How Bloomberg is increasing gender diversity in its stories

Katie Hawkins-Gaar of Poynter writes about Bloomberg’s efforts to increase women quoted in its stories.

Hawkins-Gaar writes, “Laura Zelenko, a senior executive editor at Bloomberg, says Bartenstein’s source tracking is an example of a ‘micro win,’ but stressed that the company is doing even more on a wider scale to increase women’s voices in the news.

“‘I’m happy to see individual reporters getting excited about their own [gender diversity] numbers and seeing progress, but I want to us focus on the macro, because that’s where we’ll begin to see change,’ Zelenko said.

“Zelenko, who oversees newsroom talent, diversity, training and standards at Bloomberg, explained that the company’s approach to boost diverse sourcing is multifaceted, and has led to positive results. Last year, the company added a CMS feature that allowed reporters to track the diversity of sources in stories. Tagged stories have increased approximately 10 percent from week to week since launch. The company also boosted its global database of women experts from 500 names at the start of 2018 to more than 2,300.

“Getting more women on air required a different approach. ‘One of the things we kept hearing is that either women don’t exist in the positions we’re looking for, or firms aren’t pushing forward women, or women didn’t feel comfortable going on TV. It turns out they didn’t have the training or the support,’ Zelenko said.”

Read more here.