VentureBeat’s experiment in finding female tech reporters

Dylan Tweney, editor in chief of California-based VentureBeat, tried an experiment in October 2014 in an attempt to find more females interested in being technology reporters.

His idea, he wrote on LinkedIn, was to use an online application and then “reformat them from a relatively hard-to-read Google Spreadsheet into a clean-looking Google Doc (using this handy script), remove the names, and evaluate them that way.” The idea was that technology news was a male-dominated world, and this system would hide a person’s gender and identity.

The results? VentureBeat didn’t hire any full-time reporters due to the process, but it has hired three freelancers, and two of them are women. And Tweney said that he learned a lot about hiring and would do it again.

“It was not what I hoped to accomplish, which is to hire somebody completely out of the regular network, that I ordinarily wouldn’t look for,” said Tweney in a telephone conversation with Talking Biz News. “I think I learned a lot, and as an organization we learned a lot from the process.”

VentureBeat currently has a staff of 12, and sister site GameBeat has four staffers. Of those 16, two are female, though Tweney notes that number has been higher.

“As it went down, I felt like I had to do something about this,” said Tweney, who added,  “This is something a lot of Silicon Valley firms, or tech firms, might consider doing. You can do coding tests for software engineers. There are a lot of fields where blind auditions can be used. I think that would help the diversity issue that some of these organizations face.

“I think it was a successful experiment. I hope other people will try it because it will make me look less weird.”

Tweney is now using the process to find interns, noting it allows him to get a much better look at someone’s writing ability throiugh a blind process. But he added that the process is time consuming, and the technology is not quite up to the task.

“The time consuming part is that if you’re just looking at text with no embellishments around it, no design and no byline, you really have to read the text,” said Tweney. “You raise the bar a bit. You wind up reading each submission a couple three times before you whittle the group down. That is a good thing, but it does force you to reckon with the writing.”

After receiving the submissions, Tweney asked people to write a sample story and provide links to other stories that they have published.

“For the candidates who looked good, I took the links and clicked on them and used Instapaper to put them into text and put that in a Google doc,” said Tweney. “That was time consuming, but it gave me Google Docs that were eliminated where published and who wrote it.”

VentureBeat received between 40 to 50 submissions. About half of those were those Tweney classified as “OK.” He then narrowed it down to five or six that were ‘pretty good” and conducted interviews with most of those.

“One of the downsides of this, people who are established journalists don’t want to go through the process<‘ said Tweney. “You’re making them jump through hoops. It’s most suitable for entry-level candidates.”