The media needs to prioritize diversity and representation in 2021
Economics of the industry aside, newsrooms, agencies, and media houses need to look more like America.
Sree’s newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). The good news: There are 31 days till President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The bad news: There are 31 days for Trump to do a lot of damage.
Scroll down for Read Something; Watch Something; a weekly tech tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob), and much more.
TUNE IN: #NYTReadalong w/ Lipi Roy, MD, MPH, FASAM - she’s awesome.
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What a year 2020 has been. I hope that all of you are able to take some time this holiday season to just find some peace amidst the chaos.
This is the last Sunday Note of the year, and I want to thank everyone for opening, reading, sharing, tweeting, and engaging with me. We re-launched the Sunday Note in March as lockdowns started to enter the lexicon — largely because my producer Zach and I figured we’d have some time on our hands. Little did we know…
We covered a lot of political topics this year because politics has consumed the space in every way and I simply couldn’t ignore it. That said, I’m fundamentally a digital media and journalism junkie, and we’ll be focusing more on those topics when 2021 comes around.
On that note, I want to leave you with an issue near and dear to my heart — diversity in media. First, the data, via Nicole Childers (@NicoleChilders) for NiemanLab:
According to the 2019 American Society of Newspaper Editors diversity survey, only 18.8% of all print and online newsroom managers were people of color. A RTDNA 2019 survey shows that only 17.2% of TV news directors and 8.2% of radio news directors were people of color.
This is probably my favorite media big-think piece of the year. It almost certainly makes business sense to be more inclusive, and the fact is that we need more reporting that is truly from the ground — reporters who are there, speak the language, understand the communities they are reporting on, and know-how to report fairly on the issues. This necessarily means more diverse newsrooms and editorial teams. It’s worth noting that there are already some worrying trends.
But it’s not limited to journalism and journalism-adjacent media. This week, my Digimentors team helped produce a great Muck Rack interview with CNN media reporter Kerry M. Flynn (@KerryMFlynn). She’s a great reporter who covered the rampant racism and sexism issues at Refinery29, an agency-slash-content house owned by Vice, earlier this year — and the (very justified) backlash.
It’s an excellent interview, hosted by Muck Rack Cofounder and CEO Greg Galant (@gregory), that gets into the very real issues of representation in media and newsrooms and other important existential issues in the industry. There are also some good tips for PR folks on how to get noticed by journalists and pitch better — a crucial skill set.
Consider this our “Watch Something” for the week:
I hope we see a concerted, meaningful effort by the media writ large to prioritize diversity in 2021 and beyond, and promise to work wherever I can to promote it.
With that, thank you again for spending your Sunday with us. Please take a minute to share the Sunday Note with others, tweet your comments or suggestions @ me, and have a happy, safe, and healthy holiday season.
- Sree
Read Something
Everyone - immigrants or not - should read Arun Venugopal (@arunNYC)’s essay in The Atlantic.
Tech Tip: 2020 Was a Banner Year for Misinformation
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Robert S. Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him on @newyorkbob.
Whether you’ve been searching online for election news, Covid-19 updates or just for a holiday gift, 2020 has been a terrible year for the truth. Misinformation always spikes in presidential election years, but add a pandemic and social uprisings to the mix and stir in passions and strong alliances and the truth often becomes an afterthought.
So where can you go to distill the truth from the latest rumors? Snopes, which has been debunking online rumors and hoaxes since 1994, the same year Mosaic, the first Web browser, was released, is a good place to start.
Through simple, but effective investigative work (public records, court documents, etc.) Snopes reaches conclusions based on facts, not opinions. For example, after researching allegations by lawyer Sidney Powell that election fraud in Edison County, Michigan hurt President Donald Trump, Snopes easily debunked the claim, calmly pointing out that there is no such county. Funded via ads and donations, Snopes.com has no political bent.
FactCheck.org offers a similar level of research into rumors and possible hoaxes. Established by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, FactCheck.org is also non-partisan and supports itself via small donations.
While President Trump tops the FactCheck.org "Whoppers" list of "the most egregious falsehoods" for the sixth straight year, President-elect Joe Biden also appears here for his claim that if Trump had done his job during the pandemic "all the people would be alive...just look at the data."
On the other end of the truth scale, Wikipedia attempts to compile a list of “fake news” sites that “intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation.” While Wikipedia is hardly the most authoritative resource given the fact that most of its pages can be edited by the public, the list reveals many well-known hoax and misinformation offenders, some with names similar to those of legitimate news outlets.
The bottom line: Web surfer beware. Stop, look and listen—but if it’s really important to you, take the extra step and do your own research.
Listen to Something
This is such a smart discussion about Georgia politics, especially about the role of “the church” writ large, and has a lot of fascinating asides about evangelism and social justice.
Something That Hits Close to Home
Blogs! I’ll go to the grave believing in the fundamental goodness of the early social media-era blogosphere. Honestly, we all need something on the lighter side. Also, 17 seems like a lot.
Subscribe to Something
Josh Sternberg’s “Media Nut” newsletter is always thoughtful, and I think this is a particularly good piece about the year that was on the back page of our nation’s leading papers.
Odds & Ends
🗞 Sunday #NYTReadalong w/ Lipi Roy, MD, MPH, FASAM of NBC News and MSNBC.
The Readalong is followed, on Sundays at 11 am-noon ET, by a new medical show I’m co-executive producing with surgeons Sujana Chandrasekhar, M.D. (@DrSujanaENT), and Marina Kurian, M.D. (@MarinaKurian), called She’s On Call (watch live or later).
After 250 episodes in 250 days, my global show has moved from daily episodes to 1-2 times a week. The best way to know when I’m on the air and see all my archived shows, is to subscribe to my YouTube channel or my Whatsapp alerts.
The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
🎧 Every Saturday, I host a call-in show on WBAI 99.5FM (@wbai) - "Coping with Covid19" - focused on being helpful, hopeful, and focusing on the pandemic's effects on society’s most vulnerable. Listen live Saturdays from 12-2pm EST, or later. And, of course, call in or tweet questions for us using the #wbaisree hashtag! Listen to this week’s episode here!
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