Bloomberg’s Zelenko wins Breakthrough Award

Laura Zelenko, Bloomberg’s senior executive editor for diversity, talent, standards, and training, is the winner of the Jessica Savitch Breakthrough Award from Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications.

She received the award at a presentation Thursday night.

Under Zelenko’s leadership, the percentage of women guests brought in as expert commentators on Bloomberg Television has climbed to 18 percent in the most recent month, up from 10 percent at the start of 2018.

In addition, the percentage of stories that quote or cite a woman expert on Bloomberg’s TOP, or front, page, has increased to almost 10 percent from about 2.5 percent in March 2018 and is growing at an average pace of 13 percent a week.

Bloomberg began a push to increase the number of women in its content earlier this year and as part of that effort began a pilot program to train more women for media appearances in locations across the globe in order to further diversify content and talent.

Savitch was best known for being the weekend anchor of NBC Nightly News and daily presenter of NBC News updates during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She died in a car accident in 1983.