There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead

Join us for a discussion with Kristin Gilger and Julia Wallace, authors of “There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead,” moderated by Shorenstein Center Director and former editor in chief of TIME Magazine, Nancy Gibbs.

There’s No Crying in Newsrooms tells the stories of remarkable women who broke through barrier after barrier at media organizations around the country over the past four decades. They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view and think about the world. These women, who were calling in news stories while in labor and parking babies under their desks, never imagined that 40 years later young women entering the news business would face many of the same battles they did – only with far less willingness to put up and shut up.

Kristin Grady Gilger is Senior Associate Dean and Reynolds Professor in Business Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She spent the first twenty years of her career as a reporter and editor at newspapers that include The Arizona Republic; the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon; and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Louisiana. At Cronkite, she directs the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and the National Center on Disability and Journalism. She has done training in media management, leadership, ethics and writing around the country and the world. She holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in journalism from the University of Nebraska.

Julia Wallace is the Frank Russell Chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She is an award-winning news industry executive with deep experience in investigative journalism, industry leadership, digital transformation and change leadership. She was the first female editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was named Editor & Publisher Editor of the Year in 2004. She also served as managing editor of USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Arizona Republic and led Cox Media Group Ohio. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.