US broadcaster NPR introducing diversity tracker
US broadcaster NPR has introduced a diversity tracker available for all journalists at the company. Called Dex, the tool is attached to NPR’s content management system, the Poynter Institute reports.
For each story, reporters, producers, correspondents and editors submit information about their sources’ race and ethnicity, gender identity, geographic location and age range. They can also indicate if a source declined to provide that information. Dex tracks all of this information so that journalists can later pull up reports to monitor their source diversity.
The US broadcaster’s solution resembles resources introduced by for instance Swiss publisher Ringier Group that has launched an artificial intelligence-based tool, EqualVoice, that is used by an increasing number of publishers trying to fix the gender disbalance in news reporting.
The BBC’s 50/50 project has also spread and is used by other media companies, universities etc to track the gender balance in programming with the goal to reach a 50/50 balance.
Dex also acts as a source database for NPR journalists, allowing them to find experts for stories they cover. NPR maintains a public-facing Diverse Sources Database, but the two are not currently connected, though that could change in the future, said deputy director of news operations Rolando Arrieta.
Dex has information about a source’s race and ethnicity, gender identity, geographic location and age range.
The ability to create reports in real time is what makes Dex so powerful, said NPR chief diversity officer Keith Woods. NPR has been tracking the diversity of its sources since 2013. Before 2020, research teams at NPR took an annual random sample of the organization’s sources for their demographic analysis.
In 2013, no more than 28% of sources were women, and 16% of expert sources were people of colour. 27% of all sources came from Washington, D.C.
However, numbers have improved, Poynter reports and in 2019, women made up close to 40% of all sources, and people of colour was 25 to 30% of expert sources. Less than 20% of sources came from Washington, D.C.
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