Deep Reads

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Deep reads

Immerse issue #9: On diversifying digital storytelling

✍︎flickr: David Smith

By Jessica Clark

Who gets to make and engage with emerging forms of media—and why does this matter? In this issue, Immerse Founding Producer Ingrid Kopp reflects on these questions. Below, find resources on how these questions are being considered in related fields:

• While women are currently holding their own in interactive and VR production—and indeed have been pivotal to the evolution of field—according to a 2017 report from the Women’s Media Center, men are still dominating media across most platforms: TV, newspapers, online and wires. “Too many male CEOs, producers and editors remain in their comfort zones and default to hiring and promoting those who are like them,” writes WMC president Julie Burton.
• Why are we still talking about diversity? That’s the question addressed in a March 2016 package produced by the Ryerson Review of Journalism. “Journalists exist to explain the world to the world — a world of almost infinite variety,” writes Igor Shapiro. “If journalists approach their task with an expectation that people are or should be alike, there’s no chance of the job being done well.”

✍︎Sabrina Hersi Issa is a technologist focused on global advocacy and media innovation and the CEO of Be Bold Media.

• What will it take to make newsrooms more representative? Follow the data, writes Sabrina Hersi Issa, reporting on her ongoing research for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation exploring how funders can support inclusive journalism. As mainstream journalism has suffered from a series of financial crises, previous methods for tracking diversity across the industry have fallen apart. Simply “valuing” inclusion is not enough, Issa suggests—infrastructure needs to be put in place to track and assess who’s hired and who leads. “Building inclusive, diverse cultures requires investment of both time and resources and this is what infrastructure reinforces,” she writes. See her follow-up Q&A with Jill Raney of Practice Makes Progress.
• Tracking who’s creating media is only part of the puzzle, though. The JeRI project tracks the demographics of sources, and how sources’ remarks are weighted in particular stories. “JeRI posits that a real-time, constant quantification and analysis of the types of sources that journalists use tells a story in itself. About whose stories are usually preferred, about whose stories are often missing.”

✍︎Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, a Visiting Professor at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, and a Senior Fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute.

• Speaking of data, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to shape the storytelling and reporting environment—and according to Kate Crawford in the New York Times, it’s also got a “white guy problem.” Crawford writes: “Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many ‘intelligent’ systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to. …Histories of discrimination can live on in digital platforms, and if they go unquestioned, they become part of the logic of everyday algorithmic systems.”

Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.