Miss Mix became the radio editor at Radio Broadcast magazine, a position she held from early 1924 until her sudden death in April 1925.