Newsrooms are diverse—and journalists want diverse sources too

Media organizations have made great progress in making their newsrooms more diverse, with the ultimate goal of creating content that’s more representative of their audience. Through internship opportunities, targetedrecruiting initiatives and thoughtful mentoring programs for underrepresented groups, the wheel is beginning to turn, albeit slowly. We’ve been struck by explicit demands from journalists for greater diversity in their sources over the last few years. While recent court cases and pushback on corporate diversity efforts have slowed these demands, we think there remainsan unrelenting desire to feature a broad cross section of sources.  

When we recently shared a rundown of the senior financial markets experts the Lowe Group works with out to a large list of financial media,  a wire service reporter responded by pointedly asking whether the list included diverse voices. Fortunately, it did—though, truth be told, not as many as it should have—and we also were able to direct the questioner to additional diverse sources among our clients as well.  

In the weeks after this episode, we started noticing other examples of financial media crying out for diverse voices, including a plaintive tweet addressed to “PR folks” from an economics editor at Quartz. 

It has certainly made us reflect on how we can do better. As intermediaries between investment and financial services firms and financial media, there is an opportunity to make an impact well beyond the four walls of our Milwaukee-based office.  

We work with our clients to make sure we are aware of the full extent of their diversity (on male-dominated Wall Street, by the way, we would argue that diversity includes females as well as BIPOC and LGBTQ+ voices) and that we are including them in our pitches to media.