Kay Mills

“Kay Mills’s book begins on the day in 1966 when a man at Newsweek told her: `I need someone I can send anywhere, like to riots. And besides, what would you do if someone you were covering ducked into the men’s room?’ 'All of these things seemed vaguely unfair to me at the time, but didn’t really register,’ Ms. Mills said in a telephone interview from her office at the Los Angeles Times. 'That was the way it was. We weren’t really resisting these things. It didn’t seem fair, but so what?’ It still didn’t seem fair 15 or 20 years later, but the inequities had registered. `One overriding reason I wrote the book,’ she said, `was that I was trying to sort out why this profession I cared so much about really didn’t return the favor for women--and, I might add, minorities--for such a long time.’”
“You’ve come a long way, baby, says Mills, but not nearly far enough...Mills tracks the slow ascent of women...starting in 1783 with Elizabeth Timothy, who took over the South Carolina Gazette when her husband died. For the next 150 years only a handful of females followed her...Mills has interviewed dozens of survivors of this long march, and records their advances and retreats in their own salty words, including what she calls `everyday indignities’--those unmistakable moments of truth when a woman knows she’s been zapped.”
“A wonderfully subversive little book...Under the guise of tracing the historic and continuing struggle of women in American newsrooms, she has exposed some very sore places for the press and for women...For people concerned about the role of the press in American affairs, this book strips away the veneer of the myth of objectivity behind which journalists too often hide in making excuses for why they do not do better than they do in telling us what is really going on. Mills argues, with anecdotal support as well as testimony, that women bring special qualities such as better capacities for listening and compassion, that they have some special resources as reporters, such as being less threatening, and that they see the world differently and thus ask different questions, understand issues in a different way, and hear different nuances in a quotation or a news event.”
“Kay Mills...is the author of a seminal new book on women in journalism, A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page. Well written, informative and carefully researched, it chronicles the long march female journalists have plod in their search for professional equality in the U.S."
“Reading A Place in the News was like seeing my life as a professional woman pass before my eyes. Stories of life on newspapers always make for an exciting read; Mills’ book has all that excitement and a wonderful added dimension because its heroes are women.”