Every newspaper used to have special pages of some sort geared to the interests of women. But feminists screeched about it, saying there’s nothing different about the interests of women and men, that it was just a social construct imposed on women by male editors. That’s why newspapers quit covering debutante balls and “society” events.
Well, a Pew Research Center research report shows that maybe all those old cigar-chomping, male chauvinist editors knew what they were doing:
Women consistently express more interest than men in stories about weather, health and safety, natural disasters and tabloid news. Men are more interested than women in stories about international affairs, Washington news and sports.
According to Pew, women prefer weather, crime news, culture and arts, community news, entertainment news, health news and religion news.
Here’s what the survey showed men like: sports news, science/technology, business/finance, international news, Washington news, local government news and consumer news.
You can’t get much different than that. The notion that newspapers print only “bad” and “depressing” news took hold in that era immediately after so-called women’s pages bit the dust. The hunger for what today is called “hyperlocal” news may be, in reality, an indication that the things women want out of a newspaper just aren’t there anymore.
