When finding speakers for journalism talks, it’s easy to turn to the usual suspects — well-known journalists who appear regularly on panels related to their expertise. It’s more challenging to step outside your network and find new, diverse speakers who can bring different ideas and experiences to the discussion at hand.
Columbia Journalism School’s Sree Sreenivasan renewed attention to the lack of diversity on panels last week when he posted this Facebook update: “I can’t believe it when event planners in NEW YORK CITY put together panels in 2011 consisting of five white men and no one else.”
He called it “unacceptable” and “ridiculous,” and told me in a follow-up note that this issue “is not about quotas or token diversity, it’s about having diversity of all kinds — race, gender, points of view, class, etc. Diversity doesn’t happen by accident. There are specific things you have to do to make it happen.”
Sreenivasan’s post generated nearly 80 comments from folks who shared similar experiences of attending talks with mostly white, male speakers.
Technology-related talks in particular are notorious for featuring only white males. At South by Southwest, for instance, women make up only 30 percent of panelists.
In addition to offering tips on how to find diverse panelists, we want to provide you with the names of possible panelists you can turn to. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Emma Carew recently helped create a minority talent bank, so we hope to talk with her about what she thinks the next steps should be to advance that effort.
We will let you know once we have a date and time for the chat.
