First stop of the day: The New York Times. At the Times, we spoke to two of the four people who make up the Gender Initiative team, a group that formed only a year and a half ago and, coincidentally, released its first publication at the same time the Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story. We spoke with Francesca Donner, Director of the Gender Initiative and Sharon Attia, Social Media Editor. The Gender Initiative aims to widen the Times readership outside its stereotypical audience of older-white-men and include women in more interviews and articles, as well as write more articles about women.
The Gender Initiative has produced work regularly in the Times since it launched, including “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries of notable women who did not get the recognition in paper at the time of their actual passing, “45 stories of sex and consent on college campuses,” and most recently, “This is 18,” which showcases girls at age 18 around the world.
At The Marshall Project, we spoke with Bill Keller, who is currently the editor-in-chief, though he is retiring soon. A lot of misunderstanding surrounds the criminal justice system, in part due to the portrayal of it in media and pop culture, according to Keller. In 2015, The Marshall Project partnered with The New York Times to produce “Attica’s Ghosts,” an in-depth report of mistreatment of prisoners in one of the United States’ most brutal jails. Last April, The Marshall Project again wrote about the Attica Correctional Facility, but this time in a different light; “How Video Cameras Tamed the Infamous Attica Prison.” The Marshall Project won a Pulitzer for One of their articles, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” written by Ken Armstrong (The Marshall Project) and T. Christian Miller (ProPublica) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
Our next stop was ABC where we talked to Greta Morris, a production associate of 20/20 and Molly Berecca, a publicity assistant for Disney. Despite the recent loss of jobs at Disney, neither Morris nor Berecca were affected. Morris noted that she uses the video production skills she learned at Miami every day. Berecca’s responsibilities differ from Morris’s as she deals with publicity events, handles publicity for shows and even gets to pitch episode ideas. Berecca’s favorite day of the year? Casting day for “The Bachelor.”
Next, we met with three Miami alumnae, Bridget Clegg (Art Production Manager for Hearst Digital), Beth Stebner (Editorial Recruiter for Hearst Digital), and Laruen Doyle (Associate Director of Communications for Hearst Magazines), at Hearst Corporation. The decline in magazine readership is affecting every publisher in the industry, but Hearst’s recent integration to digital and print attempts to combat this. “You can’t really be an analog person in a digital media world,” Stebner said.
Our last stop of the day was at FleishmanHillard, a public relations and digital marketing company. We spoke with Ephram Cohen, General Manager of FleishmanHillard New York and Tim Race, Senior Vice President. Even though journalism and public relations are quite different, FleishmanHillard’s branding tag, “The power of true,” may as well be the tagline of journalism.
Hannah Montgomery 