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."