Diversity in Journalism

As the COVID-19 pandemic has developed, we’ve seen how important it is to understand how different communities are impacted by the same issues, with research highlighting the disproportionate effect on BAME communities and how lockdown and social distancing can be harder for young LGBTQ+ people.

Any journalist should be able to find and tell these stories but as Dorothy Byrne,  Head of News and Current Affairs of Channel Four, told a seminar at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: ‘If you yourselves are not representative of your audience or your readers, then you cannot understand and represent their interests. As society changes, if you don’t change with it, you will lose viewers, listeners and readers… If you change you who defines the news agenda, you change the agenda.’

In this whitepaper we hear from a range of experts, journalists and charities about their efforts to increase diversity in the media, the research they’ve produced, and why it should matter to all of us: readers, listeners, viewers and journalists alike.