Naked Women, Feminism and Newsroom Culture

The emphasis of media scholarship on media texts and their various meanings, and audience responses, has been at the expense of any detailed considerations of those who actually produce the texts. This focus has either downplayed or dismissed both journalists' subjectivities and the power relations of production processes in newsmakinq, and how journalists' personal histories might influence what becomes 'news'. In this paper, I examine negotiations over feminism in a series of dialogues that occurred recently in the newsroom of, The Mercury newspaper in Hobart, where f have workedas a sub-editor. These discussions centre on the publication of an image of a group of naked female anti-war protesters. I explore the various subject positions that journalists took up in regard to feminism. I also draw on material from recent in-depth interviews with print media journalists who discuss the place of feminism in newsroom culture. I conclude that feminism is a significant port of newsroom culture, although a feminist-friendly newsroom is for from the norm.