When Francesca Donner tried to change how women's stories were told at the Wall Street Journal, she hit a familiar wall. "It was like a rubber band," she explains. "You can stretch it, but [the news] still comes back to being told through a male lens."

The frustration wasn't about a lack of women in the news - they were there. The problem was deeper: whose perspective was shaping these stories, and what was being deemed worthy of front-page coverage?

Donner's journey from traditional newsrooms to founding her own publication, The Persistent, reflects a broader struggle in journalism: how to break away from ingrained editorial traditions that have long determined what counts as important news.

At the tail end of the noughties, Donner witnessed senior editor Carol Hymowitz's attempts to bring more women's stories to the fore, only to face massive pushback at the Journal. "Even if the 1980s were long gone, I felt like we were in this long-gone era with shoulder pads," Donner recalls.

The experience left her troubled about how women were - and weren't - being covered in mainstream media. Even after moving to The New York Times, the same patterns persisted.

Then came 2016 and Trump's election, followed by the #MeToo movement. These two events spurred many women's........

© journalism.co.uk