UK Diversity: Guardian News Finds that Diversity Vital for News Media’s Sustainability
While in corporate London one can still find quite a bit of skepticism about diversity, 189-year-old and London-based Guardian News and Media has taken it quite seriously. Going beyond just focusing on increasing employee diversity, new Head of Diversity Yasir Mirza has made it an imperative that goes to the core of what it means for them to be a news outlet.
Mirza’s objective? To increase the diversity of their UK readership. And his strategy to get there?
- improve the balance of editorial content with more stories reflecting the lives of all sections of society
- organise a minority media conference focusing on Black and Muslim communities
- develop an ‘Ambassadors’ programme linking the paper with 450 minority community organisations in Greater London to extend their knowledge of them
- create a Minority Writers’ Workshop to nurture new talent
- mainstream minority community voices into their content through articles on wider and non-stereotypical issues exploring the culture and lifestyle of minority communities
Mirza has made believers of several of the newspapers editorial leaders. According to the Guardian’s Executive Editor in the Guardian’s January 28 blog posting, Mirza “wants to put diversity at the heart of Guardian News & Media’s business strategy, embedding the social, business, and legal case across all departments.” Mirza’s boss, the managing director, says:
“We [must] vigorously reflect the diversity of the people we cater to. The extent we fail to do that will be the extent to which we fail to be a sustainable business in the long term.”
As I discuss in The Inclusion Paradox, inclusivity is not just a social issue, but a business issue. And those organizations that nail the business issue will have a much better chance of achieving sustainability.
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