NewsBeat

20 NewsBeat June 2019 Featuring more female sources could increase your audience engagement, research suggests W hat would happen if news media struggling to survive applied the productivity mantra "What gets measured gets done" to the sources they quote? Business research, Hollywood sales data and anecdotal evidence from the news industry itself all suggest it's worth a try. In many western democracies — the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada included — most major news organizations continue to feature three or four times as many men as experts or sources as they do women. This might have been more defensible a generation ago. Male CEOs, politicians and professionals were the norm, and we weren't so clear about the costs of failing to consider how profoundly different men's and women's bodies and lives are when developing drugs, policies or programs. But reams of respected business research has since found that when organizations draw on the talents of women, they make more informed decisions, better serve their customers and are ultimately more profitable. And continuing to rely primarily on a white, male subsection of the population to offer commentary and analysis when you're trying to engage culturally diverse audiences that are 50% female? That hasn't made sense for decades. Nor is it good journalism. Diverse sources are a hallmark of responsible reporting. For news to effectively fulfill its democratic obligations, it needs to reflect the diverse perspectives of the citizens it purports to serve. Doing so is likely to engage more of them. Entertainment box office figures are instructive. TV and film executives once believed that female audiences would watch programs aimed at men, but the reverse was not true. That rationale helped to justify decades of male-centric movies. But a 2018 study found that on average, female-led films earned higher revenues than male-led films released in the same year. In an age of on-demand programming from a multitude of providers, the tastes of teenage boys no longer rule. Audiences want good storytelling and to see their realities reflected on large and small screens alike. Good journalists understand this and many are already attempting to capitalize on a similar dynamic in terms of how they report and who they feature. Senior staff at Bloomberg and The Atlantic have been leading this charge for years. And in 2018, the BBC explicitly committed to meeting a 50:50 challenge, ensuring the equitable representation of male and female sources by this coming April. Anecdotally, some media are discovering that such attention pays off. The producers of La sphére, a Radio Canada program that covered technology, noticed that efforts to achieve gender parity among guests corresponded with an increase in listeners. And The Fiancial Times determined that reframing one of its electronic newsletters to engage female readers inspired higher "open" rates among male readers as well. Informed Opinions, the non-profit I lead, is looking to inspire others to mimic these experiments. We recently collaborated with scientists at Simon By SHARI GRAYDON

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