Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2007

Abstract

This project started during a Women and Mass Media course at Eastern Illinois

University taught by Dr. Sally Turner. The class visited Marion Best, publisher and

owner of The News-Progress in Sullivan, Illinois . From this visit, comes this study.

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This study found that the number of Illinois female publishers has not quite doubled since 1900 from 34 to 63 . However the percentage of female publishers has skyrocketed from 2 to 19 percent. Three female publishers in Illinois were interviewed about their experiences as women who occupy a position of leadership to gain insight into the challenges of leadership from the female perspective and to discuss why there are so few female newspaper publishers . The interviews included topics such as decision-making, mentoring, and the evolution of female journalists' rol es in the workplace. It was found that female publishers share similar goals with their male counterparts, but that how each sex achieves those goals, however, differs . The female publishers, also, tended to make decisions based on their experiences as opposed to gender. While the interviewees did not have mentors at their jobs, each had a female family member who filled that role. Overall, it was found that women today have a better chance at advancing up the corporate ladder in a newspaper than their predecessors.

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