2006 APSE Remarks

The following remarks were made by AWSM Executive Chair Joanne Gerstner at the 2006 Associated Press Sports Editors convention in Las Vegas:

To the APSE executive committee and membership –

It is a great honor to speak to you this morning. My name is Joanne Gerstner, I am a sports writer at the Detroit News and the chair of the board for the Association for Women in Sports Media. I have also served as AWSM’s president for the past two years.

I come before you this morning for a few reasons. Number one is to tell you about my group’s financial and structural strength. I know it’s hard to believe, but we are preparing to celebrate AWSM’s 20th anniversary in a year. We’ve gone from having charter support from nine visionary APSE members, along with our founding women members, in 1987,

To now, as we are nearing 500 paid members strong, with members in every state and Canada. We are no longer a niche group supporting the few women that broke through barriers in the 1980s. We are now the main voice for women in our industry.

Thanks to a lot of hard work over the last two years, we have grown by 180 members. The influx of incoming members led us to think bigger for our future, leading us to reorganize as a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. For those not fluent in IRS-speak, that means everything from dues to donations to AWSM is now fully tax-deductible. We are launching many regional events and seminars. And I am laying the groundwork for a significant endowment initiative that will secure AWSM’s bright future for years to come.

And that’s where I hope all of you will get involved.

When I look around this room, it’s clear that we have a ways to go to getting more women into management, on the desk, and into other positions of power in sports departments.  We are still very much in the minority, despite other sections of the paper approaching gender parity in the last 15 years.

I know a lot of you want to bring women into your departments. I hear from many of you on a regular basis, as you are trying to fill openings on the desk or in management.

I am very appreciative of your desire to have the talented and capable women in my group work with you.

The truth is this: all of us, AWSM and APSE, need to do a better job of nurturing the talent we seek. The pool is thin. But it doesn’t have to be.

I have several ideas to bring more women to those areas:
- the first is to have APSE partner with AWSM in additional  scholarships and internships in our annual summer program. We presently give one, $1,000 scholarship to our top copy editing candidate. We send two to three each summer to partner papers for copy editing internships.

I would love to see five college women on summer internships, with two more scholarships, and making our copy editing scholarships higher than our writing. I don’t know how life was for you in college, but scholarship money talked to me, and the chance to earn more money and a good internship experience would have caught my attention.

We want to make copy editing as viable and cool as writing. We have experienced a huge upswing in the demand for our internships and scholarships, a reflection both of more women looking to get into sports and the increased reach and strength of AWSM. But most of the women are steered, either through perception or by their professors, to apply for the writing internships and scholarships.

Why? They’ve been told that’s where women have more opportunity. It’s the sexier choice – after all, the copy editor isn’t seen arguing with a boy-band haired Woody Paige on ESPN or getting on talk radio. While many of us would love to have a whack at beating Woody in an argument, the truth is there are more opportunities for good jobs and advancement on the desk.

I’ve spoken to many of the students, and they had no idea the desk was an option for them, as they rarely come into role model contacts to help them form an impression.

Therefore, all of us in this room need to make the effort to come to them. I would like to see our internships take a chance on the college underclasswomen, the ones who have not perhaps decided on writing vs. the desk. My friends on the desk tell me that their career-deciding experience often came through exposure to an editor or a strong, mentoring copy desk on an internship.

I have proposed to Glen, that APSE help us increase the bounty on copy editing scholarship for our 2007 summer internship program. I am also asking all of you, please consider taking an AWSM copy editing intern. I can tell you from experience, you will be accomplishing two things: nurturing talent, but also possibly grooming the next star hire for your desk.

And we at AWSM, through our grass-roots approach reaching out to colleges and instructors, will use our influence to tell students about copy editing and sports management. More information will equal more candidates. We’ve already gone this route informally last year, and it worked.

Our second proposal is this: we, through the organization of AWSM board member Lydia Craver and APSE diversity chair Jorge Rojas, want to establish some sort of mentoring for women who want to go into management,. At the present time, there are only five women who are sports editors of major metro dailies. We need to do better. We must do better. Having a forum where interested AWSM members can pair up with an APSE member to prepare for management roles will only strengthen our industry.

I thank you very much for your time. We all should be proud of how far we’ve come. 20 years ago, AWSM didn’t exist. This conversation would never have occurred. And I probably would not be a sportswriter.

We have a chance to work together to make things even better, and more importantly, to speed up the growth cycle for women in this business.

I ask for all of your support. Come learn about us, work with us, come to our convention next May in Dallas to help us celebrate out 20th anniversary.

I will be here throughour the convention, and I look forward to discussing this further.

Thank you.