Diverse newsroom: why it matters
Most newsrooms suffer from a lack of diversity. Journalists are comfortable to be with other journalists who often have similar middle-class backgrounds, and university degrees. Studies also show that top editors as a group is more “white” than the market they provide news for.
Trying to create a better diversity and balance, US-based project Trusting News has created a hiring guide for newsrooms to identify job candidates with different experiences.
Trusting News is a a research and training project set up by the American Press Institute and Reynolds Journalism Institute.
The guide includes a list of interview questions hiring managers can ask to understand how prospective employees would bring their life experiences to their work. The goal is to help newsrooms hire for “dimensions of difference.”
“Who we are as journalists, who we are as human beings affects how we do our journalism,” Trusting News director Joy Mayer told Poynter Institute´s website.
”The ultimate goal is to change newsroom culture, Mayer said. Ideally, newsrooms should have a diverse set of experiences represented among their staff, and those journalists should feel comfortable using those experiences in their work.”
She said she hopes newsrooms will reflect on the perspectives they might currently be missing.
“For a newsroom to really use this guide well, it would have to come along with conversations with the whole staff about why these issues are important and what the goal is so that as people are brought on, they feel not only empowered to speak up, but rewarded for speaking up,” Mayer said.
“The way I think about dimensions of difference is bringing to bear a really broad consideration of how someone is showing up for work and how their characteristics and experiences could influence how they approach their work.”
Those differences are not necessarily those that are easy to define like age, race, sexual orientation or skills mentioned in the CV.
”Instead, they include all forms of visible and invisible diversity — experiences that would be found in a community and that a newsroom wants represented among its staff.”
As examples, Mayer mentioned experience living in a small town or having family who are immigrants.
Trusting News worked with four US partner newsrooms to generate interview questions that encourage job candidates to share how their experiences influence their journalism.
Among the 16 questions included in the guide:
“Tell me about a time you got into a debate about journalism with a friend or family member who does NOT work in the media?”
“How do you get to know a new community? Are there types of community involvement that are important to you?”
”Trust in journalists is an issue for all of us. What kinds of things can you do/have you done to build trust with sources who are otherwise suspicious of you, your outlet or journalists in general?”
The guide warns that there are many personal questions that interviewers cannot ask directly. It also encourages interviewers to recognize and address the power dynamics involved in a job interview so that candidates understand that they can decline to answer certain questions.
“It is vitally important to create spaces and places in which people understand why these questions are getting asked and understand that they can opt in to answering,” the guide reads. “When they are asked if there are things from their own experiences they’d like to share, they need to know they will not be penalized for declining to answer.”
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