This panel looked beyond diversity as a box-ticking exercised and explore why newsrooms should start to consider it a legitimate business strategy to grow their audience. This includes not only gender and ethnicity, but also class, nationality, faith, sexual orientation, age, location, and other aspects of identity, all necessary to better understand and represent our audiences.

1. CAPTURING THE MISSING
By Russell Contreras

9. Status of media diversity in U.S.
• Since 1998, newsrooms across the U.S. have shrank
• There are 40 percent less journalists since 1998
• Local newspapers have closed, fewer opportunities
• Wages stagnant
• Professional has attracted the “privilege” who can afford it

10. Status of media diversity in U.S.
• American Society of News Editors 2017 Survey
• 16.5 percent of newsrooms — people of color
• 13.4 percent of leadership women, people of color
• 5 percent were Latino, U.S. largest minority group
• In UK, 94 percent of journalists are white

11. What’s at stake?
• Accurately covering diverse populations
• Honesty about changes in society
• Reflect inequality and poverty
• Cover tensions among groups and solutions in real time
• Seeking new voices as media consuming public changes

12. Diversity Response
• Assess needs
• Build the pipeline
• Engage with marginalize communities, consider new
products
• Help build a new UNITY organization

13. Diversity Response
• National Association of Black Journalists
• Asian American Journalists Association
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• Native American Journalists Association
• JAWS — Journalism and Women Symposium
• NLGJA —The Association of LGBTQ Journalists

14. RUSSELL CONTRERAS , ASSOCIATED
PRESS
@RUSSCONTRERAS
RCONTRERAS@AP.ORG