Bloomberg Expands New Voices Initiative to Sydney, Mumbai, Dubai and San Francisco to Ensure Diversity of Newsroom Voices

Originally posted on bloomberg.com.

Bloomberg today announced the expansion of the news organization’s New Voices initiative to Sydney, Mumbai, Dubai and San Francisco in 2019, following on the success of similar launches this year in New York, London, Toronto, and Hong Kong.

The program, which is funded by Bloomberg, provides one-on-one media training for top women executives in finance and business — assisted by local trainers from Burson Cohn & Wolfe — with the goal of getting the women TV-ready for interviews on Bloomberg TV and other outside outlets.

At the recent Conference Board’s West Coast Diversity & Inclusion Conference in San Francisco, Bloomberg News Senior Executive Editor for Diversity, Talent, Standards and Training Laura Zelenko, who is spearheading the New Voices initiative, spoke about limiting bias in the newsroom.

“Diversity both internally and externally, from who reports, writes and edits the stories to the outside sources we choose to interview and bring on Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio, is imperative to staying competitive today, for making sure we’re finding the right, most important stories to tell, and for ensuring what we report and write is always accurate, fair and balanced,” she said.

Here’s a glimpse of the progress Bloomberg News is making in amplifying women’s voices across platforms:

• Bloomberg News’ global database of women experts has quadrupled this year to more than 2,300 names.
• The percentage of women guests brought in as expert commentators on Bloomberg TV has climbed to 18% in the most recent month, up from 10% at the start of 2018.
• The percentage of stories that quote or cite a woman expert on Bloomberg’s TOP, or front, pages has increased to almost 10% from about 2.5% in March and is growing at an average pace of 13% a week.
• Bloomberg’s panel policy that enforces gender diversity has influenced programming at events around the world, and it has improved the discussion at Bloomberg’s own events.

“Our work is far from finished. What we can’t do is lose momentum or weaken the urgency,” Ms. Zelenko added. “From what we’ve learned, there are some best practices that can be replicated industry to industry. On the one hand, we need to create processes that can be measured, with tracking tools and metrics to review. On the other, these efforts must be carried out simultaneously with cultural change to truly ensure durable impact.”