Pew Research Center

The departure of Jill Abramson marked an abrupt end to the reign of the first woman to run The New York Times, a role that made her a journalistic pioneer in her own right.

Her dismissal comes during the same week as the retirement of Barbara Walters, who broke a glass ceiling at ABC in 1976 by becoming the first woman to sit at a network anchor desk. Both events have prompted a debate about the role of women in American journalism and how much -- or how little -- has changed over the years.

Our data analysis finds that overall there has been little significant change in the share of women newsroom employees and news managers in recent years. Female journalists are generally paid less than their male counterparts, an issue that may have played a role in Abramson’s exit, according to some media accounts, although the New York Times has denied that.

In the past 15 years, the percentage of women who work in newspaper newsrooms has barely budged. Women made up 36% of all newspaper staff in 2012 (the last year for which data are available), a slight decline from 37% in 1998, according to The American Society of News Editors’ annual census.

As news of large-scale data breaches and vulnerabilities grows, new findings from the Pew Research Center suggest that growing numbers of online Americans have had important personal information stolen and many have had an account compromised.

Findings from a January 2014 survey show that:

• 18% of online adults have had important personal information stolen such as their Social Security Number, credit card, or bank account information. That’s an increase from the 11% who reported personal information theft in July 2013.
• 21% of online adults said they had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over without their permission. The same number reported this experience in a July 2013 survey.

The European Union and the United States are negotiating the most economically significant regional free trade agreement in history: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Publics in Germany and the United States support TTIP and trade expansion in general, especially with each other. But when it comes to specifics, both Americans and Germans oppose many details of this far-reaching initiative. Moreover, they disagree with one another on making transatlantic regulatory standards similar.

And, in the United States, there is a striking generation gap in attitudes relating to TTIP.

For instance, roughly eight-in-ten Americans under age 30 also back the idea of making product and service standards as similar as possible between the US and EU, perhaps not surprising given the fact that this generation is far less trusting than their parents and grandparents of the US government’s ability to set strong safety and privacy standards. A significant share (85%) of Germans prefers European regulation of data privacy, trusting more in their own government’s capacity in this realm than in US regulation.

And, in the United States, men, the young, those with a college degree and high-income persons disproportionately lack faith in American standards protecting their data’s confidentiality. Overall, roughly half (49%) of Americans trust US privacy standards. But only about four-in-ten high-income Americans (39%) share that trust compared with nearly six-in-ten low-income people (58%), a 19 percentage point difference in views. There is a similar 14 point divide on the issue between those who have graduated from college (39%) and those without a college degree (53%).

In this study of US Internet traffic to 26 of the most popular news websites, direct visitors -- those who type in the news outlet’s specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked -- spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral.

The data also suggest that turning social media or search eyeballs into equally dedicated readers is no easy task. These are among the key findings that detail how 1 million people enrolled in one of the nation’s most popular commercial Internet panels have been connecting through their desktop and laptop computers with the most accessed or shared news sites of our time.

An analysis by Pew Research of three months of comScore data finds that among users coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.