How Did Journalism Become the It-Career for Rom-Com Protagonists?

I’ve been working as a journalist (or “blogger,” or “digital media employee,” or however you want to define my tenure writing for the web arm of print magazines) for about five years now, and while my chosen profession is many things—rewarding, creative, embattled, and slowly dying all come to mind—I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as glamorous. Part of this is due to the fact that I choose to work remotely, but even before the pandemic, when I commuted to the Vogue offices in New York City, I never quite felt like the glamorous, blowout-sporting fashionista that pop culture had convinced me a women’s magazine writer should be.

Now that we’re three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, with the journalism industry plagued by economic strife and systemic inequity and reporters the world over still working from home in many cases, I—like one iconic and very well-shod journalist before me—can’t help but wonder: Where did my long-held notion that my job was supposed to be chic, sexy and/or glam even come from?

I regularly recap romantic comedies for this website, and as I recently looked back through the many fun, frothy films that I’ve exhaustively catalogued my thoughts about, it hit me: A not insignificant chunk of the protagonists in these rom-coms were exactly the type of shiny-haired, show-pony journalists I occasionally felt like shit for not being, their careers constantly telegraphed as being Big and Important and Fancy (though not, of course, as life-or-death important as the affections of whatever guy they spent what appeared to be the majority of their waking hours chasing).

This phenomenon has been clocked before, but it’s impossible to truly understand the myth of the “hot girl journalist” without going back to the mother of them all: the 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday. In it, Rosalind Russell plays ace reporter Hildy Johnson, whose main arc in the film is romantic, yes—but her style and impassioned pursuit of a story about an accused murderer are still clear. Then, later on, there was Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen in the 1976 satire Network. While director Sidney Lumet renders his female lead as a careerist and fanatical network television exec, she’s also…Faye Dunaway, captured for posterity trotting to and fro through her office in high-heeled pumps and a perfectly fitted skirt suit.