THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE U.S MEDIA 2015

Methodology
The information in this report is derived from an analysis of 27,758 pieces of content from
October 1 to December 31, 2014. Selected media include the top ten national newspapers
by circulation, evening news broadcasts on major broadcast networks, two wire services, and
four major Internet news sites.
For all media, articles and content that do not directly identify a journalist or a reporter as the
source of the content were excluded. This includes unsigned editorials and stories with no
byline.
NEWSPAPERS: Using major commercial content aggregators, articles were collected from
the first or A section of eight broadsheets (Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, LA Times, The
New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post).
For the two tabloid format newspapers (New York Daily News, New York Post) articles were
selected based on content, generally excluding sports/lifestyle/entertainment.
WIRES: All articles from the Associated Press and Reuters with an identifiable byline are included.
Due to the volume of content produced by wire services, every attempt was made to
select articles only over 500 words.
TV: Transcripts were collected from evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS.
Anchors and reporters are identified as the “byline” journalists.
INTERNET: Due to the high volume of content published on these sites, a random selection
of content was selected from four sites: CNN.com, Daily Beast, FOXNews.com, and The Huffington
Post.
All content was given one or more subject tags. These tags are cross-referenced with the
gender of journalists to identify whether certain subjects are covered more by men or women.
For content that includes more than one identified journalist or reporter as the source of the
content, a primary byline has been identified, and a secondary byline has been identified
where necessary.
The Women’s Media Center commissioned Novetta (www.novetta.com) to conduct this research.
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WOMEN’S MEDIA CENTER
The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015 TOC womensmediacenter.com