Explore the stories of women pioneers in journalism

Marion Carpenter was a revolutionary woman journalist during the 1950s. She was the first female national press photographer to cover Washington D.C. and the White House. She was born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1920, where she studied to be a nurse. In her free time, she joined the St. Paul Camera Club and became interested in news photography. She later moved to Washington D.C. and worked for the Washing...

Zania Erhaim is a Syrian journalist. She broadcasted for BBC Arabic Television and covered the ongoing civil war in Syria. During that time, she was the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)'s Communications Manager, and she trained hundreds of people to be citizen reporters, and many of them were women. She helped establish many of Syria’s emerging independent newspapers and magazines. She f...

Mary Garber was a pioneering sports writer during the 1940s. Working at the Winston-Salem Journal, she advocated for black athletes and coaches in the segregated region of North Carolina. She was the only female sportswriter in the Winston-Salem region for 30 years and one of the few in the country. She was the first woman to be inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, and was also indu...

Clare Hollingworth was the first journalist to report on the outbreak of World War Two. She was working at the Daily Telegraph at the time, and she had been a journalist there for less than a week. She was sent to Poland to investigate tensions between Germany and other European countries when she saw German troops on the Polish border. Three days later, she was the first to report on the German in...

Cora Rigby was the founder of the Women’s National Press Club and the first woman at a major newspaper to head a Washington News bureau. In her hometown, in Ohio, during the late 19th century, she started her journalistic career by writing political columns. She was initially sent home on her first attempt because the editor thought it was scandalous for a woman to write in the newspaper. She re...

Ida B. Wells is one of the most well known and celebrated female journalists in American history. She started in journalism after the lynching of one of her good friends in Memphis. She started to investigate why black men were lynched. Investigative journalism was fairly new at the time. She wrote several columns in the local newspaper. She wrote a pamphlet in 1892 that exposed the motives behind ma...

Meredith Talusan has written for The New York Times, VICE Magazine, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. She was the first transgender staff writer at Buzzfeed News and the first trans person to hold an executive position at Condé Nast. She is now a contributing editor at them. She won the Al Neuharth Award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism for her MIC feature “Unerased: Counting Transgeder Lives.” She wa...

One of the most well known female journalists, Nellie Bly revolutionized journalism and investigative reporting. She worked at the Pittsburgh Dispatch and started to write investigative reports on the working conditions of women in industrial factories, but after the paper got complaints about the articles, she was sent to write articles on society, fashion, and gardening. She later went to Mexico as...