Friday 10th May: Young people diverge on gender equity

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

Are you a publisher with newsletters or podcasts? Then you absolutely must have Wednesday June 12th in your diary. It’s going to be big! You can check the just-revealed early agenda here.

Esther has been writing about GenZ and gender attitudes for our pals over at Digital Content Next. New data from polling outfit Gallup shows that that in the US, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30% more liberal than men. That’s a gap that has recently opened up after decades of a roughly equal spread of worldviews and Esther worries that as the news media struggles with increased polarisation gender equity is rising on the list of contentious topics.

Worryingly (for anyone with a brain) a growing number of younger men think that gender equality has been solved. “The proportion of people who believe that feminism has gone too far… that’s growing across all groups,” says Luba Kassova, researcher of 2020’s The Missing Perspectives of Women in News report. “Gen Z young men are leading though: A higher proportion of them seem to think that.”

The reality is, women’s expert voices remain significantly muted in high-profile news genres. Kassova’s research shows men’s share of voice is up to seven times higher in politics and up to 31 times higher in relation to the economy. As Esther says, if these voices aren’t heard, divisions in society, and among younger people, are only going to grow.

“Social media isn’t trying to kill journalism, because social media has never really cared about journalism,” writes media academic Amanda Lotz. Instead, she says, more effective and efficient advertising tools killed traditional newspaper operations, not the circulation of news on social media. She concludes: “Perhaps we’d all be better off if social media weren’t regarded as a place to access news.” Harsh, but fair.

We’re gearing up for our Publisher Newsletter Summit in June so this piece from Inbox Collective was a shoo-in for today’s roundup. My favourite from this list of 25 bangers is number 21: the perfect newsletter strategy sits at the intersection of three things - what you believe; what your audience tells you; what your audience actually does. I love the mix of expert inspiration, audience research and data analysis that this approach embodies.

Speaking of winning newsletter strategies, former Vox staffer Mathew Yglesias has been writing about the success of his four-year old Slow Boring Substack. He says a lot about flying solo, but it’s his take on niche publishing that really resonated. “I have no idea what the future of journalism is,” he says, “but I do think we can now say that part of the future of journalism is the existence of a bunch of small-scale subscription publications like this one... it is both possible to secure an audience and to do the basic work with these tools.”

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