International Women’s Media Foundation

Being a good leader is like conducting a symphony: You don’t necessarily know how to play each instrument but you do know how to make the instruments work together to produce music.

This image, according to Jill Geisler, head of the Leadership and Management group leader at the Poynter Institute, illustrates how leaders see the big picture and get their teams involved and invested in their work.

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by Lindsey Wray

We all deal with conflict on a daily basis, and in a newsroom, it can be exacerbated by tight deadlines.

Consider a newspaper reporter who constantly turns in stories late. This would hold up editors and the copy desk and could even delay the production schedule of the newspaper. Avoiding the issue would make the problem worse and disrupt workflow. The reporter’s manger should plan to approach the reporter about why deadlines are being missed and how to best resolve the situation so that newspaper production can stay on track.

Difficult conversations, such as this one, involve the discussion – and hopefully resolution – of conflict. They can include everything from talking to someone about a missed deadline to laying someone off because of budget cuts.

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The IWMF is concerned for 2007 Courage in Journalism Award Winner Serkalem Fasil. Her publishing company was convicted June 11 by the Ethiopian High Court - along with two other publishers and four editors - on anti-state charges linked to coverage of the government’s handling of disputed parliamentary elections in 2005.

Fasil, a publisher who owned three newspapers at the time of her arrest in November 2005, could face heavy fines or have her company dissolved, according to CPJ. Fasil was acquitted in April.

Dawit Fasil, brother of Serkalem and deputy editor of one of the company’s newspapers, had also been released in April, but he has now been returned to prison. He faces up to three years of imprisonment on charges of “inciting the public through false rumors.”

• Read the CPJ alert.
• See the press release about this year’s IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winners.

Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho’s car was sabotaged May 8. Cacho was also threatened earlier this month when she testified at the trial of a pedophile.
Read (in Spanish) about the incident on Cacho’s website.

Howayda Taha Matwali, a producer for Al-Jazeera, was convicted May 1 on charges of harming Egypt’s national interest and falsely depicting events for her work on a documentary exposing police abuse. She was fined and sentenced to six months in prison. Matwali, of Qatar, also works as a reporter for the London-based daily Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Umida Niyazova, an independent journalist in Uzbekistan and a human rights advocate, was sentenced May 1 to seven years in prison. At a trial that was closed to the press, Niyazova was found guilty of charges of smuggling subversive literature and distributing foreign aid material that threatens national security. Niyazova, who has already spent more than three months in jail, will have 10 days to appeal the charges.
Read the CPJ alert.

As their presence in the blogosphere increases, female bloggers are facing increased threats. Women are targets of sexual harassment and other threats, which are often of a more explicit and malicious nature than those against men.
Read the article in The Washington Post.

by Lindsey Wray
Placing her hands on top of her head, Helen Donovan, executive editor at The Boston Globe, made a sweeping motion.
At the IWMF’s networking breakfast March 29 at the Globe, a roomful of journalists seemed slightly confused about this action.
Was her head itching? Had a bug flown into her hair?
Far from it. Instead, the gesture was symbolic—she was brushing away the glass after having helped to shatter the figurative glass ceiling.
Donovan is part of a generation of women who made great breakthroughs in gaining access to upper management jobs in journalism, an arena previously – and often still – dominated by men.
The IWMF invited her and five other prominent women journalists to share their perspectives in an informal setting with women journalists in Boston who continue to face gender gaps in the workplace and who are interested in learning how to move forward in their careers.
New forms of journalism, particularly on the Internet, can provide ways for women to make these advances, Donovan said.
“A sense of experimentation has really invigorated everybody,” she said.
But Ellen Goodman noted that blogs can create a virtual “good ‘ol boy” network, especially in political discussions.
“We still have a kind of his and hers news,” said Goodman, a syndicated columnist for the Globe.
To leverage this difference, Carole Simpson called for women and minorities to make up for the ground they’re starting to lose.
“The progress is starting to erode,” said Simpson, a former ABC News anchor who is now leader-in-residence at Emerson College.
She hopes to use her current position to motivate women to “get back into the pipeline” in the media industry.
Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, agreed with the need to engage both journalists and the public.
“The whole future of journalism is about connecting,” she said.
Moving a lot when she was growing up and spending her career in journalism taught Hume to always expect something different, a necessary skill for journalists, she said.
“You have to be dexterous; you have to be nimble; you have to be open-minded.”
Hume encountered such discrimination as being asked by a source when she was reporting for the Detroit Free Press why she was covering business instead of fashion.
“It was a wild frontier,” she said.
Women journalists are positioned to become media leaders, the journalists agreed at the IWMF breakfast, whether it involves forging through this frontier or walking on the broken glass of partially shattered glass ceilings.
Lindsey Wray is the IWMF’s communications assistant.

In honor of International Women’s Day, Maria Cristina Caballero, former director of investigations at Semana, a weekly news magazine in Colombia, wrote about former IWMF Courage in Journalism Award Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who was killed in October 2006.
Click here to read the article on PostGlobal.