Online Magazine Topic Proposal

I am planning to make an online magazine titled Devant. The title comes from French, translated to mean ‘in front of’. To me that means that women should already be ahead considering where we are now and where we have been. It is also about the writers and artists featured in the magazine that are ahead of their time with their ideas and perspectives on women’s issues and cultural or race issues. The magazine will be primarily focused on women, but I would like some men to contribute to the magazine as well. The content will be personal stories, poems, drawings that come up to each person I ask to participate when I give them a broad topic such as women and race issues, and also current events. Everyone has a story to tell, and I want my magazine to be that place. I will be using the online magazine creator at issuu.com.

I want to see a magazine that features ‘real women’ of all ages as the center and the audience, and focuses on more than just the trivial daily celeb news. Women are underrepresented both in the production and in the content of newspapers and magazines that cover the news and world topics. Since 1999, women have remained stagnant, making up between 35% to 37% of newsroom staffs out of 978 daily newspapers. Moreover, minorities make up a mere 12% to 13% of the staff in American newsrooms. In other words, the creators of the story do not have enough female perception, cutting out 50% of the population.

The women that are on staff, may not receive the recognition their work deserves to the overwhelming male writers. The first page of The New York Times is crucial to a journalist’s career, as the publication is hailed as the nation’s “newspaper of record”. Men were quoted in articles on the front page 3.4 more times than women. When women were the authors, a woman was more likely to be quoted. Just as men’s default for quoting resources tends to be other men, the same seems to be true of women. We should push both sexes to support one another, but I think it is still a priority and a larger gain if more women get to write the story. Before reaching the heights of The New York Times as a journalist, a magazine like mine would be a good place to start being seen, heard, and understood. We need the depiction of women in the world as creatives, as writers, artists, and scholars who tell the story for the audience, instead of in between the pages of the important content written by men solely in advertisements adhering to patriarchy.