‘Changing the way we do journalism’

Q&A with Juliana Iootty

Head of Asia Region, BBC World Service

As the Head of Asia Region, Juliana oversees the BBC’s 16 language services in Southeast Asia, managing in-country editors and production team, and helping to transition the BBC’s audience from traditional to digital platforms. Working with the 50:50 Project, Juliana increased female contributors across the Asian services – with some moving from as low as 17% to 50%.

Reflect Reality:  How did you get started with the 50:50 Project?

Iootty:  We are a public service broadcaster and as such we have the duty of serving people that need information, and women are a big part of this. In several Asian services and countries, our audience often skewed male, and we had to look at our content and ask whether it represented women’s role in society. I decided we needed to jump into the 50:50 Project and try and look at the way we were doing journalism.

BBC Indian Services taking part in 50:50 Project. Photo credit: BBC

What makes the 50:50 Project so effective is the commitment from leadership. The first thing was for me to understand what the project was about, that it was not a tokenistic approach. It called for a change in mentality and a change in the way we think about our stories. When I was sure I understood this, I called a meeting with my management team. Ros came and spoke with us. Our team had an entire away-day to look at how we would measure the results of the project, but mainly to talk about what it meant for our journalism. We invited BBC leaders to talk about how they changed their departments and had several layers of people from services – managers, editors, producers – included. We needed to get people's buy-in.

RR:  What challenges did you confront?

Iootty:  We are a multiplatform operation, with tv, radio and digital. We included programs from all three platforms. It was more challenging for some than others. The East Asian services are mostly digital, and that makes them a bit more avant-garde by nature. In the Indian market, for instance, there are around 800 TV channels, and countless radio channels and websites. To reach audiences we needed to be strong not only on our direct platforms but on social media and search engines. The 50:50 Project was easier with digital services because it was already a part of their day-to-day job to gauge the impact on the audience, to listen to what the audience was saying online. In other regions where services are radio heavy, the mentality was different: you put the content out there and you don't necessarily know what the audience is doing. We have people working here for 10 or 12 years in radio, and they are not used to audience feedback. This is the most difficult thing – to change the work culture.

RR: How was the content improved?

BBC East Asia Services, radio programmes taking part in the 50:50 Project. Photo credit: BBC

Iootty:  My concern, in the beginning, was that the message we were conveying to teams would be misinterpreted; that they would hear us saying that they need to do more stories that are relatable to women and that this would mean only stories about motherhood, or women's sexual health or sexual abuse, etc. I was afraid people would pigeonhole women's audiences, thinking they would only be interested in this kind of content. The main success of this project was for people to understand that women are not interested only in things like sanitary pads, or sexual violence or stories about health. Those are important stories, but surveys show us unequivocally that women are interested in politics and hard news as much as men are. The reason why we were not reaching women was because those stories were delivered by interviewing only male politicians or listening mainly to male contributors, or simply because they were done in a non-engaging way. Women have less time than men. If you don't grab them, they are gone. For example, if we need to produce a story about Trump's policy on immigration, we would need to add context to it, telling people the ‘things you need to know about how these changes will impact your life.’ We made it more relatable. To me, that was the big success, that people started to understand that if you want to make a good story, you need to find an interesting angle, character, or a better headline.

Just today we had a meeting to talk about the engagement we have seen on stories. There was one example of a story on a new environmental law passed by the Thai parliament. We found a woman in Bangkok who opened a sweets shop that is environmentally friendly in the way she sources the product and does not use plastic bags. Her story, set within the context of the new law, had 45% engagement by women which is massive for a single story.