As an adjunct professor at Medill back in the early 90s, Susy Schultz and a colleague organized a program they called “Racism and Sexism From Sources—How Do You Handle It?”
Schultz was one of five women at the Sun-Times who began meeting for lunch about once a month to talk things over: family issues for one, newsroom assignments for another. “Were they saying ‘Cindy, go cover that’ or was it ‘Joe, go cover that’?” remembers Cindy Richards, then an editorial writer. Certain that they weren’t the only women journalists in Chicago with these matters on their minds, the five of them put out feelers. If we tried to organize, they asked, would you be interested? There were precedents. In 1988 an Association of Women Journalists had been created in Dallas-Fort Worth. And since 1985, JAWS—Journalism & Women Symposium—had been bringing together women journalists from across the nation for an annual retreat.
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The Association for Women Journalists just celebrated its 20th anniversary in Chicago. Amy Guth, the Tribune‘s manager of social media and search engine optimization (a title that would have been gibberish in 1993), is the president now and says AWJ has almost 300 members. “My main goal,” she told me in an e-mail, “is to offer as much digital training and networking opportunities as possible to the membership.” She went on, “Certainly our industry has evolved, and certainly AWJ members have seen the results on very personal levels, but I am also seeing an entrepreneurial spirit starting to appear in the membership. Change is hard in any industry, to be sure, but I also believe it jumpstarts creativity to a large extent.”
She went on about AWJ: “It’s become a job network, a freelance network. There used to be a lot more posts on our listserv about ‘I was sexually harassed by a source, how do you handle it?’; ‘I pitched a freelance story and they didn’t hire me but then I saw the story in the paper.’ Now it’s a lot of ‘needing work.’” But the most interesting discussions, she said, are still the ones about how news is covered. “The idea that what Hillary Clinton wears gets more coverage than her policy statements,” said Richards. “Somebody will post that on the listserv and it’ll blow up into people sharing thoughts.”
