15 women journalists from 12 media outlets recommending the most important news from Europe – that’s NewsMavens.com. An English-language news round-up with information selected solely by women was officially launched on October 16th, 2017. Istinomjer is one of the media outlets participating in the project.
NewsMavens.com is a roundup about what’s most important in Europe today, done by women from top EU media brands. The service is provided through the collaboration of partnering news organizations. Currently there are 15 contributors – female journalists and editors from 12 media outlets. Each of them curates stories from their media to the collective roundup, giving NewsMavens.com’s readers a unique, feminine perspective on current affairs in Europe. Newsmavens gives particular attention to smaller countries of the European Union which tend to lay outside of mainstream media’s focus. NewsMavens.com, a project initiated by “Wysokie Obcasy” and “Gazeta Wyborcza” from Poland, is financed by Google’s the Digital News Initiative Fund.
We want to address some important questions with Newsmavens, including: does the gender imbalance in the European newsrooms, where only about 27% of the senior managers are women, affect the narrative about modern Europe? Our first week of publishing recommendations has only increased my conviction that, on average, women journalists pay attention to issues that are beyond the field of vision of many decision makers in mainstream news outlets. We also aim to discover what kind of audience a women’s perspective on the news will attract, said Zuzanna Ziomecka, editor-in-chief of NewsMavens.com.
There are 5 to 8 news recommendations in English published every morning on the website. Contributors have the freedom to select any of the articles, radio shows or television programs presented on their home medium’s site – gender issues are not mandatory nor are they the intended focus of the project. Once selected, contributors explain the relevance of the story for their country and/or region. The recommendations are all written in English while links at the end of each one take readers directly to the original story. Additionally, there is a Google Translate button placed next to article links for one-click access to the translated version. On weekends, NewsMavens.com publishes a summary of news from a given week with an editorial comment.
The current form of NewsMavens.com is the first stage of our project. In the coming months we will be working on new features recommendation formats, such as daily and weekly newsletters, and video interviews – Ziomecka explains. – We also intend to grow our team to include contributors from media partners all 28 EU countries.
So far 12 partners have joined the Newsmavens collaboration. Among them are: the Irish “The Irish Times”, the Austrian “Der Standard”, the Slovakian “Dennik N”, the Italian “MicroMega”, Estonia’s “Eesti Ekspress”, “Istinomjer” from Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Nepszava” from Hungary, “WikiTribune”, “De Standaard” from Belgium, “The Market Mogul”,”Diene Korrespondentin” from Germany and “Gazeta Wyborcza” from Poland. NewsMavens.com is also supported by the World Editors Forum and Women in News. There still is room for new contributors – NewsMavens encourages women journalists working in news media from all across Europe to apply (
video online).
NewsMavens.com is a media innovation created by “Gazeta Wyborcza” and “Wysokie Obcasy,” its weekend supplement dedicated to women’s issues. The project is financially supported by Google Digital News Initiative Fund (in the Large Projects category).
