Tuesday 17th November: How to force through cultural change in newsrooms

November 17, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Where does cultural change in newsrooms come from? Internally or externally? Two recently published pieces of research demonstrate that you can't simply rely on internal expertise in order to transition newsrooms to a modern and effective form. The first, from Frederic Filloux, is a cheap and cheerful write-up of his students' suggestions for how media can best reconnect with their audiences. Correctly, they identify a lack of representation as being a huge part of the problem:

"Newsroom employees are less diverse than US workers, overall. More than 77% are non-Hispanic whites, according to a report by the Pew Research Center in 2018. In a 2019 survey conducted by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), 22% staffers of color make up legacy print newsrooms, while 19% hold leadership positions. The survey only received a 23% response rate nation-wide because people complained that it was too “time-consuming."

Meanwhile, a study from Lucy Kueng for The Reuters Institute at Oxford University takes a clear-eyed look at how those changes often need to be forced through internally. That requires getting buy-in from all levels of the organisation, and there are often many communication gaps that prevent that. As newsrooms need to evolve to remain viable, this is one area of research that isn't going away any time soon.

We've written a little about the challenges of taking an media business' events online in our Media Moments 2020 report (see below) but it's impressive to see the extent to which the South China Morning Post managed to increase the number of events it runs, while also significantly reducing costs.

Black people in America are underrepresented in newsrooms and more exposed to the virus. For Wired, Patrice Peck explains how launching 'Coronavirus News for Black Folks' "gave me a kind of second sight. I could see where the country is headed—and how blind it’s been."

Evergreen content is a ready source of traffic and revenue for news sites - but actually investing in creating and updating that content is tricky. The time pressures on reporters and newsrooms too often take attention away from valuable evergreen articles, as this post from David Tvrdon explains.

This week's podcast:

This week Gary Rayneau, co-founder of Project 23 tells us about about his time leading a diverse team at Dennis, the impact of Black Lives Matter in 2020, and how publishers can approach diversity and inclusion in the right way.

This special Conversations episode of Media Voices, sponsored by Lotame, discusses the importance of an open web to advertisers, the realities of our new cookie-less world and how identity solutions add value to the entire ecosystem.