Bloomberg editor: Diverse newsrooms help tell better stories

Laura Zelenko, the senior executive editor for talent, diversity, standards and training at Bloomberg News, said on Friday that maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce was vital to its success.

The Hindu writes, “Ms. Zelenko also said that diversity also affected the stories that newsrooms chose to divert their resources to. She wondered if American news organisations would have latched on to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 earlier if the African Americans covered the Federal Reserve: banks targeted blacks to sell their higher-risk home loans.

“Ms. Zelenko said that diversity also affected the way newsrooms produced stories. ‘I have to admit, I didn’t always think this way and I am constantly surprising myself with my own lack of understanding of the biases that persist in the newsroom,’ she said.

“She went on to narrate an incident involving a story, written by a female reporter from Bloomberg, about harassment at big banks in New York. A senior male editor had worked on it; the reporter asked Ms. Zelenko for her opinion on the product. ‘I said it read like a joke, like it wasn’t taking the issues seriously, there was some nuance in the writing that wasn’t there. She asked me, well isn’t there a woman who could edit this story instead? I looked around the room and realised we had a dearth of senior female editors in a position to take over that story,’ she said.”

Read more here.