What Happened to the Press Women?

I didn't go to the Virginia Press Women conference in Roanoke last Friday because even though I had received a postcard informing me I had won something, Roanoke is just too far to go. I am not a fan of that long ride down Interstate 81, and I made that trip last year to go to a conference in Blacksburg. Once a decade is enough.

I figured I'd find out what I won in the Saturday newspaper. But the Times-Dispatch didn't have a Saturday story, or a Sunday one that I could find online. I googled my name and came up with nothing new. Only the Fredericksburg paper had posted a story on Saturday, and that was about the people from the Fredericksburg area who won awards. If anyone else in the state did, that was not news in Fredericksburg.

So I went to my real source of information, Twitter, and posted a plea for information. Sunday night, the editor of the Richmond Good Life website, a news aggregator, tweeted back that the Virginia Press Women website had finally posted a press release. I had won first place for full color newsletters!

Yeh! But wait. There was no second place or third. I was in a class by myself. Apparently a full color newsletter is so expensive and useless, no one does them anymore. My nearest competitor was the George Washington Foundation, which had entered a spot color newsletter and also came in first in that very specific category without any competition.The more competitive fields were for web writing.

Then I realized the reason the Times-Dispatch had taken no interest in publishing this story. There were no winners from the Times-Dispatch. Back in the days when I yearned to be considered a Virginia Press Woman, the Times-Dispatch and Norfolk newspapers dominated these awards. No one from the Virginia Pilot won anything either.

I looked over the list again and found that out of 54 men (yes, there was one) and women winning awards from the Virginia Press Women, only six of them actually worked full time at newspapers, and those newspapers were the Farmville Herald, the Fredericksburg Freelance Star, and the Henrico Citizen. Media General, which owns a big block of newspapers in this state, had either not budgeted for contest entries or their female employees are in such fear of losing their jobs, they don't want to call attention to themselves?

Or maybe there are no women left working full-time for major newspapers. Twenty-four of the winners listed themselves as freelance writers. Seven did communications and public relations for colleges and universities. Twelve worked in communications for businesses, non-profits or government. One listed herself only as a web content librarian, which may be another word for freelance. Three were from magazines. One entry was in radio. 

Of the web category awards, only one winner worked for a newspaper. Two were magazine web pages, four were college web pages, nine were associated with businesses, nonprofits or government, and five were freelance, so there's no telling where their web writing or editing appeared. Does this mean I can start entering my blogs? (It turns out, yes.)

The "Press" in Virginia Press Women is dying as surely as newspapers. This organization needs to rename and rebrand itself if it wants to embrace a wider membership of young women entering the communications field. (They did by 2014!) The hottest job title these days is "social media manager." 

Weaning Ourselves Off the News Print

My husband survived another Sunday without the advertising inserts from the Sunday paper. That is his only interest in the Sunday paper, and it was so intense, after I finally let our Sunday-only subscription expire, he went to the 7-11 for three weeks to purchase the paper. I made him buy me a lottery ticket every time he went, so maybe his intense dislike of the lottery finally helped to wean him off the paper.

His argument, and that of others who have posted comments, was we recouped our investment in the Sunday paper by using the food coupons. That's possible, but cutting out and sorting the coupons was becoming as much of a chore as flipping through the Sunday sections looking for articles I was interested in reading -- which was always not many. I was down to reading just one comic, just the fake letters in the Parade section, and maybe an article in the Money section. The want ads were down to three or four pages at best.

News print is dirty, smeared and difficult to read. The size of the newspaper is difficult to handle. Who has a kitchen table these days where they spread out this huge paper, and flip through the pages? Who even has a leisurely Sunday to do that? With the end of blue laws, Sunday is a major shopping day. You can even go to Ukrop's (uh...Martin's) now. I would come back as a subscriber in a second if the Times-Dispatch went to a daily tabloid format, but as many times as I tell them they need to imitate the New York Daily News and the New York Post, they ignore me. Even though we don't have subways except for sandwiches, we are a commuter society and if print survives, it's going to have to be as a more portable format.

But back to those suggestions that the Sunday paper pays for itself through coupons. No, it doesn't. If you are married to a shopaholic, the Sunday paper ad inserts, especially from Best Buy and hhGregg, were temptations to buy things you didn't previously know you wanted. That last Sunday paper he bought actually cost me $375 because a Craftsman rolling on wheels toolbox he wanted was on sale at Sears. It has been two weeks now and there are still no tools in that toolbox, and probably never will be. Maybe a few will go in eventually, but then they'll drift back to the last place they were used, and eventually they will disappear or rust up from being left out in the rain. The toolbox is a promise to get organized that will be broken. I have been through this many times before.

At least the Sunday paper will no longer be a guilty party in this.