Your local alt-weekly: Putting the “sex” back in sexism

Glossed over? Did I gloss over the gender imbalance at CP? It was the third section of the six-section piece, and at 200 words, wasn’t an inconsiderable part of the text.

And while, I’m a big fan of Molly’s work, I think she misunderstood my deployment of web hits. Then again, it might be my writing. More on this in a sec.

After the Hoffman quote Molly highlighted, here’s what I wrote:

“But such strong yin desperately needs a yang. Who looks out for young women? Dude-rich topics have crested precisely as CP lost an exceptional aspect of Perry’s exceptional tenure: strong and senior female editors.

“Monika Bauerlein, Jennifer Vogel, Julie Caniglia, Hawkins – there’s no equivalent at the new CP. The two most recent hires – staff writer Beth Walton and music editor Andrea Myers – are simply too new to claim such influence.

“Hoffman points to copy editor Bridgette Reinsmoen and A-list editor Jessica Armbruster as veterans with responsibility, but neither has the status to undo any editorial imbalances.”

Without nice VVM context Molly provides (not the narrower focus of my piece, which was already too damn long as it was), I think I hit on most of her points. She probably said them with more depth, feeling and personal experience than I did, but in this sense, the Internet is a meritocracy and this is one of many places where a Steve Perry title shines.

About web hits: are they fool’s gold? Sure. But they are an objective datapoint (or at least a more objective one), something sorely missing from the CP debate.

I used them precisely to show that the culture/dude stuff was popular, and deeper topics like politics/investigations were trailing, and in fact used web hits to underscore my criticism that substance in these areas is malnourished.

Here’s just a sample:

“Tellingly, there were no political stories in the Top 10. Such coverage has fallen far under Hoffman. Aside from episodic forays, CP has abandoned the legislative beat and the paper’s traditional City Hall haunts. Hoffman keeps up the site’s GOP convention blog, “Elephants in the Room,” but there’s little to distinguish it. … political anorexia in these keenly political times imperils CP as a must-read.”

I’ll admit I might’ve led folks astray with the word “vindication” in introducing the web section, but there’s a little bit of archness there that hopefully is recognizable to alt-weekly fans.

The reason for including the sidebar on web hits was to give people an objective look at how the site generates traffic – which I think was revelatory and I specifically tweaked:

“Comparing Steve Perry’s last month – February 2007 – to the same month this year, City Pages’ web traffic has grown smartly by most measures. A big reason: pop culture tales (real-life superheroes, living at the Mall of America for a week, Diablo Cody), slideshows of naked or nearly naked people, and blogs about unclothed dining and porn.

“Such is life on the web, where the mere mention of S-E-X sends page views soaring. (The most popular thing I’ve yet written for MinnPost was about sex ads in the Star Tribune.) The new-era CP seems to, umm, beat the drum regularly.”

I acknowledge the title of my piece was a sharp stick at the prevailing wisdom, perhaps my own tabloidish bid for attention, so I’m wide open to the forceful and thoughtful critique Molly delivers. I guess, in the end, I’m trying to encourage better stuff (like this week’s CP scoop on St. Thomas’s bullying a pro-choice law student) by highlighting it, and I think there’s more there than the paper’s critics feel.

Thanks, unironically, for the critical look at the story.

Thanks for the great comment David, I think you did a great job with the story. My point was that Hoffman’s defense wasn’t a defense at all.

And then to follow that with a graf stating Hoffman’s cultural emphasis has been vindicated by web hits seemed to me to gloss over the fact that his claim that Reinsmoen and Armbruster were veterans with responsibility was laughable and offensive.

Actually… You wrote that before Hoffman’s quote, which is why ending with his quote seems to stand as a (weak) defense to that argument.

That’s fair If you only knew how many times I moved stuff around.

By the way, enjoy the laurels at MnSpeak!! I can only imagine the grief Demko is getting in-house.

An email response from Kevin Hoffman, which he asked me to post Please publish this response on the original post by Molly:

First things first: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of a frat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Second: I never told anyone our calendar section was too “girly.”

I will say that there is one point on which Molly and I agree, which is her statement: “Media stories about other folks in the media tend to be self-aggrandizing, self-referential, and just plain self-absorbed.” I think her post is a perfect example of same.

But I will have to disagree with the main thrust of Molly’s post, which is that City Pages is somehow sexist.

Molly might want to take a gander at the masthead and correct her gender math as it pertains to staff writers. We have a team of five news writers, plus the food critic, which has been consistently a woman (Dara Moskowitz, then Rachel Hutton). Right now, the tally stands at three male and two female staff writers (Jonathan Kaminsky, Matt Snyders, and Jeff Guntzel are male; Rachel Hutton and Beth Walton are female). We have one open position (the replacement for Paul Demko), and gender will not be a factor in making that decision.

It is important to recognize that the salaried editorial staff the new owners at Village Voice Media inherited from your boss, Steve Perry, in 2006 was roughly 33 percent female–six women out of eighteen total staffers.

Today’s staff is roughly 31% female–four women out of thirteen total staffers. And that doesn’t include the vacant staff writing position.

Nobody’s bragging about these numbers.

  But keep in mind that one of the women on the former staff, Jane Sherman, is no longer here because she received a promotion and is now the art director at Seattle Weekly.

  It’s worth asking: Is a statistical shift of two percentage points in two years really worth the outrage expressed in Molly’s piece?

It’s also worth asking: How many women does Minnesota Monitor employ in full-time, salaried, editorial positions? Looking at the main page, I see six male bylines and one female byline (Molly’s). Is it possible that the gender imbalance at this bastion of political correctness could be worse than our own?

And below is my response to him

Kevin,

My point still remains the same. You had ZERO female news/feature writers for more than a year. Rachel and (now) Andrea cover food and music, respectively. They are ghettoized to those sections. They have no say in what feature and news stories get covered. And unless it’s a food or music cover, they won’t be in the feature well.

Secondly, since Steve took over MinMon just a couple of months ago, he hired Anna Pratt and me, and Robin Marty is also on staff. In just a few months Minnesota Monitor has become more diverse, not less.

It’s a new regime, and a start in the right direction.

——(His last reply, below)—

I have no interest in debating the point with you. Please post my response on your original post–it’s only fair to give the target of an attack a chance to respond.

Kevin

Glossed over? Did I gloss over the gender imbalance at CP? It was the third section of the six-section piece, and at 200 words, wasn't an inconsiderable part of the text.

And while, I'm a big fan of Molly's work, I think she misunderstood my deployment of web hits. Then again, it might be my writing. More on this in a sec.

After the Hoffman quote Molly highlighted, here's what I wrote:

“But such strong yin desperately needs a yang. Who looks out for young women? Dude-rich topics have crested precisely as CP lost an exceptional aspect of Perry's exceptional tenure: strong and senior female editors.

“Monika Bauerlein, Jennifer Vogel, Julie Caniglia, Hawkins – there's no equivalent at the new CP. The two most recent hires – staff writer Beth Walton and music editor Andrea Myers – are simply too new to claim such influence.

“Hoffman points to copy editor Bridgette Reinsmoen and A-list editor Jessica Armbruster as veterans with responsibility, but neither has the status to undo any editorial imbalances.”

Without nice VVM context Molly provides (not the narrower focus of my piece, which was already too damn long as it was), I think I hit on most of her points. She probably said them with more depth, feeling and personal experience than I did, but in this sense, the Internet is a meritocracy and this is one of many places where a Steve Perry title shines.

About web hits: are they fool's gold? Sure. But they are an objective datapoint (or at least a more objective one), something sorely missing from the CP debate.

I used them precisely to show that the culture/dude stuff was popular, and deeper topics like politics/investigations were trailing, and in fact used web hits to underscore my criticism that substance in these areas is malnourished.

Here's just a sample:

“Tellingly, there were no political stories in the Top 10. Such coverage has fallen far under Hoffman. Aside from episodic forays, CP has abandoned the legislative beat and the paper's traditional City Hall haunts. Hoffman keeps up the site's GOP convention blog, “Elephants in the Room,” but there's little to distinguish it. … political anorexia in these keenly political times imperils CP as a must-read.”

I'll admit I might've led folks astray with the word “vindication” in introducing the web section, but there's a little bit of archness there that hopefully is recognizable to alt-weekly fans.

The reason for including the sidebar on web hits was to give people an objective look at how the site generates traffic – which I think was revelatory and I specifically tweaked:

“Comparing Steve Perry's last month – February 2007 – to the same month this year, City Pages' web traffic has grown smartly by most measures. A big reason: pop culture tales (real-life superheroes, living at the Mall of America for a week, Diablo Cody), slideshows of naked or nearly naked people, and blogs about unclothed dining and porn.

“Such is life on the web, where the mere mention of S-E-X sends page views soaring. (The most popular thing I've yet written for MinnPost was about sex ads in the Star Tribune.) The new-era CP seems to, umm, beat the drum regularly.”

I acknowledge the title of my piece was a sharp stick at the prevailing wisdom, perhaps my own tabloidish bid for attention, so I'm wide open to the forceful and thoughtful critique Molly delivers. I guess, in the end, I'm trying to encourage better stuff (like this week's CP scoop on St. Thomas's bullying a pro-choice law student) by highlighting it, and I think there's more there than the paper's critics feel.

Thanks, unironically, for the critical look at the story.

Thanks for the great comment David, I think you did a great job with the story. My point was that Hoffman's defense wasn't a defense at all.

And then to follow that with a graf stating Hoffman's cultural emphasis has been vindicated by web hits seemed to me to gloss over the fact that his claim that Reinsmoen and Armbruster were veterans with responsibility was laughable and offensive.

Actually… You wrote that before Hoffman's quote, which is why ending with his quote seems to stand as a (weak) defense to that argument.

That's fair If you only knew how many times I moved stuff around.

By the way, enjoy the laurels at MnSpeak!! I can only imagine the grief Demko is getting in-house.

An email response from Kevin Hoffman, which he asked me to post Please publish this response on the original post by Molly:

First things first: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of a frat. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Second: I never told anyone our calendar section was too “girly.”

I will say that there is one point on which Molly and I agree, which is her statement: “Media stories about other folks in the media tend to be self-aggrandizing, self-referential, and just plain self-absorbed.” I think her post is a perfect example of same.

But I will have to disagree with the main thrust of Molly's post, which is that City Pages is somehow sexist.

Molly might want to take a gander at the masthead and correct her gender math as it pertains to staff writers. We have a team of five news writers, plus the food critic, which has been consistently a woman (Dara Moskowitz, then Rachel Hutton). Right now, the tally stands at three male and two female staff writers (Jonathan Kaminsky, Matt Snyders, and Jeff Guntzel are male; Rachel Hutton and Beth Walton are female). We have one open position (the replacement for Paul Demko), and gender will not be a factor in making that decision.

It is important to recognize that the salaried editorial staff the new owners at Village Voice Media inherited from your boss, Steve Perry, in 2006 was roughly 33 percent female–six women out of eighteen total staffers.

Today's staff is roughly 31% female–four women out of thirteen total staffers. And that doesn't include the vacant staff writing position.

Nobody's bragging about these numbers.

  But keep in mind that one of the women on the former staff, Jane Sherman, is no longer here because she received a promotion and is now the art director at Seattle Weekly.

  It's worth asking: Is a statistical shift of two percentage points in two years really worth the outrage expressed in Molly's piece?

It's also worth asking: How many women does Minnesota Monitor employ in full-time, salaried, editorial positions? Looking at the main page, I see six male bylines and one female byline (Molly's). Is it possible that the gender imbalance at this bastion of political correctness could be worse than our own?

And below is my response to him

Kevin,

My point still remains the same. You had ZERO female news/feature writers for more than a year. Rachel and (now) Andrea cover food and music, respectively. They are ghettoized to those sections. They have no say in what feature and news stories get covered. And unless it's a food or music cover, they won't be in the feature well.

Secondly, since Steve took over MinMon just a couple of months ago, he hired Anna Pratt and me, and Robin Marty is also on staff. In just a few months Minnesota Monitor has become more diverse, not less.

It's a new regime, and a start in the right direction.

——(His last reply, below)—

I have no interest in debating the point with you. Please post my response on your original post–it's only fair to give the target of an attack a chance to respond.

Kevin