Congratulations to Barbara Field and the Afghan Women’s Writing Project!

Barbara Field

Barbara Field, the OpEd Project’s San Diego Regional Manager, was recently featured on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune for her outstanding volunteer work as a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP).

Karla Peterson’s article, “Afghanistan Stories: Written at risk, edited with care,” discusses Barbara’s mentor position with an organization that creates safe writing workshops and allows women to tell their stories through poems and essays. Women in Afghanistan are paired with mentors and they discuss their writing daily in online classrooms.

On the OpEd front, Barbara also organized a successful OpEd Poject Program in San Diego last week!

Congratulations and thanks to Barbara and the AWWP for their inspiring work.

-Katherine Milsop

“Harnessing Twitter” – OpEd Studio, May 19

Sarah Milstein at the OpEd studio.

How do you get your point across in 140 character or less? Thursday night’s studio on Twitter began with Jolie Solomon challenging one woman’s use of “nothing words” in class. (What does “laying the groundwork” mean, anyway?) The goals of each woman at the seminar ranged from getting more followers on their personal Twitter accounts, to using Twitter as a tool for “Ted Talks” (Technology, Entertainment and Design conferences) and media exposure.

In her discussion, guest speaker Sarah Milstein successfully demystified Twitter the seminar attendees. Milstein, co-author of “The Twitter Book”, gave a presentation on harnessing the power of Twitter. She became the 21st Twitter user after the site was created in 2006. Milstein is also the co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records.

According to Milstein, women tend to be more active in social media. But about 70 to 90 percent of individuals who use social media are “lurking” – meaning that they are not actively posting, networking or tweeting through the sites. She described Twitter as a “low risk” way to network and build relationships with people in your field. The standard for use is simply to read. Read the posts of other people, organizations or news outlets that you are following.

If you’re interested in becoming a Twitter “thought-leader”, it’s important to create a Twitter persona. It could be your own, but feel free to experiment with multiple personalities in the same account.

Milstein emphasized the importance of sharing “valuable stuff.” This could be as simple as linking to a fascinating news article or opinion column you read recently. You can also link to photos and videos on other sites. When sharing links, it’s often a plus to include your own opinion before the link. If the author or host you are citing is a Twitter user, it’s all right to “call them out” and include their user name with the “@” symbol in your tweet. (For example: “The seminar tonight was great! @oped_studio.”) Sites like bit.ly offer a free url shortening service to help keep you under the 140 character limit.

Sharing tips via Twitter is another way of mixing the practical with the personal. Point to credible sources and give people information they can use. Milstein discussed Twitter’s ability to provide a vivid personal connection and make a window into your own life. You can share funny anecdotes about your dog, or mention helpful tips about finding a hotel in Barcelona. Milstein suggested following the “80/20 rule”: Keep 20 percent of your posts about you, and 80 percent about everything else.

The value of Twitter doesn’t necessarily rely on how many friends you have. According to Milstein, following is extremely overblown. It’s not necessary to have thousands of followers. If someone follows you, no Twitter etiquette compels you to follow her in return.

The class also discussed Twitter’s ability to spread news and big events faster than most news media outlets. The site’s ability to cultivate organic trends and memes via hashtags (searchable phrases or words with the “#” preceding them) makes it an indispensable tool for thought leadership.

But sometimes the most compelling tweets are the simplest ones. Don’t feel you have to be clever each time. While the tweet is essentially out there forever, it has a shelf life of about five minutes, so don’t stress each tweet.

One attendee noted that it’s very easy to get lost in the “vortex” of tweets. Milstein said that it’s important to play around on Twitter but, “While you’re playing, be interesting.”

Check out the OEP on twitter @theopedproject. Follow our studios @oped_studio.

-Katherine Milsop

The OpEd Project Speaks With The Takeway’s Femi Oke

Femi Oke is a British television reporter and journalist. She works as a daily newscaster and contributor with the Public Radio International/WNYC’s morning radio new program The Takeway. Femi was kind enough to sit down with Chris Fanikos, the social media intern here at The OpEd Project, for a quick yet informative interview.

Femi Oke

So, tell us a bit about yourself. What inspired you to follow this path?

Since as long as I can remember, I always knew I wanted to be a journalist. When I was seven years old I would gather “news” from my family and report it all in a weekly news bulletin.  I did my first professional radio broadcast in London at 14 years old.  By the time I left home to go to University I’d already been working as a cub radio reporter for five years.  I free-lanced at the BBC radio station close to my University when I wasn’t studying my English course.  The day after I graduated I joined the BBC as a researcher.    I was very focused.  I knew exactly where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do from a very young age.

What does your average day entail? What does it look like?

My day begins at 2AM when my alarm goes off.  The shock of getting up at “crazy 0’clock” never quite wears off, but I’ve been waking up this early for the last three years.  As I run around my apartment getting ready for work I catch up on all the latest news.  I have BBC World on my tv, BBC World Service Radio on my laptop and I download NPR and CNN pod newscasts and listen to them on my way to work.  I have to be up to date with all the latest news so when listeners wake up, they don’t miss anything that happened overnight.  The Takeaway news team starts preparing newscasts at 3.30am and by 6am the first of sixteen original newscasts are ready to go live.  By 10am the show’s over and then I have a little more flexibility to research potential guests, plan meetings and prepare for the next day.  I’m always sleep deprived, but I love knowing the news before most people are awake.

How many people tune in daily to The Takeaway?

We have about a million listeners a week.

What are the major differences between broadcast radio and broadcast television reporting? Which do you prefer?

The major difference is complexity and how many people are involved. . With television even the smallest shoot requires a team of people; the reporter, shooter, maybe a producer, editor and a control room full of crew to get the story on the air.  With radio you can create a beautiful piece with very few people.  I can go out on location and record a story without dragging a crew around with me.  Getting back to the studio I can even edit my own story and this makes the entire process much more intimate and personal.  Television of course has an instant impact.  I remember being on my first primetime television show back in the UK.  The next morning after it aired, I walked down the street and I was shocked that people recognized me.  The impact of radio is much more subtle, a great radio story gets into peoples heads and their hearts.  I do love both mediums, so trying to pick a favorite is like asking a mother which child she prefers.  She may well have an answer but will never tell you.

How has the rise of internet journalism both professional and private (blogging) impacted radio news?

Journalism on the internet and private blogging has expanded the possibilities for covering news. Just think how less informed we would have been without people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria posting their stories, images and video online for the international news community to see.  In a much less dramatic way domestic stories are also given more depth and breadth thanks to the internet as it’s so easy for the radio and television audience to comment and share their experiences online.

Internet journalism has lifted the barrier between the audience and program makers.  On The Takeaway  for instance listeners post comments about a segment and within a few minutes they too are part of the program.  It’s not unusual for us to book a particularly insightful listener from a comment that has been left online.   Our reporting becomes more interesting and diverse because the Internet allows the listeners to get their stories to us so easily.

The one reservation I have is that it’s smart never to trust anything your read on the Internet until you’ve checked the source multiple times.  Just because a story comes up when you search for it, doesn’t make it true.

Do you have any advice for those interested in pursuing radio journalism?

Decide what style of radio journalism you’d like to produce.  Once you know what you want to do, find a local radio station that makes that kind or radio.  If you turn up willing and eager to learn most stations will be happy to help you. Radio people on the whole are very warm and welcoming.  Walking into a radio station is exactly how I got started.  It may take you a while to convince the boss to pay you, but the experience you gain along the way is worth it.

If you can, who was your favorite interview and why?

People always expect me to name somebody famous.  I have interviewed iconic leaders, movie stars and tons of celebrities. I’ve had a laughing fit with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, sat on actor’s Kurt Russell’s lap ( don’t ask) and seen Cher behave like a bad tempered school girl.  I have hundreds of fun celebrity interview stories.  Honesty though, my favorite interviews are with people who aren’t celebrities, but still allow me into their lives so I can share their deeply personal experiences with the world.  While living in Johannesburg and reporting for CNN I interviewed a family who lived in a shack made out of corrugated iron.  They lived in two tiny rooms with no real heating or cooling and three children piled onto one tiny mattress at night.  They had no wash facilities and the toilet was a crude hole in the ground.  The family was so frank, funny and kind to me that I will never forget them and it’s been years since I broadcast that report.  It’s easily one of my favorite interviews.

OpEd Project Busted Out At Princeton University This Week

In this photo, OEP Mentor-Editor Janus Adams bonds with Princeton's Cornel West

What Twitter Tells Us About the Gender Gap in the Media: We Don’t Listen to Women

In honor of Mother’s Day, Elmira Bayrasli wrote a post on her Forbes Blog, Entreventures,  about the Twitter gender gap and what it reveals about the absence of women in the media.

Bayrasli begins by citing statistics gather by VIDA, which showed the preponderance of male bylines in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper’s and The New Yorker, and the results of the OpEd Project’s  most recent byline survey, which found women author around 20% of op-eds in major print publications. Time and time again, this gender gap in opinion journalism is attributed to consistently lower female submissions. According to Bayrasli, that explanation is far from sufficient.

“The argument that females don’t raise their hands as often as men makes sense only when men and women are in the same room. It is a room where female hands tend to be bound, at times involuntarily. That is especially true in rooms where the conversation is about finance, economics and, to less extent, politics. Men dominate those topics, rarely leaving space for women to engage in the conversation, however much we do engage. And we do.”

Using Twitter statistics gathered by the Harvard Business School to back up her argument, Bayrasli insists that women still face many obstacles in getting their voices heard. The Harvard Study found that even though more women use twitter then men, men average 15% more followers than women.

Shrugging the gender gap off as a problem that will take care of itself will only perpetuate the problem. According to Bayrasli, it is self-awareness of the attitudes and conventions we have about gender that will bring change. If you have a story or argument about struggling, or succeeding in getting your voice heard, now is your chance to voice it!