11 Nov Meet GMMP United States Coordinator Kelly Martini
Name: Kelly Martini
GMMP Coordinator for: United States
Since: 2025
Why are you a GMMP coordinator? What motivated you to lead the GMMP?
I discovered the GMMP when I was first out of college and working for what was then The United Methodist Women’s Division (now United Women in Faith). Twenty-five years later, my daughter who was finishing law school participated in the monitoring. And what a change there has been in the media!
Dr. Glory Dharmaraj and Shirley Struchen, long-time communicators in the United Methodist Church in the United States, introduced me to and mentored me in both media monitoring efforts and the importance of religious communications.
When the position opened to be the U.S. coordinator for GMMP+30, and they asked me, I jumped. I had retired from full-time communications, but I still did some freelance writing and was following media and its coverage with my personal professional lens.
The United States was reeling and split after the November 2024 presidential elections, and I would tell anyone who listened my theory: there were direct correlations of political rhetoric and the rise of specific news networks, their story coverage, and their commentary.
The GMMP is important because it puts data to hypotheses and opinions like mine, proving them right or wrong. Statistics give us a hint as to why the U.S. political atmosphere is volatile and split. Does it have something to do with who tells the story, who is the focus of the story, and who is left out of the story? To me, these are extremely important questions to ask during times like these. It can inform how we got into this situation.
How are you using the GMMP methodology, tools and findings? How have any of these dimensions of the GMMP shaped the work of your organization, institution or network?
I was a big advocate of using AI to collect all the data we needed for the May 2025 monitoring day. Yet two things became apparent to me in discussions with other WACC (World Association of Christian Communication) members:
- First, the human aspect of the data connection was important. It gave real people buy-in to the process and opportunities to exchange their feelings and ideas about the data.
- Second, the GMMP methodology continued the three-decade endeavor, and changing the methodology after so many years would skew the data, which was necessary to see how the media has stalled or changed.
This project is the first step in an opportunity to connect across denominations, faiths and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to tell a story, to communicate the lessons, and to work with others to advocate and act for truth in the media.
What positive change has the GMMP driven in your context? What contribution has it made to the process towards gender equality in or through the media?
For me personally, this has been an opportunity to reach out to young adults (15–25 years old) who have a different definition of media, who are constant recipients of story snippets from places we don’t imagine, and who have a definition of gender equality, which is different than sexual equality.
Recognizing this group is positive if we can embrace them and move forward to learn from their experience and news. This year, we recruited a small number to participate in GMMP, but they monitored our news, not necessarily theirs.
We also hired an intern, Emma Rachel Samuel, both a new grad student and citizen, which combined generational expertise with national/global experience. She collected compiled data so easily and quickly that I was embarrassed by my lack of tech skill!
Her self-starting and independent work was a lightbulb for me – she could work better and faster with her tools and expertise. We need young adults. When we expand recruitment of young generations and monitoring of different news sources, we will have better support in working towards equality.
We have been marking the GMMP’s 30th anniversary in 2025. Why do you believe that it is crucial for the GMMP to continue?
The work of GMMP is critical, from my U.S. perspective, because we’ve become so divided as a society. We no longer have an independent press corps in the Pentagon. Our networks have more commentary from talking heads than hard news. And the messages we get, whether from T.V., radio, or newspapers are being dwarfed by the news the “younger generations” are getting from YouTube, podcasts, web links, Reddit, Snapchat, and social media in general.
In late 2024, The New York Times surveyed teenagers about their relationship with news. Most young people reported that they got their news from social media, while they also said the constant bombardment of news popping up on their phone was stressful.
The teens are becoming better at “lateral reading” to understand what is fake and what is fact in their news, which is a generational difference. But with the constant bombardment, they turn to humor – Last Week’s Tonight with John Oliver, The Daily Show, or satirical animation like South Park– to ease the overload of all the pessimistic information.
If this is where the news is, and where it will be more and more, then somehow we need to embrace all these media for monitoring. We have to be led by the younger generations. Even as a mother of young adult kids, I’m clueless about their news sources. New places seem to pop up daily, or I’m kept in the dark about them, on purpose!
Monitoring efforts will need to discover if the influencers are today’s newscasters, if memes are the headlines, if satire actually communicates the real facts. And where the similarities and differences in the messaging and subject matter are. It’s a complex bugaboo.
Monitoring will have to be a fluid monitoring mechanism. When there’s human involvement, young people have to have buy into its purpose, and monitoring has to be as easily accessible and fast as everything else in a young person’s life.
It will need to involve or even be led by the younger generations, the ones who see sex and gender as two different things, and who understand what’s fact, what’s fiction, and how to tell the difference. We need them for the human factor of monitoring and for their expertise.
Monitoring will be as necessary as it is daunting if we want to continue to learn and advocate. And after all this, we may decide we need help with data collection. AI, anyone? (Ask our interns, they can probably tell you all about it.)
Kelly Martini was director of communications for the former United Methodist Women’s Division, and is now a freelance writer living outside Philadelphia, PA.
Get involved with a GMMP+30 team near you. Contact us to find out how.
English 
Spanish
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.