Recently there has been much discussion of the underrepresentation of women in the media industry. It can be easy to lament about the situation, difficult to understand the reasons, and even more difficult to actually do something about it. How can an industry work towards gender equality, when many other industries and the culture at large reflect these biases?

Enter UNESCO’s Women Make the News initiative. This advocacy initiative, starting with International Women’s Day and lasting through April 30, aims to promote gender equality in the media across the world. According to a UNESCO report, women make up 36 percent of reporting jobs and 27 percent of management jobs in media companies worldwide. This year’s initiative focuses on the difficulties for rural women to access media, and gives those in the industry suggestions of how to participate. Read more

With the rise of new media platforms like tablets and smart phones, the ways in which we interact with content have shifted dramatically. In a nod to the ever-growing amount of readers using tablet and mobile devices to read the news, the BBC launched a beta site redesign today that accounts for “swipability,” the finger gesture most popular for navigation on smart phones and tablets. “The beta provides a first glimpse of core design principles that will underpin the reshaped BBC Online,” said the BBC in a press release today, “which take into account changing user behaviours including the preference for ‘swiping’ through content – increasingly intuitive given the rise of touch-screen smart phones and tablets.”

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The BBC is in the process of creating a new app that would allow its reporters in the field to file photos, audio and video from an iPhone or iPad directly into the news organization’s system. The app would also allow reporters to broadcast live from an iPhone using only a 3G signal, Journalism.co.uk reported earlier today. But is this an innovative move? Read more