Not again; what a bother. But oh, it can’t wait. Music—that’ll do it. Aha! Dinah Shore: two minutes, 30 seconds and here comes the song. She’s ready, Dinah starts; and off she goes—Mil’s gone.

This always happens to Mildred MacDonald. Her 23-year-old bladder behaves with urgent, octogenarian unpredictability. That is, only when she’s on air. The familiar tingle creeps up her legs, just below her belly until she’s desperate for a “relieving” musical interlude. But again, only on air, between 11:15 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. on weekdays, when she’s hosting CHAB’s women’s show in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

The hem of her skirt—yes, never slacks—dances about her calves as she bursts out of Studio A. Her dark hair, in pretty waves, lifts off her shoulders as she makes her way through the sully plume of smoke and chatter. The boys—they light their cigs in the hallway. With their parted ’dos and sleeves rolled to the elbows, they watch MacDonald, sweet in her rush, and smile at her pace. The men in the control room share more than a smile, conspiring to lock the studio door. Oh my, wouldn’t that be a hoot! Mil, baby, you’d be stuck outside!

The facetious fellas are just talk, though, and MacDonald slips back in the nick of time. She’s skipped the bathroom gossip—that’s for the secretaries. MacDonald, after all, is the only CHAB girl with a mic. And she’ll be damned if she lets her skirt, or her bladder, get in her way.

And, boy, they sure didn’t. She reported for the women’s pages of Regina’s Leader-Post, then fixed her hat, curled her lashes and hosted women’s radio shows. At the mic for 50 years, she went on to work for 34 radio programs and five television shows at CBC in Ottawa. Basic Black, In Town and Out, Marketplace—hell, she did it all. A sweet thing-turned-venerable reporter, MacDonald was a trailblazer. Yes, she kicked her high-heeled shoe through the studio door long before women really lit up radio. So did Barbara Frum, Florence Bird and Jeanne Sauvé—the girls we all remember for noisily rattling cages and clearing the path for women in Canadian radio. MacDonald also broke ground. She just did it more quietly.

She went after the human interest stories, even as she began to cover social issues, all while unabashedly coordinating her hat and scarf. She started earlier and lasted longer than most other ladies of her time, modestly doing her job, and doing it well. And in that simple, quiet way, MacDonald made strides for women in Canadian broadcasting. But today, most of them haven’t a clue about her. When she died of pancreatic cancer in June 2009, her friends and colleagues celebrated her contribution to radio, but many in the industry didn’t even notice. As former colleague Susan Toccalino says, “Young people who come to CBC now don’t know who she was.”

* * *

MacDonald started in the industry before her curls could set. On the beat at 18, she got a job at the Swift Current Sun in 1945, reporting for the women’s pages. Then she blew it—she got hitched. Larry was a lanky guy; handsome, yes, but skinny as hell. A war veteran with unrelenting pain from shrapnel lodged in his leg, he took little Milly, then 19, to be his wife and she swapped her pen for a spatula. “It nearly fucking killed her,” says Alex MacDonald, the pair’s daughter, born two decades later. “She had nightmares about not getting the bathtub clean enough.”

So she tossed her apron at her mother-in-law and dropped the housewife bit. She got the gig at CHAB in 1951 and sweet-talked station manager Sid Boyling into giving Larry a job too. Larry, who was working at a meat-packing plant, had no experience in journalism. Don’t sweat it, MacDonald told Boyling, he’ll find his on-air voice. And he did. A few years later, they packed up and moved to Ottawa and, following a short stint atCFRA, landed at CBC. Larry fell for television; MacDonald stayed true to radio.

Her first big break came in 1954. Still the kid at CBC and just five weeks on the job, she was sent to pick up the Queen Mother in Virginia. Nervous as hell, but determined as ever, MacDonald boarded a Royal Canadian Air Force plane to begin her coverage. “I’ll tell my listeners all about it when I return,” she told Thom Benson, assistant director of CBC’s Outside Broadcasts. Ah, such naïveté. She would tell her listeners parts of it. Wrinkles and vogue—that would be MacDonald’s beat.

* * *

“We have seen her in a great many colours,” says the sweet voice. “Mostly her favourite, blue.” MacDonald’s cadence is meticulous. She delivers each word with the gentle precision of a parent reading a nighttime story. “But we seem to have seen that Her Majesty has changed from the very pale blue that she loved 15 years ago to the more, deeper tones of sapphire.”

* * *

That was journalism back then. The boys covered politics; the gals gave clothing reports. “They were the women’s pages of the air,” says Barbara Freeman, a Carleton University journalism professor whose specialties include gender and diversity in the media. These “women’s pages” spoke to the girls at home; the housewives who “yearned” for fashion news and child-rearing tips.

The kitchen shackles had come off in the 1940s because the men were fighting the war, and someone had to deliver the news. But when the soldiers returned, it was back to the pantry for most women. There were some, including Kate Aitken, whose on-air presence was not confined to wartime. Mrs. A, as everyone called her, gave CBC listeners candy-coated coverage of cooking and etiquette.

Then there were exceptions such as Betty Kennedy—perhaps best known as a panelist on Front Page Challenge—who joined Toronto’s CFRB in 1959. “I was unique in that I had complete autonomy,” says Kennedy, who later became a senator. “I treated my show like a news beat. The only instruction I ever got was, ‘Try not to get us sued.’”

MacDonald and many others trod somewhere in between, swallowing their temporary worker status. Married women weren’t full-time staff at CBC in those days. Surely hubby’s income would be more than enough. What’s a marriage for, after all?

Instead of stomping her feet, MacDonald tackled the inequity much more cunningly: through her reporting. As the ’50s turned into ’60s, she shed the clothing stories.

* * *

“I have no doubt in my mind that it was a case of racial discrimination,” John Shertulian tells MacDonald onAssignment in 1960. Shertulian and his wife believe an Ottawa landlord turned them away because of their West Indian heritage. “I had to have an income of at least $4,200. Secondly, I had to have no pets.” Not a peep from MacDonald; she lets him tell his story. “I had no pets. My income is over $4,200… Three or four days afterwards, I got a call from the agent telling me he could no longer rent me the house… I asked him why. He had no reason.”

Knowing tolerance for inequality is changing, she probes. “Mrs. Shertulian, maybe you can tell us about this: what sort of reaction have you had since this story was made public?”

“The phone rang nonstop,” chimes the contented voice. “Everybody was very, very sympathetic.”

* * *

Sympathy came with peace and love, at least outside the newsroom. The big changes would come to the studio the following decade, but heels were starting to graze the ground. Hell, there was even a woman or two delivering sports broadcasts on the radio! These ladies and their progress! Lucky for the old-fashioned fellas, most of the girls were still at home. But they wouldn’t be for long. Not with new space age inventions shaving hours off household to-do lists: the new disposable diaper from Pampers, wrinkle-free permanent-press fabrics and some sort of innovative self-cleaning oven (imagine that!).

And, of course, the pill, which made the cover of Time in 1967. Its social impact was enormous, giving women new control over their bodies, their careers and their lives. Power was hers, for a change. And fueled by books such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, more women started taking advantage of that power.

Also in 1967, Ottawa broadcaster Florence Bird chaired the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW). Despite over 20 years in journalism, she told the Ottawa Citizen in 1998 that she wanted to be remembered for her work for women. “In journalism,” she said, “my ideal was to write of important things. I wanted to improve things for women—and I believe I made a contribution.” Indeed, those contributions set in motion changes that would reinvent the role of the Canadian woman. There was still a lot of bunk to get through, of course, but MacDonald could keep the boys in line.

* * *

Early evening, 1968, and MacDonald waits in a dimly lit theatre for Duke Ellington. She’s covering his Ottawa concert for CBC Radio’s Bright Lights. After several futile calls to his agent (who had no idea what time he’d arrive) and speaking with several hotel operators (who had no idea who he was), MacDonald finally spots a shadowy figure on the stage. As his fingers test and tickle the piano’s keys, MacDonald moves down the centre aisle. The stage is lit just enough for her to distinguish the Duke’s face, and for him to look upon hers. With her full lips and prominent cheekbones, she is undeniably pretty.

“Did you say your name was Mildred?” Ellington asks. “This is what I think of when I hear the name Mildred.” And as he seduces a tender melody from the piano, MacDonald lets a smile break. It hides her reporter’s skepticism. “Oh, yeah,” she’ll later write in an article, “and at the next place, he asks, ‘Your name’s Donna? This is what I think of when I hear the name Donna.’”

After the serenade, she interviews him over steak sandwiches. The next morning, she receives an unexpected call. “I have a lot of radio and television interviews to do in Montreal today,” Ellington says, “and I can’t do them without you.” MacDonald politely declines, but it’s not the last she hears of him. Every Christmas, without fail, she receives one of his personally designed cards. She opens the last one six years later, shortly before he dies. “May all your life be merry,” it reads. “I love you, Duke Ellington.” 

* * *

Swooning interviewees were one thing, nonsense in the newsroom was another. One boss told the guys to cool it with the swearing. Not for her adorned ears, he said, until she told him to cut the crap. (MacDonald slipped four-letter words now and again. Especially to machines.) Women’s voices, too, were a topic of debate. “The early attitude was that a woman’s voice was not well-suited to radio,” says Donna Halper, media historian and author of Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. Technology was often the scapegoat—a lot of hooey, but it worked. Freeman adds: “Women were told that because of the sound technology of the time, their voices didn’t resonate as well as men’s voices. You could take that at face value, and some of them did, and they tried to pitch their voices lower.” That wasn’t exactly what MacDonald did, but the heads at CFRA did tell her to speak with a little more “breath.” So she learned how to sound—erm—sexy. Then she got to CBC and was told, “That’s not how women talk at the CBC.” So she learned to speak with authority. MacDonald certainly wasn’t compromising. She just wanted to tell her stories. And if that meant putting on a silly voice (or maybe dropping it), so be it.

 * * *

Darn, that won’t do—interview. Nope, not then either—editing. MacDonald is sitting in her gynecologist’s office, trying to schedule a baby. At 39, she never planned on getting pregnant. Bully to staying home and knitting booties, though. She’ll work until the first contraction. If that means following a story up the Peace Tower in Ottawa, lugging a reel-to-reel machine and carrying a baby nearing the eighth month of its incubation, so be it. She needs to capture Dominion Carillonneur Robert Donnell ringing the bells, and it has to sound authentic.

* * *

“She wouldn’t have done it from the ground,” says her daughter. “For the sound effects, you want to be up there.” And Alex knows what makes for good sound bites. From the time she was little, she trotted alongside MacDonald in-studio and on interviews. What about daycare or maternity leave, you ask? Ha! Show me a man on the moon and I’ll show you maternity leave. Well, MacDonald certainly wasn’t staying home. So Alex became a regular in CBC Radio’s joint on the seventh and eighth floors of the Château Laurier. “If you had a kid, you were definitely expected to leave,” says Freeman. But there were some women who said, “Okay, I’ve had my kid, I’m back, now do something with me.” Pregnant in the mid-’40s, radio reporter Marjorie McEnaney informed her bosses that she’d be back after three months. They scoffed, of course, and hired a man. Three months after giving birth, McEnaney simply showed up and started working. CBC eventually reinstated her, but just as a temporary worker, naturally.

The feminist movement shook up these policies and attitudes in the 1970s. Women chucked the sweetie-pie bit and demanded to be treated as equals. Bird produced a report for the RCSW on how the “equal” treatment of the sexes was faring in 1970. For those who thought all was well, she threw down pages of recommendations to make sure the girls got what they were worth. And the journalism girls caught on. An internal task force on the status of women at CBC led to the creation of an equity office in 1975. Pair that with labour legislation amendments, which meant equal rights for women in the civil service, and real changes were taking shape.

Attitudes were slower to come around. “You can have all the rules and regulations you want,” says Freeman. “You still have to work through the prejudices.” Jeanne Sauvé and others had already flipped the bird at those prejudices. Sauvé, who later became Governor General, defied the stereotypes, hosting Opinions on CBC in the ’50s and ’60s. The politically charged show was her baby—she picked the topics (including premarital sex), chose the guests, did the research, wrote the copy. In the ’70s, June Callwood, who combined journalism and social justice, confronted the contentious: child abuse, test-tube babies and, of course, feminism. And Bird, who was appointed to the Senate in 1978, continued to advocate for women’s rights. Though they shared a profession with MacDonald, they were a damn lot louder. Maybe that’s why we remember them.

* * *

By the ’80s, MacDonald’s always on the go (just look at the junk in her car), reeling in the stories and making a name for herself. No more fluff—today, she’s covering the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s annual meeting.

The voice is as sweet as 30 years ago, if plagued by a touch more vibrato from an overworked larynx: “Today’s family law is based on a social custom that goes back to the 13th century. This is where the man provides the necessities in exchange for the woman’s domestic and exclusive sexual service.” Very matter-of-fact. “Now, as long as the marriage works, women assume that property and money being acquired belongs to both of them. And it’s only when the marriage breaks up that the woman learns that the law doesn’t recognize that value of the work that she’s done in the home.”

Not a syllable overemphasized, not a point overstated. No preaching, just reporting. She doesn’t tell her listeners about how she learned to drive at age 50 after she and Larry separated. (Her father had said, “Nice girls didn’t,” so she’d never learned.) And she doesn’t tell her listeners about the constant anxiety of being a single mother and working freelance. No, she simply tells them about the conference. Other people’s stories interest her, not her own.

* * *

Every Saturday, MacDonald went to Wilfrid’s Restaurant in the Château Laurier to flip through the newspapers and maybe knock back a martini or two (three olives, very cold). From her corner booth near the window, she “interviewed” her waiters, learning their names, where they went to school and who they were dating. “In a very subtle way, she could get the information she needed or wanted out of someone,” says Rob Clipperton, who worked with MacDonald for nearly 20 years on Ottawa’s In Town and Out. “She could just make everybody totally relaxed.”

MacDonald conceded to retirement in 2001. It was those damn machines. She could never keep up; digital wasn’t for her. But that doesn’t mean she quit. No longer propped up by her mic, she leaned on her pen, writing for a couple of Ottawa newspapers, Forever Young and Capital Parent. She’d started out at theLeader-Post at a time when there were so few women that the newsroom had only a men’s bathroom. (Luckily, the staff at the Simpson’s department store a block away put up with her frequent trips to the ladies’ room.)

But she lived long enough to see Jennifer McGuire, a former radio producer, become head of CBC News. No more lone skirts, either. By 2008, women made up 45 percent of CBC/Radio-Canada’s corporate workforce. Chances are, most of them know how Bird’s protesting and Callwood’s activism helped them secure a spot. Little do they realize, MacDonald’s skill did too. “There are people who make the headlines and bring about the attention that can be a catalyst for change,” says former CBCer Abby Hagyard. “But I think the real change comes when people like Mildred just do the work. Just get it done.”

* * *

And MacDonald, known as the “woman with a smile in her voice,” has a few tricks up her pretty turquoise sleeve to help her get the work done. “This is Mil—aw, fuck.” She stops the tape. Funny, MacDonald only fumbles her words with extremely nervous interviewees. “Oh well, it’ll be edited anyway!” Her interview subject seems a little less on edge. 

“Shall we try again?”

Joanne Ramondt thought she had found a good example of male bias in the pages of the Calgary Herald. In a photo of a husband and wife business team, the husband was standing in the foreground, clearly the focus of attention, while the wife sat off in the background with the children.
Ramondt is a member of the gender monitoring committee at the Herald, which has been surveying the paper for such biases since last May. Although the photo indicated to Ramondt and other committee members that something was wrong, they agreed one photo wasn’t enough proof. But it took just a few more weeks to confirm their instincts: in almost every photograph of a family, the husband was the dominant image and the wife was in the background with the children. When the photo department was presented with the series of pictures, it realized its unconscious bias. Coverage immediately improved.
This was just one example of what the committee saw. “Whole days went by and we found our section fronts presented men only, even with the entertainment and life sections,” said Ramondt. “When you have day after day of this, you start to understand why women aren’t reading the paper.”

The Herald isn’t alone among Canadian papers, either in its lack of female presence or in its skew to a higher male readership. About 63 per cent of Canadian women say they read a newspaper yesterday, compared to 75 per cent of men, a gap which translates into hundreds of thousands of papers not read each day. And newspaper articles refer to women as subjects or sources only 19 per cent of the time, according to a Media Watch study of 15 Canadian papers.
Newspapers are no longer the main source of news for most Canadians, who turn to television instead. Merge that with the fact that women-the main audience advertisers want to reach-have stopped reading newspapers in alarming numbers in the past two decades. This explains why, over the past few years, newspapers have seriously committed themselves to regaining this lost constituency.
The women they’re seeking are too busy with careers and families to read anything not interesting or relevant. Weekday readership dips to its lowest levels, at 57 per cent, among women in their late 20s and early 30s, 75 per cent of whom are in the work force.
The most direct approach to the problem has also turned out to be the most controversial: the creation of a special section for women. The concept aims to reflect the lives of women in the 1990s, but evokes memories of the fluffy women’s sections of the past. The approach has been called “condescending” by some and “liberating” by others. The Montreal Gazette became the first, and so far, only Canadian newspaper to try it when their weekly five-page section, called WomanNews, debuted in March, 1992.
At worst, it’s seen solely as a gimmick to attract advertisers. The first of these new women’s sections was the Chicago Tribune’s, which appeared in 1991. In its first year, the Tribune’s Womanews drew a 21 per cent increase in ad lineage over the previous section, launching a women’s-section trend in the United States. But the biggest concern is that these sections will become a ghetto for stories about women, excusing editors from improving women’s coverage elsewhere.
“My first choice is to have those stories all through the paper,” said Patricia Graham, a senior editor at The Vancouver Sun. That is, in fact, what the Sun and other newspapers, such as the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald are attempting. But it’s tricky. Not only must papers implement changes quickly, they must market them aggressively, or they won’t convince women to start reading newspapers again.
That’s why the new women’s sections, though not necessarily the best answer to the problem, shouldn’t be readily dismissed. Unlike previous women’s sections, they have a more dynamic feel, with articles such as how feminism excludes minority women, advice on being a pregnant working professional and opinion columns by freelancers from across the continent.
But newspapers still need to make a strong and vigilant commitment to improve coverage overall, in order to dispel the perception among many women that newspapers are for men. Women obviously aren’t going to start reading the paper regularly just because of a few pages once a week. A special section, however, may be a starting point to draw them in. And The Gazette’s WomanNews, although it hasn’t attracted much advertising, does seem to please its target readers, including busy working women.

The new women’s section works because of the simple premise on which it is based: find out why women are reading papers less, understand who they are and give them what they want. Then they will read. This idea came out of the experience of Colleen Dishon, a senior editor at the Chicago Tribune.
As a manager, she heard stories from women who worked for her complaining how difficult their lives were. Dishon thought that the newspaper was not meeting the needs of these women and others like them. “There was nothing in the paper that showed them they weren’t alone in their struggle, that others were in the same boat,” she said, “How could the paper serve these women? With the affirmation that this was a large group.”
And so, in 1985, Dishon created Tempo Woman, a section aimed at working women. Over the next six years, following extensive research, it changed three times and broadened its target audience. Its final version, called Womanews, appeared in April, 1991. “The male reporters thought it was a terrible idea,” said Dishon, “but they would think that any special thing for women would be.”
Womanews uses all the paper’s bureaus and has a large freelance budget to produce a mixture of in-depth news stories, features, profiles, a calendar and classifieds. Distributed in the 7ribune’s Sunday paper, it goes to more than two million readers.
Almost three-quarters of the 7ribune’s female readers say they read it regularly, and it has the strongest appeal to working women, particularly under age 35. In less than two years, Womanews has been syndicated to more than 60 newspapers. It was a model for The Gazette’s WomanNews as well as similar ventures in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Kentucky, to name a few, with names like Every Woman, Accent on Today’s Woman and You. Its critics no longer complain.

“Women-food” reads the big banner headline of The Gazette’s women’s section from 1960. A glance at any such page of the time shows what editors thought women were interested in: weddings, social gossip, cooking, fashion and not much else.
It wasn’t always so. In 1889, Kit Coleman started writing a column for The Toronto Daily Mail called “Fashion Notes and Fancies for the Fair Sex.” She soon renamed her column “Woman’s Kingdom”-perhaps sarcastically-and started filling a page with political commentary, literary criticism and short stories along with the lighter items. Coleman had thousands of fans, male and female, including Wilfrid Laurier.
The women’s pages survived into the 1960s, but they had their critics. In 1963,Christina Newman wrote in Macleans condemning their content. “In the collection of cliches and
claptrap, of syndicated syrup and trumped up trash they call the women’s pages, the editors and publishers of newspapers are apparently trying to reach some long since vanished female who measures out her days dispensing kindliness in tea gowns and sandwiches on silver salvers, preoccupied mainly with the length of this spring’s skirts or the content of this Sunday’s supper menu,” she wrote. The sour attitude toward the new women’s sections may well be rooted in memories of these old sections.

Lucinda Chodan of the Gazette was skeptical when the male managing editor mentioned the idea of a woman’s section to her in the summer of 1991. Chodan, assistant managing editor, immediately thought “ghettoization.” That August she visited the women’s section editor at the Tribune to study the idea. “I came back converted,” said Chodan. The success of the Tribune’s section as well as Dishon’s extensive research convinced her that a new women’s section might work in Montreal.
The research considered, for instance, the startling fact that American papers lost about a quarter of their female readers in the 1980s. In Canada, the losses have been similar, but not so dramatic. In 1992, there was a 12 per cent gap between the number of men and women who read newspapers, compared to 1968 when 82 per cent of women and 81 per cent of men said they read a newspaper on an average day.
Yet a U.S. study found that women between the ages of35 and 44 find time to read three hours a week, compared to 2.7 hours by men the same age.
“These women are reading magazines,” said Donna Nebenzahl, editor of WomanNews at The Gazette. “The reality is that there isn’t anything in the paper they want to look at.”
The committee on women’s coverage at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix found that women “will make time to read gripping, intelligent writing, even longer pieces as well as humorous articles and practical, well-organized features that help them cope with their complex lives and demanding roles.”
When they do pick up a newspaper, women are more prolific readers than men. They have a wider range of interests and will look at or read more sections and pages. This makes them appealing to advertisers. Women control 85 per cent of consumer spending, and advertisers believe they are responsible for most household decisions (including the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions).
The research from the Tribune, The StarPhoenix and The Gazette also showed that women want information relevant to them in one place, so they don’t have to search for articles of interest.
Unlike the Lifestyle or Living sections which followed the women’s sections in the 1970s, WomanNews at The Gazette is targeted exclusively at women and based on a “news you can use” philosophy. “There’s nothing in the section about how to cook, how to parent or how to clean,” said Nebenzahl. And unlike most women’s magazines, it examines harder news stories. The section has published an infographic on dealing with stress, a story on the low percentage of women working in the sciences, a fashion piece on briefcases, and every week it carries news briefs and a calendar of local events.

Still, some women are offended by the idea. Where is the guarantee that male editors will still worry about coverage of women’s issues, or about male bias in the rest of the paper? Will this hinder more than help women in the long run?
“It’s insulting to give women 10 pages and say that’s enough,” said Linda Hawke, who conducted Media Watch’s survey last year. “Is that what we’re aiming for? I don’t think that 10 pages in a newspaper is what we’re aiming for.
“We’d like to see things more evenly distributed throughout the paper, and dealt with in a comprehensive way. There has to be more of an effort to get women’s opinions and voices in the rest of the paper.”
Nebenzahl says the section isn’t intended to replace the news, but to put a new spin and local angle on items of particular interest to women, with more context and depth than the typical news story. “We don’t cover issues that are deemed news for the A or B sections,” she said. ‘~nd there’s a concerted effort to not make it a repository for stories about women.” Chodan says having the section has sensitized others in the newsroom to women’s concerns.
Most importantly, WomanNews is satisfying its readers. “The best experience was the reaction I got from people I interviewed,” said Frances Bula of her stint as Woman News reporter. “There were professionals, businesswomen, immigrants, educators, a diverse range of women. They were excited about [WomanNews] and told me they read it every week.”
According to The Gazette’s research, 59 per cent of women who read WomanNews say it increases the value of the paper for them, and three-quarters say it’s useful in their lives. What they like most are health and lifestyle articles and news stories affecting women. Advertisers have reacted with much less enthusiasm. In some weeks, the section has had just one ad. This may be because they’ve committed themselves to other well-established sections in the newspaper where they’ve always bought ads. For now, though, the section will remain as long as it continues to satisfy its target readers.

At other newspapers, the process of balancing coverage has been neither smooth nor quick. Editors at The Vancouver Sun had a mandate to reserve page three of the first section for stories of interest to women. The plan lasted less than a year because of other changes to the newspaper, but there were problems with the approach. Patricia Graham, a senior editor at the paper, said some of the articles were too featurish, which broke the pace of the news section. And sometimes it had too many stories about serious issues, such as breast cancer and rape, on the same day. The approach now is to ask section editors daily whether they have stories of interest to women or multicultural communities.
“We worry sometimes whether we can move fast enough before we lose more readers,” said Graham. “We still haven’t come to grips with the content question. It’s not just what’s covered, but the angle. For instance, women are more concerned about sexual assault, while men are more interested in stories about false accusations. It affects coverage. “
At the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the idea of a woman’s page was first mentioned at an editorial meeting in the fall of 1991. It was only considered seriously after a task force created to deal with the issue of women’s coverage recommended it as part of its report.
The idea wasn’t popular in the newsroom at first. The task force circulated a questionnaire among newsroom staff to ask what they thought the problem was with coverage. Some of the responses they got were “women are using the paper for their own agenda” and “there’s nothing wrong.”
With the support of senior editors, two pages called Access became part of the Saturday paper’s Prism section last September. Women’s issues editor Deanna Herman worked with the Prism editor to find space for Access. They moved some columns into the Sunday paper, and cut back on space for books, art and the cover story. To combat potential ghettoization, Herman attends news meetings and assigns stories to reporters in other sections.

Despite the initial problems, the pages are now accepted in the newsroom and women readers seem to like them. In contrast, a few months previously, The StarPhoenix’s auto section increased in size without the backlash or commotion surrounding the women’s page.
This sort of reaction happens because the problem is so deeply entrenched. A study by Gannett newspapers in the United States found that papers allocate beat reporters in favour of male interests. For instance, 19 per cent of reporters cover sports while only 8 per cent are assigned to family or lifestyle issues.
Yet 74 per cent of women say they read family or lifestyle sections frequently compared to 67 per cent of men who say they read sports just as often.
“If there were more women in higher positions, part of the problem would start to take care of itself,” said Hawke of Media Watch, “and they have to be in positions where they can make decisions about how information is presented.” In addition, an eight-month study of the readership gap by The Edmonton Journal said there should be more female reporters and columnists, more stories about women, more women experts quoted in stories and the creation of a special page to cover women in the workplace.

As editors rely more on the opinions of focus groups, and as society becomes more diverse with more people from different cultures, it’s difficult to foresee how newspapers will adapt.
“There’s an argument to be made that the newspapers of the future will be highly targeted,” said Nebenzahl of The Gazette. “In the past there was a captive market. It was easy to say, ‘Let’s give them blank section.’ It’s more difficult now. Resources are limited and you need to consider the market. But this has to blend with the fact that you’re still a newspaper.”
At the Tribune, Dishon now works full-time developing sections. Her latest creation was a section called KidNews which started last August, and she’s exploring the idea of a section for baby boomers of the Clinton generation. The Tribune is also looking at ways of unbundling the paper so that readers can get just the parts they want. At an extreme are papers like USA Today, which are highly market-driven. Although it may be criticized for its short, superficial reporting, USA Today is considered a leader among American papers for its coverage of women and minorities. Each section has stories which reflect the diversity of its readers. It also has a mandate to have a photo of a woman or member of a minority on page one, above the fold, every day.
Canadian newspapers are headed in different directions. Joanne Ramondt of the Calgary Herald is involved in a project to merge the city and life sections. Back in 1972, when she worked as a summer student at The London Free Press, female interns were obligated to spend a month working on the women’s pages. “We all hated it, and cheered when the section died,” she said. She sees the disadvantages of the new sections, but won’t completely reject the idea. “Now I’m coming full circle. I’m thinking that these sections may be good.