For News Producers
Achieving and maintaining gender parity in news sourcing require newsrooms and journalists to reconsider the way they work. One-off special initiatives have limited results if staff fall back on the same familiar processes and old habits. This section presents interventions newsroom leaders and journalists can introduce to sustainably change their workflow and transform their sourcing processes. The approaches are drawn from best practices developed by the United for News coalition and pilot project partners. Many of the strategies are also relevant for diversifying sources beyond gender.
Specific interventions fall within one of four strategy categories: Planning and Analysis for launching key interventions in the newsroom, Tracking the gender split of sources, Ensuring Staff Buy-In for the ongoing participation of the newsroom, and specific activities for Cultivating Sources.
The interventions in this handbook can be implemented together as part of a larger initiative. Alternatively, newsrooms can pick and choose the activities that work best for them. Bloomberg’s New Voices program is an example of a newsroom that has incorporated a broad set of activities to increase women as sources.
Bloomberg’s New Voices
In a major push to diversify its workforce and content globally, Bloomberg launched its New Voices initiative in early 2018. New Voices aims to address the deficit of women sources in their stories and on television. Bloomberg considers increasing diversity of all voices, particularly women’s voices, the key to ensuring balance and fairness in its reporting, and to building new audiences.
New Voices’ components include:
Tracking: Tracking diversity in content across all platforms, including online, print, TV, radio, photography, and live events. Bloomberg enhanced its news story publishing software so that it could track any story that cites or quotes a female expert.
Expert Database: Building a global database of more than 5,000 female sources for Bloomberg journalists to reference.
Training: Funding media training for top women executives in business and finance in order to increase the number of women on-air at Bloomberg and other media outlets. In 2018 the training program launched in New York, San Francisco, Toronto and London. In 2019 it expanded to Dubai, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.
Since rolling out New Voices, Bloomberg has consistently increased stories that quote or cite a woman and the number of women expert commentators on TV has increased from 10% to more than 21%. By the end of 2019 more than 150 senior female executives have received media training and in two years the global database of female sources has grown from 500 to 5,000 women.
