Introducing Peer, a marketplace platform making the news inclusive
I’m very excited to introduce Peer.
At its core, the mission is simple: Peer is the first marketplace to target the gender and diversity gap in news coverage in order to create more representative and inclusive news.
But looking at the symptoms of how we got here — and why we need to launch this in the first place — there is much to be said.
There’s a 3:1 male to female ratio of sources quoted in the news¹, and around 25% of the sources are non-white².
It has been studied that as women face systematic and structural biases within many professional verticals, including academia, this media gap is further reinforced³. This is coupled with the fact that potential news sources may not have the marketing and PR budgets or right skillsets to engage with journalists organically.
That is not to say that members of the press do not want to remedy this. During our user discovery, an overwhelming amount of journalists have said that they would like to be more representative by interviewing more women, people of color, and other diverse sources. But the source discovery process in its current state is cumbersome and time-intensive.
As the media landscape changes and adds pressure by squeezing journalists’ bandwidth with more demand for content, shorter deadlines, shrinking and hybrid newsrooms, social platform engagement, etc., this makes it a more challenging — and more urgent — issue to solve.
That’s why it’s not uncommon to bump into journalists asking the Twitterverse to help track down diverse sources, or to witness the rise of communities of underrepresented founders and funders and lists of female scientists.
All of these factors correlate back to the notion that in the past decade, the state of journalism, including the trust that readers have in the press, has slowly declined. In 2019, 13% of the U.S. audience reported completely trusting the mass media, and only 28% — “a fair amount”⁴.
Peer aims to lead the change within media by:
- Giving journalists access to a vetted community of accomplished and diverse sources tailored for each story.
- Eliminating the need for news sources to throw spaghetti at the wall when pitching reporters or to rely on a war-chest PR budget to get press. Once verified and admitted to Peer, sources are in ongoing consideration for media opportunities curated and relevant to their profiles.
Right from launch, we are a growing platform of accomplished sources with meaningful insights for the coverage of editors, journalists, contributors, podcast hosts and freelancers within all news and content platforms.
To join us on that mission: apply as a source or join as a member of the press.
We look forward to the day when a steady diversity equilibrium has been reached and we would need to pivot, but I’m afraid we have our work cut out for us. We hope that Peer will be that catalyst in moving the needle within media — and change the way the news is told.
