Journalism

Copyright & 2007 SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol. 8(4): 449–473 DOI: 10.1177/1464884907078659
ARTICLE

The journalist, the housewife,

the citizen and the press
Women and men as sources in local news
narratives

& Karen Ross

University of Liverpool, UK

ABSTRACT

The use of sources in news narratives is an extremely important part of not only the
story’s construction but also of its orientation and, ultimately, the point of view being
supported in a given story. The sly deceit concealed within journalists’ use of sources
as apparently independent and authoritative commentators enables the journalist to
masquerade as a mere conveyance of others’ perspectives while actually peddling a
particular viewpoint by the choice of speaker and the choice of quote. This study inter-
rogates the content of three English regional newspapers over a 10-week period, up to,
during and after the British general election in 2005, in order to identify gender differ-
ences in the sources used. It argues that, as with the national press, men are more than
twice as likely as women to be quoted as sources and that women journalists are no
more likely to source women than male colleagues. It concludes that a newsroom
culture which privileges elite and other (white) male voices appears to exert a greater
influence and conformity over who ‘counts’ as an authoritative voice than any indi-
vidual newsworker’s proclivities to more accurately reflect their views of the diverse
local community.
KEY WORDS & citizens & elites & news sources & public opinion & women

Introduction

In the last few years, there has been an ongoing and sustained attack on the
increasing tendency for journalists to interpret the news for us rather than
reporting it ‘straight’ (Langer, 1997; Sparks and Tulloch, 2000) and on their
use of points of view which privilege elite voices and perspectives (Kim and
Weaver, 2003). Although these criticisms have been particularly levelled against
political news coverage (Ross, 2002; Franklin, 2003), especially parliamentary
450 Journalism 8(4)

debates, the journalist’s interpretive lens is also brought to bear across the wider
news canvas. Researching the news industry is an open-ended and fascinating
endeavour, but this article is concerned with one very specific aspect, namely
the sources used in newspaper stories. A cursory glance at any newspaper
demonstrates that a majority of mainstream news stories, other than editorials,
round-ups and opinion pieces, routinely include either a quotation from a
source or some paraphrasing of a source’s words. The use of sources is thus an
extremely important part of both the story’s construction but also its orien-
tation and, ultimately, the point of view being supported in a given story
(Tuchman, 1972). The sly deceit concealed within journalists’ use of sources
as apparently independent and authoritative commentators enables the jour-
nalist to masquerade as a mere conveyance of others’ perspectives while actually
peddling a particular viewpoint by the choice of speaker and the choice of
quote.
Importantly, in the wider context of news content and news production,
questions of gender bias have been consistently raised over past decades both
in terms of the restricted range of story types in which women appear (Tuchman
et al., 1978; European Commission, 1999; WACC, 2000) but also in relation to
women’s relatively subordinate position within mainstream newsrooms
(Gallagher, 1995; Meehan and Riordan, 2002; De Bruin and Ross, 2004:
Mahtani, 2005). This article is concerned with the ways in which gender is
implicated in not only the use of news sources but also the relationship between
the sex of journalists and their use of female and male sources in the stories they
write. It takes a case study approach, sampling three English regional news-
papers whose content is interrogated using a gendered frame analysis as the
primary explanatory framework. It begins by discussing the broader context
within which this study is situated, before moving on to a consideration of the
case study itself, and then discusses the findings and draws some preliminary
conclusions and suggestions for further research.

Framing and agenda-setting: the national and the local

Much of the media scholarship which has focused on the news industry has
tended to view the sector in mostly negative terms when it comes to evaluating
the media’s role as information-giver and advocate for the public sphere. This is
largely because of the commonplace (and commonsense) view that news-
workers, through a decision-making process which deliberately selects some
stories and excludes others, frame and set the news agenda, determine what
we see, read and hear (Entman, 1989; Bennett, 1990; Dearing and Rogers,
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 451

1996; Iyengar, 2001; McCombs, 2004). The relatively uncontroversial theory

that has emerged from studies of news over the past decades suggests that the
‘frames’ within which stories are worked contain particular ideological biases,
which the news consumer is presented with as simple ‘truth’ (Eldridge, 1995;
Philo, 1999; Hardt, 2004). And it is precisely this masking of artifice by passing
it off as apparent ‘reality’ which makes journalism more art than craft: it is the
pretence of offering us an unvarnished and unmediated truth which gives the
practice of journalism its dangerous power. Theoretical and analytical exposi-
tions on the framing, priming and agenda-setting proclivities of the mass
media are legion. Although there is some disagreement over which aspects are
mere subsidiaries – is priming an extension of agenda-setting (Kim et al., 2002)
or the other way round (Price and Tewksbury, 1997)? – there is general agree-
ment that the news agenda is a deliberate construction, even if the direction
and purpose of story selection is rather more contentious. For feminist media
scholars, the persistent and almost exclusive framing of women as victims
(usually of male violence), eye candy or the mother/sister/wife of a newsworthy
man constitutes yet another layer of the news media onion which incorporates
patriarchy within the hegemonic practices of mainstream newsworkers (Carter
et. al., 1998; Myers, 1999; WACC, 2000; Byerly and Ross, 2005).
But if mainstream (national) media stand accused of framing the news in
ways which belie its constructed nature, is the local press infected by the same
journalistic sleights of hand? Or is the content of the Belfast Telegraph or the
Wolverhampton Times less deterministic in its handling of the local news
agenda? Can we perhaps see evidence that the theory of public or so-called
civic journalism which has been talked up in the USA is manifesting itself
between the covers of Britain’s local press, a prospect which seems more likely
to occur in the local than the national media because of their less frenzied
requirement to cover the big stories? In the USA, the most legitimate examples
of a real civic journalism have occurred through local and ‘street’ newspapers,
with journalists actively collaborating with the community and pressure
groups to produce more ‘meaningful’ journalism, often focused around specific
campaigns (Beaudry, 1996; Howley, 2003; S. R. Miller, 2004). Whilst such efforts
at public involvement are not always quite as collaborative as the theory would
suggest (Woodstock, 2002), and while local strategies of inclusion are unlikely
to cross over to the national press (Platon and Deuze, 2003), nor more evenly
present the voices of women and men, the aspirations of a more civic journalism
are nonetheless attractive in what they could contribute to a re-engaged local
democracy. But are we getting anywhere close to this in our own local news-
papers? Are the people really speaking in the Hartlepool Gazette and the Newquay
Recorder? If Hillary Clinton praised the local press for being better prepared than
452 Journalism 8(4)

their national counterparts in asking more substantive and more penetrating

questions during her encounters with them (Stein, 1994), does an interest in
background depth extend to listening to more mundane voices, to our voices,
men and women? If women parliamentarians say that local press exposure is
much more important to them than an interview with a lobby journalist
(Ross, 2002), does this translate into national politics with a local flavour?
There is certainly some evidence to suggest that non-official sources such as
campaign groups and trades unions can gain considerable (local) media pro-
filing when they give national issues a local twist (Anderson, 1997; Manning,
2001), and the incoming (2005) president of Britain’s Newspaper Society, Sir
Nicholas Hewitt insists that:

. . . no other media has the resources to collect and distribute local news in the
depth that we have. I am sure the figures show that the more local the news is,
the stronger the title. But it is not just about local news, it is about what local
news we carry and how we present it. (Hewitt cited in Press Gazette, 28 July 2005)

While the sentiments are fine, is the evidence compelling? A number of studies
which focus on the relationship between news media and their consumers often
suggest a fundamental mismatch between what each sees as the important
issues of the day (see McChesney, 1999; Rosen, 1999; Wilkins, 2000; Franklin,
2004), although obviously not so problematic as to stop people consuming.
But, for example, women news consumers have persistently complained about
the macho nature of the news (Ross, 1995). Perhaps there really is a better under-
standing of local readers’ needs amongst local journalists because, unlike the
nationals, local journalists are also local readers: crucially, are local. One of the
obvious ways in which local media differ from the nationals is in their specific
local appeal, their ability to take advantage of their very localism, and to
engage readers with news they really want, about stories which feature their
neighbours, their community, their local services and, at certain times, their
elected representatives.

How to make source

Although the news media is often conceptualized (at least by its own members)
as the contemporary manifestation of the public sphere as idealized by
Habermas, few media scholars would argue that ‘the public’ has much of a role
in this so-called ‘public’ sphere. In an analysis of coverage of the 2003 Welsh
Assembly Elections, Thomas et al. (2004) argue that the most routine way in
which the public were framed was ‘apathetic’, a descriptor derived from the
imagination of journalists rather than revealed by talking to members of the
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 453

public themselves. Similarly, in Lewis et al.’s (2004) analysis of television repre-

sentations of public opinion and citizenship, they found that citizens were
mostly shown in passive rather than active roles. This rather classic example of
framing results in a public constructed as disinterested (see also D. Miller,
2004) and accorded scant credit as narrators of their own stories. Creating this
particular rendition of ‘the public’ stands in clear contrast to those, actual,
other publics who are anything but passive observers such as anti-war and
anti-poverty demonstrators and voting refuseniks (Moore, 1996)
A political environment which has witnessed a catastrophic decline in
voting over the past 20 years, but saw 200,000 people support Live8 in Hyde
Park in July 2005, less than two months after the worst turnout for a British
general election for 80 years (Observer, 8 May 2005), is not one of public
apathy but of outrage. Although the British media certainly did cover the
Live8 event itself, journalists were much more reluctant to report the broader
politico-economic context within which Live8 occurred, including the anti-
poverty protests, marches and rallies in and around Edinburgh before and
during the G8 summit. There was scarcely any coverage of these very obvious
demonstrations of public politics (most likely) because the news media’s general
disposition results in the privileging of official rather than dissident voices,
traditional views over the radical (Bennett, 1990; Ketchum, 2004; Baron, 2005;
Day and Golan, 2005). There is a clear reluctance on the part of the news media
to cover protest politics in anything other than negative terms (Phillips, 2000;
Dolan, 2003), with some journalists now conflating ‘protest’ with ‘terrorism’
(Featherstone et al., 2004).
In general, the Western media’s role in reporting what has become known
as ‘9/11’ and the recent war in Iraq has generated significant and sustained
criticism precisely because of the mostly uncritical and pro-war coverage and
marginalization of non-elite and community voices (Zelizer and Allan, 2002;
Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005). In their analysis of
conflict coverage, Lee and Maslog (2005) identify attributes that use either a
‘war’ or a ‘peace’ frame and which include a dichotomous framing of good vs.
evil and a favouring of elite voices when the more frequently used ‘war’ frame
is employed. Ten years earlier, Steele’s (1995) study of the use of sources in the
first Gulf War found that journalists used sources who reflected their own valua-
tion of what an expert was and whose comments focused on the who rather than
the why. Twenty years earlier still, Sigal (1973) showed that during the preceding
two decades, nearly three-quarters of primary news sources used by the New York
Times and the Washington Post were ‘routine’, principally government officials.
However, the debate around bias is not entirely one-sided, and some com-
mentators, notably Tumber and Palmer (2004), suggest that there exists a
more diverse account of war reporting in some areas of the news media. How-
454 Journalism 8(4)

ever, more generally, organizational pressures to get copy ready quickly also
encourage journalists to use familiar and non-controversial sources, falling
back on individuals (mostly men) whose place in the economic and/or political
hierarchy provides instant status (Powers and Fico, 1994; Ross, 2002). This con-
sistent use of such ‘legitimate’, high-status sources is described by Bennett
(1990) as an ‘indexing’ norm, so that even when more diverse views are
reported, the discursive debate is never allowed to stray beyond the borders of
institutional tolerance.
Who is invited to speak as commentators on and in the news says crucially
important things about who ‘counts’ in society, whose voices have legitimacy
and status. If, ‘news reports are based on a selective articulation of certain
voices about a given topic’ (Kim and Weaver, 2003: 125), then the journalist’s
power in inviting (or preventing) these voices is considerable. It is not just the
reporting of a story which matters, but the choice of source influences both its
shape and its orientation, casually but irrevocably promoting a particular per-
spective which often goes unchallenged if the balance which allegedly under-
pins the journalistic code of conduct is absent. The use of sources enables
newsworkers to influence the agenda precisely through the astute use of particu-
lar, often elite, and mostly establishment (and male) sources such as govern-
ment spokespeople, politicians and business leaders whose status connotes
authority to speak (Sigal, 1973; Hallin et al., 1993; Franklin, 2003) if not neces-
sarily truth to say. The hierarchy of news values identified by Gans (1979)
more than 25 years ago, which made clear that some sources were more equal
than others, is alive and well and still living in the 21st-century journalist’s tool-
box: citizens are simply not as equal as government spokespeople and women
are almost never as equal as men, although there is at least a contemporary
debate emerging about notions of legitimacy in sourcing and how news media
might provide better access to the ‘less routine’ voice.

Source for the goose?

The bias towards elite sources means there is little room for other kinds of
voices, not just community voices but, specifically, the voices of women,
minorities and the general public, as well as challengers to the status quo. And
if Joe Public struggles to register on the journalistic radar, Joanne Public is
almost entirely invisible as citizen although she is occasionally asked to speak
in her role as mother (Stephenson, 1998; Wykes, 1998; WACC, 2000) The
great disappointment is that even if we did accept (even on face value) the
news media’s lazy insistence that women feature less in stories because they
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 455

rarely occupy positions of authority, this obviously isn’t true when it comes to
‘being’ an ordinary person, when it comes to being Joanne Public.
Any number of feminist media studies suggest that the composition of
newsroom staff in terms of balance of women and men influences the content
produced by that newsroom: if not always a different focus, then certainly a
different tone and style, because women have different experiences in the
world and thus bring a different perspective (Steiner, 1998; De Bruin, 2000;
Melin-Higgins, 2004). Rodgers and Thorson (2003) found that female and
male journalists practised a differentiated journalism in terms of style, tone
and sources used, but that these differences were most marked in smaller news-
rooms and where there was a more even balance between women and men
newsworkers. This suggests that larger newsrooms with a predominance of
male staff strongly encourage a conformist outlook, which produces hegemonic
journalistic output in terms of ‘routinizing’ a male-ordered frame, a finding
echoed by other studies of gendered journalism (see also van Zoonen, 1998;
Robinson, 2004).
If content in some form or other is influenced by the sex of the journalist
writing it, and if sources are a crucial aspect of story orientation, then there
could be a relationship between the sex of the journalist and her or his choice
of source. Encouraging a diversity of views amongst news writers makes good
business sense since there is some evidence to suggest that women news con-
sumers are more engaged by the more personalized, intimate and less adversarial
approach that women journalists are considered to promote (van Zoonen, 1998;
Peiser, 2000; Ross, 2005). One of the ways in which women journalists ‘do’
journalism which is identifiably different to their male colleagues is in their
use of sources. In most studies, men dominate as sources and, in their own
work, Shoemaker and Reese (1996) found that men were twice as likely as
women to be featured as subjects or sources in newspaper articles (see also
DeLano Brown et al., 1987; Liebler and Smith, 1997). Similarly, Zoch and
VanSlyke Turk (1998) looked at the topic focus of stories in relation to source
selection in three US newspapers over a 10-year period (1986–96) and suggested
that women rarely feature in news of national or international importance.
Armstrong’s analysis of gender as an influencing factor in the use of female
and male sources found that male sources were much more prevalent than
female ones. Interestingly and optimistically, both Zoch and VanSlyke Turk
(1998) and Armstrong (2004) found that women journalists were far more
likely to use women as sources in their items than their male colleagues. Does
this finding also hold for the local press and in particular, the local press in
Britain?
456 Journalism 8(4)

Rationale and methods

If we accept the existence of even the most benign form of agenda-setting on

the part of the local press, then who is allowed to speak in the news is just as
important as which stories are selected for inclusion. Who speaks matters
because access to the media is access to influence. Even in so-called non-political
stories, the people chosen to comment on a new building development or the
closure of a hospital or the incidence of distraction burglaries help to shape
how issues are (perhaps should be) considered and viewed, and contribute to
an ‘understanding’ of whose views are important.
This study, then, is principally concerned with two related questions: first,
are women and men differently represented as (local) newspaper sources, in
gross volume terms, in status terms and by story topic; and secondly, does the
sex of a journalist influence her or his selection of women and men as sources
in their copy? A third interest of this article lies in identifying the balance of
‘elite’ sources and those of the general public, again differentiated by gender.
In order to explore these questions, I sampled three local newspapers published
in the Midlands region of England: the Birmingham Post, the Coventry Evening
Telegraph and the Leicester Mercury. I chose to analyse local rather than national
newspapers precisely because the local and regional press claim greater freedom
to present local stories of local interest and could thus be expected to use a wider
and more diverse range of sources. Given that mainstream journalists will often
suggest that they don’t source women because they rarely have status authority,
we could expect to see more women used as sources in the local and regional
press precisely because they do occupy status roles at local level and because
we could expect the local press to source more ‘community’ voices, including
those of women.
Given that the literature relating to the national press suggests that public
voices are more likely to be sought out during election campaigns, the monitor-
ing period for the case study was chosen to include the run-up to the 2005
British general election, the election campaign period itself, and the period
immediately after the election in order to identify if this was also the case for
the local press. I monitored the press over a 10-week period, choosing one day
each week for analysis, using Monday 13 March in the first week, Tuesday
21 March in the second week and so on, and continuing until Friday 16 May,
monitoring a total of 10 weekdays over the 10-week period. The three news-
papers were chosen mostly as a convenience sample as I had ready access to all
three, but also because they share a broad regional geographic boundary, serve
broadly similar communities and have similar circulations in relation to popu-
lation size.
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 457

As this study is interested in the generality of news stories and their sources,
rather than particular types of story or particular categories of source, the first 20
stories in each newspaper were coded in terms of story type, gender of source/s,
status of source/s and other variables such as sex of the reporter. Occasionally,
fewer than 20 stories were coded for an individual newspaper because news
items ran out early on and were replaced by features, lifestyle or sports sections.
For the purposes of this study, I only coded those items which were ‘straight’
news stories including ‘soft’ news, but excluded news summaries, editorials,
opinion pieces and letters to the editor. I also filtered out all stories which did
not include at least one quoted source and ignored those stories which were
‘national’ rather than ‘local’ in flavour. A total of 30 newspapers were thus
monitored (three newspapers each day over 10 monitoring days) and a total of
538 articles were analysed and 925 individual sources coded.
At this point it is perhaps worth saying a few words about the vital statistics
of each of the selected newspapers. The Birmingham Post was first launched (as
the Birmingham Daily Post) in 1857 and is now part of the Trinity Mirror group
and has a circulation of around 13,000. It is a daily paper published Monday
to Saturday and at the time of writing (autumn 2005), has a woman editor,
Fiona Alexander. It styles itself as a ‘thoughtful’ paper – it is the only regional
broadsheet in Birmingham – and claims to be more ‘cerebral’ than its sister
paper, the Birmingham Mail: its own publicity says that it has the ‘business
readership’ at the heart of the paper.1 The Coventry Evening Telegraph was
founded in 1891 as Coventry’s first daily newspaper and is also now a member
of the Trinity Mirror Group. It has a circulation of around 58,000 and is an
evening paper, published Monday to Saturday. It has an all-male editorial
team (Editor: Alan Kirby) and has a readership profile which is split one-third,
two-thirds, ABC1 and C2DE. The Leicester Mercury was first published in 1874
and is now a member of the Northcliffe Group. It has a circulation of around
84,400 and is an evening paper published Monday to Saturday. Its senior edi-
torial team of 11 staff (Editor: Nick Carter) includes two women (Deputy
Editor and Features) and its readership profile is very similar to that of the
Coventry Evening Telegraph.

Findings and analysis

To begin with, then, what kinds of stories make it into the local press? Table 1
demonstrates the huge variety of story themes across the three sampled news-
papers.
As we would imagine, the news agenda for the local press is very different to
that of the nationals, as can be seen here, with ‘human interest’ stories being by
458 Journalism 8(4)

Table 1 Story category by newspaper title

Story category Newspaper title

Birmingham Coventry Leicester Total

Post Evening Mercury (%)
(%) Telegraph (%)
(%)

Human interest 10 31 23 23 (122)

Employment/economy 17 10 6 11 (59)
General crime 7 8 9 8 (43)
Environment 8 7 10 8 (43)
Health/well-being 10 4 8 7 (37)
Education/training 6 6 5 5
Transport/traffic 4 2 5 4
Arts/culture 3 4 6 4
Burglary/theft 1 3 3 3
General election 9 <1< 1 3
Charity event 1 6 3 3
Death 4 1 3 3
Musical event 3 5 – 3
Sports-related – 3 3 2
Politics 2 1 2 2
Enterprise 4 2 1 2
Pets/animals 1 <1< 2 2
Faith-based 1 1 1 1
Community consultation - – 2 1
Violent crime 5 <1< <1< 1
Sex-related (discrimination) 2 – – <1<
Miscellaneous* 2 4 6 4
Grand Total 100% (157) 100% (209) 100% (172) 100% (538)

Note: * The miscellaneous category included: industrial action/complaints; nuisance crime; council
negligence, sex-related crimes, local defence/crime prevention, local disaster, and race-related stories;
each of these categories comprised less than 1% of all responses.

far the most frequent story category. Such stories have indicative headlines such
as: ‘Charity gives Iraq baby care lifeline’ (Birmingham Post, 14 March); ‘Retire-
ment will be perfect fit for shoe salesman’ (Leicester Mercury, 14 March); ‘Flying
the flag for VE celebration’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 15 April). There is a
clear clustering of story types between the three newspapers, suggesting that
there is a broadly accepted ‘sense’ of what a local newspaper should contain
amongst local journalists. What is perhaps surprising about the breakdown of
story categories here is the relatively low number of stories which are either
about politics in general (9 stories) or the general election in particular (5 stories),
given that the monitoring occurred before, during and after the 2005 British
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 459

general election. Whilst we would not expect the local press to be covering
national political or election stories to any great extent, it would be reasonable
to expect to see stories about local campaigns and candidates, but only the
Birmingham Post had a sufficient volume of stories about the general election
to make this category one of its top five most popular. The Birmingham Post
certainly has the feel and style of a broadsheet newspaper, unlike the CET and
the LM which are very clearly marked out as local red tops, including their use
of relatively short articles, a high number of unattributed items and a large
number of photographs and advertisements. The Birmingham Post, on the
other hand, tends to longer articles and often includes ‘national’ stories so
these might be some of the reasons for its more ‘serious’ engagement with
politics.
We would also expect that members of the public would be more heavily
represented in local news stories during a general election campaign because
of the presence of opinion polls and surveys, which are a staple of the national
press during this time. Figure 1 shows that this was also the case with the local
press, although to a more limited extent, although it does show a steady rise
in the use of ‘ordinary’ people up to the week of the election itself, and then a
decline.
As far as the news sources themselves are concerned, of the 925 attributed
sources analysed, the Coventry Evening Telegraph used slightly more sources
across their articles than the other two, and the Birmingham Post slightly less,
in proportion to their total number in the sample. On the other hand, the BP
used a rather more diverse range of sources than either of the other two.

45
Female
40 Male
35 All
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
ar

ar

ar

pr

pr

pr

ay

ay

ay
Ap
-M

-M

-M

-A

-A

-A

-M
4-

11

18

25

2-

9-
14

21

28

16

Figure 1 Frequency of members of the public used as sources by date

460 Journalism 8(4)

Table 2 Status of source and newspaper title

Status of source Newspaper title

Birmingham Coventry Leicester Total

Post Evening Mercury (%)
(%) Telegraph (%)
(%)

Business person 8 13 13 112 (12%)

Joe Public* 5 12 17 111 (12%)
Joanne Public* 5 13 16 112 (12%)
Professional** 13 9 7 88 (9%)
Local councillor 5 8 9 68 (7%)
Local government employee 4 9 7 65 (7%)
Police officer 5 8 5 60 (6%)
Charity/voluntary sector 6 6 4 5
Campaign/consumer group
Education (teacher/lecturer) 8 5 4 5
Criminal justice 6 4 4 4
MP/PPC 11 2 1 4
Professional assoc. 8 <1< <1< 3
Events organizer 1 3 2 2
Trades union 3 2 <1< 2
Religious group/organization <1< 1 2 <2<
Tie-in to story 1 <1< 2 <2<
Emergency services <1< <1< 2 1
Mother <1< 2 2 1
Civil servant <1< <1< 2 1
Father 2 <1< <1< <1<
Miscellaneous 2 <1< – <1<
Total 236 (100%) 374 (100%) 316 (100%) 925 (100%)

Note: * Joe and Joanne Public were coded where the source was not described by a specific
occupational descriptor
** The kinds of professional occupations coded here included GPs, hospital consultants and managers,
teachers and lecturers; where other occupations were frequently mentioned, they were given their own
code, e.g. police officers, local government workers, MPs
*** The miscellaneous category included: alleged criminal, celebrity, political party worker, victim and
student; each of these categories comprised less than 1% of all responses

Whilst Table 2 shows that members of the public are better represented as
sources in this sample of news stories than is demonstrated elsewhere (Haney
and Green, 2004), they still only comprise less than a quarter of all sources,
with far more preference given to ‘elite’ voices2 such as those from the business
world (usually managers of businesses), professional occupations such as GPs,
lawyers, and teachers, together with councillors and local government workers.3
Table 3 3 Story category (top 10) by status of source used (top 5, plus Joanne and Joe Public)

Story type Status of source

Police officer ‘Professional’ Councillor Local gov Business Joanne Public Joe Public
spokesperson

Charity event 1 4 4 1 1 3 8
Environment 2 4 5 7 9 3 1
Musical event 1 1 1 2 9 4 3
Sports-related 1 2 1 4 10 4 3
Arts/culture 2 8 1 3 1 5 8
Human interest 13 19 14 10 23 33 35
Employment/economy 2 8 8 3 20 14 7
Education/training 2 4 2 2 13 6 6
Health/well being 5 16 3 4 2 7 4
General crime* 13 3 7 2 4 7 12
Grand Total (460) 42 (9%) 69 (15%) 46 (10%) 38 (8%) 92 (20%) 86 (19%) 87 (19%)

Note: * Excluding burglary/theft

Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press
461
462 Journalism 8(4)

As before, the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Leicester Mercury have more or
less the same categories of most frequently cited source, whereas the Birmingham
Post is more likely (than the other two), to use MPs or political candidates and
representatives of professional associations such as Chambers of Commerce.
This further emphasizes BP ’s rather different sense of itself, as somewhere
between a local and a national newspaper.
What Table 3 makes clear is that human interest stories attract the largest
volume of sources and, unsurprisingly, is also the story type in which members
of the public are most likely to be asked their opinion or to be quoted. There is
very little difference between the volume of women and men sources in this
category of story, although there are clear differences when the next most
frequent category is considered. For women, their second most frequent appear-
ance is in stories relating to employment and the economy which, on the face of
it, is a little surprising. However, a number of these stories relate to the closure of
the MG Rover car plant at Longbridge in Birmingham, where the wives and
partners of men made redundant were interviewed on the impact the closure
will have on their families. For male members of the public, the second most
frequent story topic in which they were asked to comment was ‘general
crime’, as it was for police officers and councillors.
If we begin to drill down the data a little more, we quickly find that there
are clear gender skews both in the status of female and male sources, but also
in terms of the kinds of stories in which women and men appear.
What we see from Table 4 is that women are three times more likely to be
asked to speak as members of the public than men and they have a significant
presence as education workers and as spokespeople for the charitable and volun-
tary sector, areas of work which are typically undertaken by women. By contrast,
men are twice as likely as women to be asked to speak as business people, three
times more likely to speak as local councillors and nearly three times as likely to
speak as police officers. But these gender-biased proclivities on the part of
journalists are not a consequence of women’s absence from these occupations.
For example, of 68 local councillors used as sources, 60 were men (89%), despite
the fact that in 2004, 29 per cent of all councillors were women,4 an average
which is more or less constant across the three regions in which the sample
newspapers are published. Similarly, of 58 police officers used as sources,
9 (15%) were women, even though in the West Midlands Constabulary, an
area which covers two of the three sample newspapers, 24 per cent of police offi-
cers are women.5 So, additional factors must be determining the selection of
particular sources by journalists, such as going persistently for the usual (male)
suspects, or simply denying women’s authority to speak by not inviting them
to do so.
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 463

Table 4 Status and sex of sources

Status of source Sex of source

Female (%) Male (%)

Business person 8 16
Joanne Public 36 –
Professional 7 12
Joe Public – 14
Local councilor 3 10
Police officer 3 8
Education (teacher/lecturer) 9 4
Local government employee 5 6
Charity/voluntary sector
Campaign/consumer group 11 3
MP/PPC 3 4
Criminal justice 2 5
Mother 5 –
Trades Union 1 2
Professional assoc. <1< 3
Tie-in to story 2 1
Events organizer 2 2
Emergency services <1< 2
Religious group/organization <1< 2
Miscellaneous 1 <3<
Total 302 (33%) 623 (67%)

Note: * The miscellaneous category included: civil servant; father;

alleged criminal; celebrity, political party worker; government minister;
and victim; each of these categories comprised less than 1% of all
responses

The absolute number of sources is still heavily biased towards men so that
even in the category of ‘human interest’ which appears to favour women, the
actual numbers of women and men quoted in these 122 stories are 75 and
138 respectively. In only two categories (local celebrity and sex-discrimination)
do absolute numbers of women sources (4, 3) exceed men (3, 1). In only one
category (pets/animals) do women and men achieve parity (4 sources each),
but everywhere else, women are outnumbered by a ratio of at least 1:2, and
often an even higher ratio than this. It is only as ‘members of the public’
where the absolute numbers of women and men sourced across all story types
are almost identical (112 and 111 respectively). It is extremely disappointing
to find, on average, the same gender skew in local press reporting as has been
found in studies of national newspapers, that is, 1:2 (women to men) whereas
464 Journalism 8(4)

Table 5 Sex of source by story category

Story category Sex of source

Female (%) Male (%)

Human interest 74 (25) 143 (23)

Employment/economy 32 (11) 68 (11)
General crime 20 (7) 56 (9)
Environment 24 (8) 50 (8)
Health/well-being 17 (6) 37 (6)
Arts/culture 15 (5) 24 (4)
Music event 12 (4) 23 (4)
Education/training 20 (7) 24 (4)
Transport 12 (4) 25 (4)
Sports-related 12 (4) 19 (3)
Burglary/theft 6 (2) 18 (3)
Charity event 12 (4) 18 (3)
Enterprise 6 (2) 19 (3)
Various other 40 (13) 59 (8)
Total 302 (100%) 623 (100%)

it could be expected that, relieved of the need to slavishly report the major
national stories, journalists might look a little more imaginatively at their
local community for source inspiration.
As well as gender skews in terms of source selection more generally, there
are also some (albeit small) differences in the kinds of stories in which women
and men feature, as Table 5 shows, although these are less marked than
gender differences in status. This is quite a positive finding as it suggests that
journalists are moving away from the habit of only asking women to talk
about health and only asking men to talk about the economy.
Importantly, a preponderance of male journalists in regional newsrooms
cannot be ‘blamed’ for this persistent disavowal of women’s views, as Table 6
shows. Of the total sample of 538 articles analysed for this study, 332 (62%)
had clearly identified writers and Table 6 shows the distribution of writers and
number of articles across the three newspapers, disaggregated by gender.
It is clear that the Coventry Evening Telegraph and Leicester Mercury have more
or less equal numbers of women and men journalists (albeit based on attributed
author articles only), with the Birmingham Post appearing to conform to the
gender skew evident in the national newspapers. Perhaps their more ‘serious’
style requires them to have more serious (i.e. men!) journalists, just like their
national colleagues. Whilst some research suggests that women journalists are
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 465

Table 6 Newspaper title and sex of journalist (attributed articles only)

Sex of journalist Newspaper title

Birmingham Coventry Leicester Total

Post Evening Mercury
Telegraph

Female 24 (28%) 71 (50%) 53 (52%) 148 (44%)

Male 64 (72%) 72 (50%) 48 (48%) 184 (56%)
All 88 (26%) 143 (43%) 101 (30%) 332*

Note: * Two articles had a female–male joint authorship

Table 7 Sex of journalist and use of women and men as sources

Sex of source Sex of journalist

Female (%) Male (%) Both (%) Unattributed Total (%)

(%)

Female 98 (34%) 107 (33%) 4 (36%) 93 (32%) 302 (33%)

Male 187 (66%) 235 (67%) 7 (66%) 194 (68%) 623 (67%)
Total 285 (100%) 342 (100%) 11 (11%) 287 (100%) 925 (100%)

more likely to use women sources in their stories than their male colleagues
(Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, 1998), the findings of this study challenge that find-
ing, as Table 7 shows.
There is a remarkable consistency across all the articles analysed, both those
with named writers and those without bylines (unattributed), in terms of the
proportion of women and men sources used. This accords with other research
that suggests that men are more than twice as likely as women to be used as
sources in news (WACC, 2000). However, as is also clear, there does not
appear to be any significant relationship between the sex of a source and the
sex of the journalist using that source. Zoch and VanSlyke Turk’s work also
suggested that where women were in a minority in their newsroom, this could
militate against them using more women as sources. However, this current
study also contests that finding, since of the 330 articles analysed which had
attributed authors, 43 per cent were written by women, 54 per cent written by
men and 3 per cent written by a female–male team.
466 Journalism 8(4)

Discussion and concluding remarks

The constructed nature of news is not only a matter of journalists choosing to

include one story over another one, but the individuals invited to speak in the
story provide a perspective legitimacy, a corroborating voice which marks out
the authority of the story to the audience. Whilst considerable guidance is
contained within the various codes of conduct relating to news media which
explicitly require balance and fairness in reporting, the empirical evidence
against which these rhetorical demands might be measured rarely finds in
their favour: the results from this study are no different. The local press has an
ideal opportunity to subvert the national agenda, and thus national proclivities
towards the use of elite male sources and a bias which privileges the mainte-
nance of the status quo, through the exercise of its alleged commitment to pro-
viding news of interest to its local community. But what the findings from this,
admittedly modest, study show is that who speaks in the news and who writes
the news is alarmingly similar in both the local press and in the nationals.
This is not just in terms of the dominance of elite voices over ‘the public’, of
men’s voices over those of women, of white voices over black, but also in
terms of who writes the news, the beats which are awarded to journalists (i.e.
women do culture and home, men do politics and the economy, again) and
the types of story which make it into print. Whilst this study does show that
more women are becoming journalists in the local press sector at least, the
ratio of women to men in the newsroom certainly does not reflect the ratio of
women and men in the journalism classroom, and women are still more likely
to be given traditionally ‘female’ beats, although not exclusively so.
The ‘so what’ question implicit in this study is answered, then, by arguing
that who is asked to speak in the news, as well as what that news is, says crucially
important things about whose voices count, who has status in society. Whilst
Nylund (2003) perhaps overstates the case a little by suggesting that news is con-
structed almost entirely from the use of quotes and journalistic interpretations
of various source statements, it is clear that the persistent use of certain
categories of commentator influences story orientation and, potentially, our
understanding of the world. Does the news-consuming public want only to
hear men speaking in the register of privilege and defence of the status quo or
would they/we like some diversity? Despite evidence to the contrary that sug-
gests that the public actually like hearing the views of their neighbours and
other members of civil society (Sundar and Nass, 2001), the paucity of ‘ordinary’
voices in the local press reminds us again not only of the media’s considerable
gatekeeping function but also of their role in the maintenance of a hegemonic
version of society which appears to be populated only by white middle-aged,
middle-class, professional men. That this bias exists as much in the local as
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 467

the national press is a desperate disappointment in the 21st century where never
before have we needed to be so seriously engaged in and with our local com-
munity, as friends, colleagues and neighbours. The almost total exclusion of
black and ethnic minority voices in the three newspapers monitored, despite
their significant presence in the regions in which those newspapers are circu-
lated, once again says something profound about the racial hierarchy of voice.
Although this study did not focus on story content in terms of ‘race’ themes,
at an anecdotal level it is clear that black people continue to feature pre-
dominantly in news stories as male perpetrators of crime (see also Downing
and Husband, 2005).
Men still dominate the news, even when that news is even more at the
discretion of the journalist than for the nationals. The Leicester Mercury chooses
to run a story about a male pensioner’s exotic travels to Asia, using his name
in the headline and a photograph of his smiling face, and it is only in the last
paragraph that his wife is mentioned as his co-traveller (26 April, p. 8). The
Birmingham Post chooses to run two feature news stories on facing pages, each
with a quarter page photo featuring three men each time, one story focusing
on new business development and the other on an upcoming concert to be
played by a boy-band, some of whose members were born in Birmingham
(13 May, pp. 2, 3). Whilst a newspaper’s layout and design, together with any
editorial slant, will determine the location of stories, with high-impact celebrity
and human interest stories demanding a prime position (Armstrong, 2004), a
problem arises when those high-impact stories mostly feature men as subject
and source. Where is the ventilation of all those other voices, other stories,
other lives? Men and women are differentially understood as doing (male-
active) or being done to (female-passive). If what we see and read and hear are
men’s voices, men’s perspectives, men’s news, then women continue to be
framed as passive observers rather than active citizens, despite the factual evi-
dence to the contrary, which shows, for example, the high incidence of
women-owned start-up businesses or the number of women councillors. To be
sure, women’s occupation of decision-making positions is considerably less
than that enjoyed by men, but their marginalization in the local press as busi-
ness people, professionals, politicians, even as member of the public, is hard to
understand without using a gender-based analysis which suggests that women’s
invisibility in the press is a consequence of a deliberate strategy which denies
women’s authority to speak. In Zoch and VanSlyke Turk’s study of regional
newspapers in the USA, they found that women rarely featured in news stories
of national or international significance (1998) and this current study also
demonstrates that Tuchman et al.’s prescient description of women’s ‘symbolic
annihilation’ from the news agenda in 1978 holds just as true now, just as true
for Britain’s local press.
468 Journalism 8(4)

Without a better understanding of the dynamics of local press newsrooms,

it is impossible to securely interpret why local journalists, women and men, con-
tinue to privilege elite male voices. One possible explanation is that notions of
newsworthiness and source credibility, which have traditionally privileged
these particular perspectives, exert a stronger influence than an individual
desire to more accurately reflect the views, or seek the opinions of, a local con-
stituency in all their vast diversity. The critical mass thesis argues that when
more women enter male domains such as newsrooms in significant numbers,
then a cultural shift can and will occur. However, such an argument rests on
the assumption that women and men necessarily practise a different journalism,
whereas ideology and politics are, arguably, as strong if not more important
drivers of action. This is not to suggest that nothing has changed over the past
30 years of feminist action and other shifts in social thinking, but it is to suggest
that the pace of change is extremely slow.
It is of significant concern that only one-third of all sources were women
and that only a quarter of all sources were ‘ordinary’ people. It is of significant
concern that in a region like the West Midlands which has an ethnic minority
population of around 600,000 (approx. 18%),6 less than 4 percent of all
quoted sources were members of identifiable ethnic minority communities
and of these, only 26 percent were women.
This study is small scale, over a limited time period and focused on three
local newspapers in the Midlands region of England, so further research is
clearly necessary to expand and extend the sample sites and thus provide further
corroborating evidence to support the gender source bias argument being made
here. Further empirical research in newsrooms is also crucial in order to better
understand the gendered dynamics at play in these male-dominated spaces
and enable a more nuanced account of gendered journalistic praxis.
This degree of bias in source selection makes clear the news media’s con-
siderable gatekeeping function in determining both content and perspective of
news stories and indicates the importance of familiarity, easy access and
shared ideas about relevance and credibility, as key features of the source selec-
tion process. If the local press is to continue to call itself ‘local’ in any meaning-
ful way, it needs to work a lot harder to more genuinely reflect the views and
interests of local communities back to themselves, in all their glorious shapes
and colours.

Notes

1 http://www.trinitymirror.com
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 469

2 Here I describe a source as either ‘public’ or ‘elite’ voices depending on the status of
the person given in the news item. Obviously, many members of the public are also
workers and business people, but my interest was in exploring ‘how’ they were
credited and with what status they were being asked to speak.
3 I coded all occupations individually but only included individual occupations
where there were sufficient numbers of people in those particular occupations to
be statistically significant.
4 The National Census of Local Authority Councillors in England, 2004. London:
Employers’ Organizations for Local Government.
5 West Midlands Police website: http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/our-people/
women.asp
6 Extrapolated from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, 2001 Census.

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Biographical note

Karen Ross is Professor of Media and Public Communication at the University of

Liverpool. She teaches political communication and gender in media. Recent books
 Ross The journalist, the housewife, the citizen and the press 473

include: Women and Media: A Critical Introduction (with Carolyn Byerly, Blackwell,
2006), Gender and Newsroom Practice (ed., with Marjan de Bruin, Hampton Press,
2004), Media and Audiences: Critical Readings (with Virginia Nightingale, Open Uni-
versity Press, 2003) and Women, Politics, Media: Uneasy Relations in Comparative
Perspective (Hampton Press, 2002). She is currently writing on the media and the
public, and gender and media.
Address: School of Politics and Communication Studies, Roxby Building, University of
Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK. [email: rossk@liverpool.ac.uk]