on media


Three women making changes in the media


Sex equality case may show value of news, says Raymond Snoddy On the same day, Tracy De Groose,


T


his is a tale of three strong women of the media – two journalists and one advertising executive


– and what their different stories say about how far we have reached in the battle for sex equality. By coincidence, all three were


making headlines of differing size and volume at around the same time. The most eye-catching news was the announcement by Financial Times editor Lionel Barber on Twitter that he would be handing over to the first woman editor in the paper’s 131-year history in the new year. Lebanese-born Roula Khalaf is at the moment deputy editor of the FT and a former Middle East and foreign editor. A few old hands could be heard


spluttering into their bitter that “she knows nothing about the City”. But what was remarkable was that the appointment was seen as, if not inevitable, certainly nothing unusual. If Khalaf had been deemed unsuitable because of perceived gaps in her journalist armoury, it would still not have changed the gender balance or the historic moment. Many people’s favourite for the top FT job was another women, award- winning journalist Gillian Tett, who famously warned of the dangers to the world economy of increasingly obscure financial derivatives. There is still some way to go. Khalaf will join a small, still outnumbered group of female national editors – Kath Viner of the Guardian, Alison Phillips of the Daily Mirror and Victoria Newton of the Sun on Sunday. But progress at least.


executive chair of Newsworks, was appealing to the newspaper industry – publishers of news brands as she has it – to start reclaiming some of the £1 billion in ad revenue they have allowed to leach away to rivals over the past decade. For De Groose, they have been selling the wrong product – advertising space instead of their journalism and the trust it attracts.


The former adland boss emphasised


at the Society of Editors’ conference how people’s trust in news brands has risen from 48 per cent in 2017 to 60 per cent this year, according to Edelman, which regularly monitors such matters. However, trust in the social media is around 29 per cent while trust in advertising, according to the Advertising Association, has fallen from 50 per cent to 25 per cent – an all-time low. De Groose has just begun her


campaign to persuade news brands to start reclaiming some of the revenue that should rightfully be theirs by emphasising their reach across both print and digital – no fewer than 44 million people a week in the UK. Expect to hear a lot more from Tracy De Groose next year. The most problematical of the three stories about prominent women is the long and complicated sex discrimination case taken by Samira Ahmed, with the support of the NUJ, to an equal pay employment tribunal. On the most simplistic level, Ahmed


has a small problem. As presenter of Newswatch, the BBC’s accountability programme, Ahmed was paid the same £440 fee as her predecessor – me. There was a subsidiary argument


18 | theJournalist


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that, as a long-experienced and more famous broadcaster, she was worth more than this mere newspaper reporter. Perhaps – but that only takes us so far.


The heart of the matter is that Ahmed was paid £440 for a 15-minute programme while Jeremy Vine was paid nearly seven times as much for many years for presenting Points of View, a programme of equal length. Ahmed is claiming nearly £700,000 in compensation.


She can claim, with considerable justice, that Newswatch can be a difficult and challenging programme while Vine, also a serious professional journalist, was presenting a light- hearted programme that was classified as entertainment. Rather laughably, the BBC is relying on the very fact that Points of View was light entertainment to justify the huge disparity and that Vine had the remarkable skill of being able to roll his eyes in a convincing way. Samira Ahmed deserves


compensation. The gap is too large to justify. How much that should be is difficult to assess.


Newswatch can be a difficult programme while Vine was presenting a programme classified as entertainment


A lot of other cases could depend on


the outcome and the very pursuit of the case, whatever the decision, could help change attitudes and encourage a better pay balance between the sexes in future in broadcasting. But perhaps the biggest story of all is


that the Samira Ahmed case could lead to something that goes beyond sex equality or even the achievements of Khalaf and De Groose. It could help to rebalance the relative


value put on serious news compared to light entertainment. That really would be worth fighting for.


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