Does the gender imbalance in newsrooms have an impact on the media narrative? How different would newspaper front pages look if media organizations had more diverse teams, and how would modern Europe be presented?<\/p>\n
These are some of the questions Zuzanna Ziomecka, founder and editor-in-chief of NewsMavens, set out to answer when she launched the project in October 2017. Supported by the newspaper where she worked, Gazeta Wyborcza,\u00a0and funded by the Google Digital News Initiative Fund, NewsMavens is a website where the news is chosen entirely by women. It aims to provide Europe with an alternative front page.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf our media is mirroring our politics and is focused on the men with the power and the money on top, then they\u2019re missing the entire picture that happens below, on the ground, where real-life people live and work,\u201d Zuzanna tells<\/a> Bayerischer Rundfunk.<\/p>\n NewsMavens started up as a collaboration between 12 European media outlets seeking to challenge.<\/p>\n \u201cOur first months of publishing show that, on average, women journalists pay attention to issues that are beyond the field of vision of many decision-makers in mainstream news outlets,\u201d she says in an interview with IJNet.<\/p>\n \u201cArticle recommendations for NewsMavens are full of non-frontpage news concerning the down-to-earth, daily struggles of ordinary people.\u201d<\/p>\n For Zuzanna, the issue of diversity in the media is one piece of a large puzzle that could prove to be instrumental to the future of democracy in Europe.<\/p>\n She believes that women have the opportunity to play a big role as agents for change in the current political landscape.<\/p>\n As democracy has been disrupted in a number of countries, including Zuzanna\u2019s Poland, she sees an opportunity for women to be a part of rewriting the direction Europe is heading in, and even to lead the charge.<\/p>\n \u201cAs changes happen, old rules and barriers, things that once seemed impossible and divisions that appeared set in stone suddenly start to move. You cannot stop change but you can use its momentum to influence and shape the future,\u201d she explains<\/a> in an article on NewsMavens and in a TEDx talk on how we should start seeing women and women\u2019s movements as an engine for change.<\/p>\n