Last month, business reporter Ben Bartenstein shared this Twitter thread about the systematic effort that he and his colleagues at Bloomberg embarked upon to ensure that their stories incorporated quotes and perspectives from women experts, instead of relying on the usual (typically white) male suspects. The thread is instructive both because of he lays out the steps of his process and his results, and because of its implications for institutions looking to translate their stated commitments to diversity into a deeply rooted cultural practice. What follows are notes on Bartenstein’s thread that I plan to use in my classes next semester.

First, here’s a link to the thread:

Half of the sources I quoted this year for @business were women. That’s 337 in total, or about one a day. Unfortunately, it's an anomaly in journalism & something I've failed at miserably in the past. Here’s how I got there & why I believe it improved my reporting:

— Ben Bartenstein (@BenBartenstein) December 27, 2018

The process Bartenstein laid out had several important components that can be broadly adopted in newsrooms and classrooms:

1. His company had a stated commitment to diversity.
2. He established a baseline by reviewing his stories in the previous year.
3. Working with colleagues, he researched the problem and found that in fact that they were ignoring many of the women experts in their fields.
4. He and his colleagues developed relationships with these sources and their company initiated a training program to help these experts become comfortable on television.
5. He gave his management monthly updates.
6. In the spirit of continuous improvement, he has established new goals and benchmarks for the coming year.

Implications for journalism education

I can easily see this being adapted for journalism education programs and campus media, where there are analogous problems. Predominantly white campuses often lack diverse staffs. Part of the goal of undergraduate journalism education and campus media organizations is to help cub reporters learn to think more broadly and systematically about sources, instead of relying on their personal networks and cultural assumptions. That’s a major goal of undergraduate education, generally.

Future research and resources

Bartenstein and his colleagues built their own database of diverse sources, perhaps because their beat is specialized. But his thread did make make me wonder what use journalists are making of the various resources that have been created over the years to help journalists find and identify diverse sources. Perhaps that will be a future research project.

In the meantime, I’ve started a Google spreadsheet of resources for educators looking to help students establish good habits in diverse sourcing. Please feel free to contribute.

Journalists: Here’s one way to diversify your sources by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.