By Katie Reilly

Profiles of former Lehman Brothers CFO Erin Callan are noticeably different from those written about her male colleagues.

A 2012 article for Business Insider described her as “well-heeled.” A 2008 article in The Wall Street Journal included a photo with the caption, “Erin Callan is known for being frank, fashionable.” A Wall Street Journal blog post about Callan with the headline “High on Heels: How Shoes Affect the Juggle” soon followed.

Heidi Moore, now the business editor at Mashable, remembers that article and others like it all too well.

“She was wearing what women wear in bond departments of investment banks, you know, an incredibly sophisticated outfit with stiletto heels — because stiletto heels show power on a trading floor — and this came in for a great deal of comment,” Moore said. “What signals was she sending? Is this an appropriate way to be dressed? It just started this whole conversation around her look and her image, whereas Dick Fuld, who was the CEO of Lehman Brothers, could just show up in a suit and everyone would just accept that he was appropriately dressed.”

Callan’s situation exemplifies the media challenges long encountered by businesswomen, who often receive a skewed kind of coverage, if any at all. It’s a problem that many of today’s business journalists and editors are aware of — one that many are trying to combat with a variety of solutions because the stakes are higher than stiletto heels and the future of quality journalism demands it.

Addressing a complex problem

In a survey of 16,800 stories across 45 news outlets, a 2005 Pew Research Center study found that only a third of stories contain even one female source — even though, at the time, 42 percent of people working in management, business and financial operations were women. Comparatively, the study found that more than three quarters of stories contain male sources.

Broken down further, in 438 business stories, 67 percent included no female sources and just 33 percent included one or more. Meanwhile, just 40 percent of those business stories included no male sources.

The old problem has proven to be difficult to fix.

“Years ago, when I was at Reuters writing a stock market close, I specifically used just women for the stock market close story, but failed and ended up having three women and a token male,” said Betty Wong, (right) the former global managing editor for Reuters.

Wong said she recently examined what she calls the standard “bread-and-butter stories” of financial journalism: U.S. stock markets report, corporate earnings and deal stories. She thinks those stories, in particular, have no excuse for failing to include women or minorities because, unlike breaking stories, they can be anticipated and prepared for daily.

Alecia Swasy, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who now teaches at the University of Illinois, said women have historically been underrepresented in business news stories because major corporations were run by men.

“That’s still true today because we’re still writing stories when a woman is named a CEO with the second graf always being, ‘She becomes the X-number woman to be named a CEO.’ Whereas, when a man is promoted, you don’t have to say that,” Swasy said.

“As journalists, we have to reflect the reality. There might be plenty of women in public relations jobs, but when it comes to the seats of power, they’re still in the minority.”

The gender gap in the field of economics has been widely acknowledged. A 2013 article entitled “Where Are the Women?” published in Econ Focus, the economics magazine of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, noted that women earned just 34 percent of economics Ph.D.s in 2011. That’s the lowest percentage among any of the social sciences. Comparatively, women earned 46 percent of all doctorate degrees.

From assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, the percentage of women in each position grows consistently smaller with higher academic posts.

Moore said this power imbalance often leads women to decline to comment in stories, even if they believe women need more representation.

“Women in business have to work a lot harder to get where they’re going, and they become very wary of anything that could hurt their chances, and that includes a high profile,” she said.

“A lot of women in business I’ve talked to — whether they’re entrepreneurs or at the top of very big firms — all talk privately about that same fear, which is the more prominent they get, the more arrows are aimed at them.”

Attempting a solution

Jennifer Pozner founded Women in Media and News in 2001, when she said there were no other national media organizations working to amplify women’s presence and power in public debate. She’s now made a career of it, teaching others about journalistic coverage of women and giving talks entitled, “Hillary Clinton is a Size 8 and Other Useless Things I’ve Learned from the News.”

By the early 2000s, Pozner had become frustrated by the comparatively small number of women who were quoted in a variety of news sources. She said there weren’t any tools to combat what she described as predictable responses from media outlets about why women were underrepresented.

“Whether it was studies about the fact that women were very, very rarely published on the op-ed pages in the top newspapers across the country or very rarely heard from as pundits in the broadcast and cable news sphere or whether it was the fact that women were very rarely quoted in stories about economics and stories about foreign affairs and business policy,” Pozner said.

“The only time, generally, statistically, that you’d even find women’s voices even approaching an equitable level in news would be in the style sections — stories about which pashmina to wear for fall and which starlet was having sex with which actor.”

As Pozner sees it, the repercussions of that lack of representation extend far beyond a single story.

“When you have half the population being either marginalized, erased or deeply trivialized in journalism, that is a threat not only to women, it is a threat to democracy,” she said.

“It makes it impossible to understand where a country wants to go in terms of, say, responses to military action or to domestic policy issues. And it makes it very difficult to ever effect social change.”

Pozner said the responses she received when she raised the issue varied greatly. Some editors and producers told her they’d love to quote more women — if only there were women who were qualified to be sources on the issue. Others told her their job was not to make social change for women but to produce good journalism using the best available voices.

Pozner’s solution came in the form of the Perspectives Of Women Expand Reporting (POWER) Sources Project, a direct response to the two excuses she heard repeatedly. The project created a database of diverse female sources — women of different ages, ethnic groups, races and socioeconomic statuses.

It launched with the goal of easily and quickly providing journalists with a qualified pool of new sources — all of whom were, importantly, also women.

At its height, the POWER Sources database included 2,000 names, though maintaining and updating that database is difficult

Pozner believes the problem is still present today, though she thinks Women in Media and News has made progress since 2001.

“We haven’t changed everything in 10 years, but there has been slow and steady increase of the numbers of women who appear as sources in journalism and the number of women who are heard as voices in their field,” she said.

Wong said her own solution was to push to diversify the reporting and editing ranks at Reuters in the hopes that a more diverse newsroom would produce articles with a diversity of sources who could more accurately tell the stories of readers.

“It’s harder to press that in places like Reuters and Bloomberg, to some extent, because if the main audience is people on Wall Street and investment bankers, for a long time, that was a white male population,” Wong said. “And you couldn’t really argue that you had to diversify the newsroom because of the audience. You could only hope that a wide range of stories and a range of opinions is what diversity brings. I really pushed that.”

Amanda Bennett, (right) former executive editor for projects and investigation at Bloomberg News, helped launch the Bloomberg News Women’s Project in 2010 with the goal of covering women and women’s issues more seriously on a global scale, including the Saudi women’s driving movement and early coverage of General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

“Our point was: there are many, many, many legitimate female sources that are not making their way into your stories because you’re using coverage lists and source lists that are 10 years old. You need to go out and look for legitimate female sources,” Bennett said.

The initiative has been responsible for thousands of women-focused stories each year.

In March of this year, Matt Winkler, who recently stepped down as editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, participated in a United Nations panel about women and the media. He said key changes at Bloomberg included identifying women who are influential in every field and insisting there be a woman’s voice in every story.

Bennett attributed much of the success of the Women’s Project to Winkler’s support at the top of the news organization. Pozner agreed that the best solution to underrepresentation is a top-down institutional priority.

“Nothing changes on an institutional level in journalism without it becoming a policy, a de facto or explicit policy,” she said.

Pozner said feedback on the POWER Sources Project from most journalists and news organizations has been positive, suggesting the sourcing imbalance is caused more by a lack of resources than a sexist disposition within newsrooms.

“For most journalists, they’re not going about filing their stories thinking about the gender or racial component of their source pool,” Pozner said. “They’re going about their story thinking, ‘Got to get this done, and then I’ve got to get the new story done and I hope it’s accurate, and my newspaper’s cleared half the fact checkers that they used to have on staff.”

Changing the standards

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled a wave of media mergers, which forced many media organizations to make cuts and many newsrooms to downsize — something Pozner thinks inhibited diverse news coverage.

The American Society of News Editors’ annual census tracks the number of full-time professional news jobs at newspapers in the U.S. That number has fallen from a peak of 56,400 in 2000 to 36,700 in 2014.

“There are any number of ways that media mergers and media consolidation negatively impact the production of journalism and trickle down to reinforcing the fact that journalists will often end up having to call the same five white guys in suits that have been in their Rolodex for 15 to 20 years as sources,” Pozner said.

Moving forward, Bennett thinks all news organizations have a lot of progress to make in terms of how they portray women, how aggressively they look for legitimate female sources and how well they track rising female leaders at companies.

Moore predicts a generational shift will make it more acceptable to be a prominent woman in business — and, therefore, more acceptable to be quoted as one.

If Pozner has any say in it, that shift will coincide with changing standards and priorities at news organizations across the board, both business and otherwise.

“Imagine if in addition to accuracy and an attempt at balanced fair reporting, another standard that you just absolutely had to accommodate in the production of journalism was equitably representing the population that journalists are meant to serve,” Pozner said. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if one of the things that mattered structurally, institutionally, was how diverse was your source pool?”

Katie Reilly is a senior journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She will intern this summer at Reuters.

By Max Wilhelm

On a November night in 2014, Sarah Lacy was redoing her home security system.

The 38-year-old investigative journalist recently heard that Emil Michael, a senior vice president of business for Uber, had publicly boasted of a $1 million smear campaign to spy on journalists covering Uber.[1]

The popular San Francisco-based ride-sharing service had faced a barrage of criticism since its founding, mostly targeting the company’s “bro-ish” culture and insensitivity to its female customers. Lacy, (right) the editor-in-chief and founder of technology news website PandoDaily, knew that she was a likely target in Uber’s campaign against journalists.

Lacy had recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny” after the company appeared to be working with a French escort service. Michael’s plan to discredit journalists by “digging up dirt” on their personal lives seemed like a gross violation of her privacy, a violation that she could not easily forgive.

“Paula Deen made racially insensitive comments and lost a show, lost very real money. Donald Sterling was forced to sell an NBA team,” Lacy said. “And yet we believe that frighteningly misogynist comments like this, anti-First Amendments comments like this, are ‘boys being boys’ and that ‘they’re geniuses and this is what it takes to build a company.’’

In response, Uber publicly denounced Michael’s statements, saying that “We have not, do not and will not investigate journalists.” While some might attribute this seemingly Orwellian plan to Silicon Valley hubris, the truth is that corporate spying on journalists is not a new phenomenon.

General Motors vs. Ralph Nader

One of the most famous cases of companies spying on critics traces back to a young attorney named Ralph Nader in 1966. Nader had written a mildly successful book called Unsafe at Any Speed which criticized General Motors for design flaws leading to unnecessary accidents and deaths in the 1960-1964 Chevrolet Corvair models. Months later, Nader suspected that he was being followed, and later heard reports of strangers asking his friends and family about his personal affairs.[2]

Nader eventually learned that General Motors hired a private investigation firm to dig into his personal life in order to discredit his future testimony in a Congressional hearing against the company.

On March 9, 1966, General Motors admitted the company did track Nader “for routine matters” but never admitted to the widely believed intention of attempting to discredit witness testimony from Nader.

During these four decades separating Ralph Nader and Sarah Lacy, advances in technology, communications, and globalization dramatically altered the landscape of American business. However, one of the darker business practices has remained intact.

This practice is corporate espionage.

The major difference in modern-day corporate espionage is that companies are better at gathering the information they want, and a lot harder to catch in the act.

While corporate espionage traditionally refers to companies spying on their competitors to gain a strategic edge, it can also refer to companies spying on the journalists who cover them.

Any company with an investigative division would prefer a less grating term over corporate espionage such as competitive intelligence, or market research analysis. However, these business arms of America’s corporate machine are responsible for many of the chilling cases of corporate espionage in the history of American business, cases that include spying and intimidating journalists.

These divisions are made up of the most talented intelligence analysts and sleuths around, including former agents of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Secret Service.[3] As agents of the firm, they have a relatively simple mission. They gather and use intelligence to protect the firm’s bottom line.

The structure of large, publicly owned companies requires constant growth in profit and share price. The motivation to continuously improve means companies are heavily suspicious of any coverage which can damage business. To prevent bad press, companies have gone to great lengths to keep their brand and share price intact, and investigative journalists are frequently the prime target.

The Case of Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard is another modern example of a company that initiated a large espionage case against journalists covering their firm. In 2006, it was revealed that Hewlett-Packard illegally obtained the phone records of several board members and journalists in an effort to find a board member leaking confidential, strategic information to the press.

One story in particular speaks to the unsettling power and boldness of corporations trying to protect their image. During this Hewlett-Packard spy campaign, Chairwoman Patricia Dunn authorized the creation of an elaborate scheme to track journalists involving a fictional Hewlett-Packard employee named Jacob.

Jacob was set up as a lure for CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto, (right) who was believed to be in regular contact with the board mole. After releasing a few credible stories to gain her trust, Jacob sent an email to Kawamoto loaded with spyware that would record every keystroke she made in a sophisticated effort to track her source.[4]

These surveillance strategies, many which were against the law, resulted in Chairwoman Dunn and a half-dozen other top Hewlett-Packard executives losing their jobs. The company was also ordered to pay over $20 million in fines.

The cases of Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, and Uber exhibit the lengths companies will go to protect their market share and brand image. While extreme, these case of corporate espionage are possibly just one of many other cases that have remained secret.

The truth is that no one knows exactly how large the market is for corporate espionage, or how much spying on journalists, executives, and employees actually occurs. However, we do know that companies are willing to pay a premium for access to hidden information.

Gartner, a leading technology research and advisory firm based in Connecticut, estimated the competitive intelligence industry at around $30 billion in 2013. This industry is only expected to grow as big data becomes more prevalent and valuable for corporate strategy.[5]

Many might wonder why corporations would engage in such questionable behavior, which seems reckless given these companies are often in the media spotlight. By looking at the risks and rewards of corporate espionage, one can better understand why this practice remains in use today.

As representatives of shareholders, it is the board of directors’ responsibility to maximize shareholder value. Therefore, spying on journalists who have the potential to hurt shareholder value, in addition to the boards’ jobs, can be seen as a viable strategy for the company’s health.

It does not help the case of journalists that companies who get caught in the act of corporate espionage have faced historically low penalties. After Hewlett-Packard was caught illegally monitoring board members and journalists, the company faced a fine of roughly $20 million, or just around 0.02 percent of revenue the year before.[6]

Considering this miniscule penalty in addition to the roughly 23 percent rise in Hewlett-Packard’s share price over the year following the scandal, one can imagine why a board of directors might frequently make decisions favoring money over ethics.[7]

The example of Uber also demonstrates how profit triumphs over ethics in the minds of investors. Not even one month after Uber’s supposed plan to spy on journalists like Sarah Lacy became public, a new round of funding valued the 5-year-old company at over $40 billion[8].

It is clear that companies have far greater resources and personnel to monitor journalists than journalists have to monitor companies. So how do journalists react with all the odds seemingly stacked up against them?

Not a serious problem?

For the most part, they do not believe there to be a serious problem.

Investigative journalists work with the belief that companies are not evil, and that it is natural for these institutions to learn about the people who write about them. They believe that there is a healthy yet competitive relationship that serves the best interests of media and the companies they cover.

Companies need the media to generate brand recognition and good press, and the media needs companies to build stories about the company, its competitors, and the industry that people will want to read.

Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed and one of the first to report on the Uber scandal, believes the relationship between the media and companies to be a healthy one.

“We don’t view our role as ‘combating’ the companies we cover. Adversarial relationships are both normal and healthy,” Smith said.[9]

One might expect to hear some bitterness after Smith’s exposure to the Uber executive talking about “digging up dirt” on journalists’ personal lives. However, he adopts an attitude of taking the high road, acknowledging that there can sometimes be bad eggs who do not represent the company culture.

In regards to the media and corporate relationship Smith also said, “Companies typically respect journalists who give them fair and tough coverage. Our reporter covering Uber, Johana Bhuiyan, has not had problems with access.”

It seems apparent that many journalists do not hold grudges, and that they are comfortable with a bit of a competitive relationship.

While the relationship is generally amicable, there are some investigative reporters that have been exposed to the darkest elements of the media and corporate relationship.

Diana Henriques, (right) an award-winning financial journalist and a New York Times best-selling author on financial events and scandals, is one such journalist.

During her 12-year career at The Times and other publications, she has had a front-row seat into how different companies work with journalists. Overall, Henriques finds no problem with companies performing normal due diligence into a journalist covering them.

“Any competent public relations professional is going to research a reporter’s public track record after getting an interview request, and I don’t find anything offensive about that,” Henriques said.[10]

Henriques states an example of a journalist covering a company who might also have been paid for speaking events by an advocacy group hostile to that company. In this scenario, she believes a company has every right to refuse an interview request by this journalist.

However, reasonable inquiry into a journalist’s professional career is not always where companies draw the line, as Henriques has personally discovered.

“I have had only a few encounters with that sort of bullying research [corporate spying], most memorably by the Ponzi scheming CEO of a debt-collection agency who traveled everywhere with armed guards and who left threatening messages on my voice mail making it clear that he knew where I lived,” Henriques said.

On a separate case, Henriques said she was trailed by a private investigator 24/7, a time which she described as “a little unsettling”. These are the only events of corporate spying that she has encountered in her 40-year career as an investigative journalist, but they are enough to leave a mark.

Dan Kane, investigative reporter for The (Raleigh) News & Observer, is an example of a journalist exposed to intimidation tactics, though from a different source.

Kane was the first to break the story of the widespread academic negligence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, starting a chain of events that culminated in a federal investigation and the withdrawing of former Chancellor Holden Thorp. Soon after releasing his research on the academic scandal, Kane said he was exposed to numerous threats from the UNC-CH fan base, including threats against him and his wife’s safety.[11]

Kane never became aware of a university-led investigation led into his personal affairs, but he did find that the school cut off all ties with him in a damage control campaign to prevent any more bad press.

“After that Julius Peppers mess it was very hard to get people to talk to me on the phone or in person,” Kane said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

Companies and institutions who take a strong-armed or closed-door approach against media exposure can lose more than the public’s trust. Henriques believes that it erodes the entire corporate-media relationship that is essential for companies.

In regards to the intimidation tactics taken against her, Henriques said, ”Knowledge about that kind of research being conducted can introduce a strong adversarial tone to the relationship right out of the blocks, which is unfortunate for both sides…opposition research can sometimes push reporters into that posture despite their best effort to be fair and diplomatic.

“That can only backfire for the company, which loses any opportunity to open a constructive dialogue with the reporter and which risks coming across to the public as a bully with something to hide.”

While corporate spying is a serious problem, the truth is that extreme cases of corporate bullying rarely happen.

Arguably the rise of social media has facilitated greater public awareness of businesses, and makes spying on individuals riskier. When it does happen, it is generally rooted in the personalities of the company’s top executives who might believe themselves to be larger than ethical business practices, an opinion that Sarah Lacy seems to have of Uber.

“I’ve never heard of a very high-ranking executive at a $20 billion company talking about a million-dollar budget to destroy my life,” Lacy said. “I’ve never heard of a case where someone was bragging about it at a dinner, where it was considered socially acceptable.”

While companies can often be the source of the problem, the responsibility to prevent this type of destructive behavior does not solely rest on companies. Journalists must be held to the same professional standard as the companies they cover by striving to remain impartial.

“A reporter has the same obligation to be held accountable for her professional performance. And that means avoiding associations, activities and assignments that can be reasonably challenged as conflicts of interest,” Henriques said.

In and of itself, companies researching the professional background of reporters is not a vicious act. It is a necessary process to facilitate ties within the media and companies, although it can never entail “digging up dirt” on reporters’ personal lives to discredit their research.

The mystery lies in where the line is drawn.

[1]Nellie, B. (2014, November 18). Sarah Lacy on Exec’s Plan to Smear Her: “Every Woman Using Uber Should Be Scared.”. Retrieved April 29, 2015.

[2] Jack Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader, 1965-1971,” PopHistoryDig.com, March 31, 2013.

[3] The Fifth Surveillance: Corporate Spying On Non-Profits | Techdirt (Techdirt.) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140711/08223227850/fifth-surveillance-corporate-spying-non-profits.shtml

[4] Martin, P. (2006, October 2). Hewlett-Packard spying scandal sheds new light on US corporate “ethics”. Retrieved April 15, 2015.

[5] Chidi, G. (2013, February 2). Confessions of a Corporate Spy. Retrieved April 22, 2015.

[6] Hewlett-Packard Company (2006). 10-K Annual Report 2006. Retrieved from SEC EDGAR website http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

[7] HPQ Interactive Stock Chart | Yahoo! Inc. Stock – Yahoo! Finance (HPQ Interactive Stock Chart | Yahoo! Inc. Stock – Yahoo! Finance)

[8] MacMillan, D., Schechner, S., & Fleisher, L. (2014, December 5). Uber Snags $41 Billion Valuation. Retrieved April 21, 2015.

[9] Smith, B. (2015, March 29). Uber’s Opposition Research [E-mail interview].

[10] Henriques, D. (2015, April 28). Investigative Reporting and Opposition Journalism [E-mail interview].

[11] Kane, D. (2015, April 2). Investigative Reporting at The Raleigh News & Observer [Telephone interview].

Max Wilhelm is a junior in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.