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Charlie Beckett

April 15th, 2008

Editorial Diversity: how to become a (different) journalist

2 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Charlie Beckett

April 15th, 2008

Editorial Diversity: how to become a (different) journalist

2 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Excellent post here from Rod McKensive editor of BBC’s Newsbeat talking about how you increase the diversity of people coming in to journalism:

…how can journalism reflect society if our journalists have similar backgrounds and a similar view of life? It’s a problem across our industry and certainly over the years BBC News has been guilty, in my view, of recruiting almost exclusively from a similar well educated, middle class background. Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with being middle class or well educated – it’s just that not everyone should be like that. It’s not instead of – it’s as well as.

The narrowing of recruitment has been well-documented, for example, by a special supplement from Media Guardian. Good luck to the BBC in their efforts to widen the net or open more doors.

But I suspect that real editorial diversity of class, ethnicity, locality and views will come through people having greater access to media via new technologies. Mainstream media will then have to chase the different journalists instead of trying to create them. This is partly about changing the news agenda to reflect people’s real lives instead of the obsessions of an Oxbridge metropolitan clique.

It’s what I call ‘Editorial Diversity’, an idea I outline in Chapter 5 of my book, SuperMedia, out next month!!

Details here…

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Charlie Beckett

Posted In: Director's Commentary | Journalism

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