Mirrored in Media
The Toronto Star, founded in 1892, is part of the Torstar Group’s Daily News Brands, which includes six regional dailies across Ontario, Canada.
Overview
The Toronto Star staff has seen several diversity initiatives come and go over the years, with varying levels of success. Now, in the context of the #MeToo movement, the Star felt the time was ripe for an approach that would engage staff across the newsroom and keep the issue of diversity top of mind on a day-to-day basis. Senior Editor Julie Carl led Mirorred in Media, implementing the following activities.
Formation of a diversity task force
To launch Mirrored in Media, Julie formed a special task force of staff, each with experience or an interest in diversity, to help design and evolve the project. To ensure genuine effort behind the initiative, participation on the task force was voluntary. An initial group of seven people helped outline the work the newsroom would engage in and communicate on a regular basis. As the initiative got underway and the staff began to interact with their colleagues and share ideas, participation on the task force grew to 13 members, representing most departments across the newsroom.
See the article about Mirrored in Media and the diversity task force published by the Star’s Public Editor, Kathy English.
Source: Article by Kathy English, Public Editor at the Toronto Star
“We’ve had so many stops and starts, but this is something we really need to solidify. I think the time is right, times have changed – the younger generations understand the need for diversity.”
‘Lunch and Learn’
The task force elected to organize regular guest speakers on the topic of building diversity. These ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions not only afforded staff the opportunity to learn new approaches and develop their skills as reporters, but the periodic brown bags helped maintain conversations about diversity in the newsroom.
Source: Toronto Star, 'Lunch and Learn' with Shari Graydon, Founder of Informed Opinions
“In everything I do now, I am aware of my personal accountability in helping to dismantle the systems of oppression and exclusion that have been built up all around us.”
Six-week audit of A1 pages
The task force started their work with an audit of the paper’s A1 pages to benchmark, and thus better understand, the Star’s current record on sourcing women and diverse voices. The numbers would tell the task force which areas of the newsroom and content required the greatest attention. They would also be used to announce the initiative to the larger newsroom and highlight the importance of the effort for editors. The audit was conducted manually each morning over the course of six weeks by Julie, and involved tallying the gender and diversity of sources and persons in photos. This audit showed that while the gender split in photos was balanced, only 24-26% of expert sources in stories were women.
Source: Toronto Star, Star journalists brainstorm their reasons for diverse sourcing
“It is, quite simply, the morally correct thing to do. It is also the journalistically correct thing to do, in order to not have the same voices singing the same songs, time after time. Being predictable is a fatal flaw for any writer, and will eventually turn off readers.”
Ongoing gender balance tracking
After establishing the baseline, a key part of the project was to develop a tracking exercise to measure gender and diversity ratios daily. A core piece of the methodology was to signal opportunities for greater conversation between editors and reporters on the topic of diversity of voice.
The count was conducted nightly by the radio room reporters. Staff tracked the gender and diversity of sources in articles and of people in photos. Stories from all sections of the paper were included in the count, with tallies by section front, inside pages and by all sections combined. The percentage of men versus women for both photos and sources were entered in a digital spreadsheet with columns to delineate diversity as well, including the breakdown of women and men of color. Staff conducting the count reached out to reporters to verify gender and ethnicity when they had doubts, and the spreadsheet also included a column to tally unknowns.
Reflect Reality spoke with Toronto Star reporter Temur Durrani, who took part in the tracking.
As part of the pilot activities, the Toronto Star is pursuing two additional activities. One is to build a ‘Memory Jog,’ which is essentially a CMS widget that reminds reporters in the process of filing a story to include a female source. The second activity is to create a custom database of female experts, building off existing public resources and contacting women’s professional associations for industries in which sources are particularly needed.
