At a time

Posted by ESC on August 11, 2003

In Reply to: At a time posted by Mei on August 11, 2003

: Hi,

: I don't quite understand the following sentence. Could anyone do me a favor. Thanks a lot.

: At a time when news organizations are facing ever-more intensive forms of competition, and when female readers, listeners, and viewers remain ellusive as ever, the costs of this failure to treat women fairly in the journalistic workplace continue to mount.

At a time = now, at this point in time. You could just lose the whole phrase and say: News organizations today are facing...

News organizations are competing against either other for a share of the audience and women are especially hard to attract. So news organizations will pay a high cost for failure to treat women journalists fairly.

I guess the paragraph is saying that women are more likely to watch, read or listen to other women. So the failure to treat women journalists fairly will result in a loss of the female audience.