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…
Charlie,
The real editorial diversity that is needed is ideological — the full spectrum from far-left to far-right. The U.S. is absolutely terrible at this. In the U.K., the record is mixed. London papers are wonderfully diverse, and the BBC is…well, don’t get me started. It is this lack of diversity that is killing-off journalism in the states. The other type is merely about journalists making themselves feel “enlightened.” (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)
Interesting. Of the UK newsrooms I’ve spent any time working in, BBC (FiveLive) was certainly the most ‘educated’ and seemingly uniform middle/upper class. It’s a very ‘cosy’ sort of environment to work in, but also very similar to the environment at its Norwegian equivalent, NRK.
Might have something to do with the ideology of public broadcasters or how it attracts people with a similar ideology, or even that it recruits people when they’re straight from Uni and molds them in a particular ideology (until recent years NRK, for instance, was considered a very safe workplace: once you got your foot inside the door you were secured a job for life).
I recently had a very interesting conversation about this with a fellow Scandinavian who’s an editor with the beeb. He noted how the BBC newsroom was so much more civilised than many others he’d worked in, how even when people were stresses and under a lot of pressure, they’d express this in the loveliest euphemisms, like in “yes dear, I’m afraid I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment” etc etc