Why Bloomberg focuses on female sources in its stories

Laura Zelenko, Bloomberg News’ talent, diversity and standards chief, spoke with Henna Inam of Forbes.com about the news organization’s efforts in gender diversity.

Here is an excerpt:

Henna Inam: Why is Bloomberg focused on this initiative of raising women’s voices in the media?

Laura Zelenko: We started talking about this initiative 10 years ago, under the leadership of our former editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler. He set out to improve the gender balance of our staff across the newsroom and in leadership positions — as well as in our story-telling. We made progress, but our efforts needed a recharge with the arrival of our current editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait. We wanted to once and for all create the definitive global source list of women experts in business and finance to keep us competitive and improve the quality of our coverage. We now have a step-by-step approach: identifying women experts, building the database, insisting that we tap more women as sources to quote in stories and interview on TV, creating standards and goals for each team of reporters in every region of the world and tracking this on a regular basis. There’s a lot of work to do, but we’re moving in the right direction.

We have champions in our offices around the world who are helping set this as a priority. The only challenge for reporters is that they have to work harder to identify a greater diversity of voices, but there’s no resistance to the idea that this improves our coverage and story-telling, while reducing potential biases in our news judgement. We’re  seeing a benefit across our platforms — TV, radio and live events.

Read more here.