How can you ensure that your newsroom is sensitive to age diversity?

1 Assess your current situation

The first step to improve your age diversity is to evaluate your current newsroom culture and practices. How well do you represent and serve the different age groups in your audience? How diverse is your editorial team in terms of age, background, and expertise? How do you recruit, train, and retain your staff across different age brackets? How do you foster collaboration, communication, and mutual respect among your colleagues? These are some of the questions you can ask yourself and your team to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your age diversity strategy.

2 Set clear and realistic goals

Once you have a clear picture of your current situation, you can set some specific and measurable goals for enhancing your age diversity. For example, you can aim to increase the representation of certain age groups in your newsroom, to diversify the sources and topics of your stories, to provide more opportunities for learning and development, or to improve the feedback and recognition systems. Whatever your goals are, make sure they are realistic, achievable, and aligned with your mission and vision as a news organization.

3 Implement and monitor actions

After setting your goals, you need to implement the actions that will help you achieve them. This may involve changing some of your policies, procedures, and practices, such as your hiring criteria, your editorial guidelines, your training programs, or your mentoring schemes. You may also need to invest in some resources, such as new technologies, tools, or platforms, that can facilitate the integration and participation of different age groups in your newsroom. Moreover, you need to monitor and evaluate the impact of your actions on your age diversity outcomes, using indicators such as staff satisfaction, retention, performance, and audience engagement.

5 Learn and adapt continuously

Finally, you need to keep learning and adapting to the changing needs and expectations of your staff and your audience in terms of age diversity. You can solicit and listen to the feedback, suggestions, and complaints of your colleagues and your readers or viewers, and use them to improve your age diversity strategy. You can also keep abreast of the latest trends, research, and innovations that can help you enhance your age diversity performance. By doing so, you can ensure that your newsroom is always sensitive, responsive, and relevant to the diverse age groups that make up your journalism community.