All About Women   

AS WRITERS, EDITORS, PUBLISHERS and subjects, females have historically lagged behind in media representation, says Kathleen Harrington. That's why she founded WomensNewsLink. com--a news service focusing on and chiefly staffed by women and girls. "Life experience suggested it," says Harrington, 42. "I grew up as the only girl on the baseball field. As an adult, I was the only woman in the office. As the lives of women are shifting, I've noticed the stories aren't shifting with the reality of the changing faces of women." Starting this month, the site, with financial backing from a group of private investors, will distribute news globally to paid subscribers through the Internet, where women users now outnumber men, according to Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications.
Harrington, a former senior adviser for the Clinton administration on business and East Asian and Pacific affairs and chief of staff to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, says the goal is to sign up both online and offline subscribers, such as mainstream newspapers and network TV stations, women-oriented Web sites and other specialty and health sites. To cover women's news, the service hires e-lancers--particularly females, but not exclusively--from around the world. Harrington, also the site's CEO, says contributors include Ellen Zavian of Sports Illustrated and Laura Logan, formerly of ABC News. WomensNewsLink.com also boasts a number of first-ever all-female sections, including obituaries and an op-ed page. The stories are available to subscribers only, and Harrington is thinking big. She hopes that "in five years [the site will] become so important in the journalism scene, no one will ever remember not seeing it before."