How to get the most out of your source diversity audit: What we learned from partnering with KQED

News organizations and motivated journalists over the past several years have tried to answer a big question: How closely does our sourcing reflect the communities our journalism hopes to serve? Or, put another way: How biased is our sourcing, and where do our biases lie? (See examples here, here, here, here, and here.)

In mid-2020, KQED, the public media affiliate based in San Francisco that serves the Bay Area, came to Impact Architects with these questions. In order to answer them with accuracy and precision, we partnered to perform a retroactive source diversity audit, including 16 programs across all KQED content areas — radio, podcasts, television, and digital — over the course of one year.

IA’s source diversity audit process is designed to provide organizational value in two key ways:

• Knowledge: A source audit provides a baseline from which newsroom staff can identify successes, as well as gaps and opportunities for more equitable and inclusive sourcing.
• Insight: The analysis of source audit data can illuminate underlying biases in coverage and perspectives, identify potentially unheard stories that can help fuel creative journalism, and surface programs, departments, or individual newsroom staff that have successful strategies for equitable and inclusive sourcing.

With those benefits in mind, here’s what we did and what we found.

How we did it, and what we learned.

1. Get a representative sample of content.

To get a representative sample of KQED content, we worked with KQED staff to identify programs to be included in the audit across radio, podcasts, television, and digital. We then generated a random sample of content and manually collected the URLs from KQED’s web archive. In all, we recorded 1,635 source records.

2. Code sources.

Once we had our sample of content, we read, listened, and/or watched each piece of content and pulled out every source. We then coded each source based on five measures of diversity: Gender, race/ethnicity, age group, location, and profession. We applied the lens of an audience person to identifying sources’ characteristics, with the understanding that a core element of KQED’s goal for its source diversity initiative is to be more representative of the Bay Area, which will then create deeper and more trusting relationships with new sectors of the community that might not yet be KQED audience members. In making judgments, we used visual cues, reporters’ and sources’ own words and descriptions, and basic online research. When in doubt about any characteristic, we coded as “unknown.”

3. Create baseline knowledge.

The results of a source diversity audit create a baseline knowledge — rather than assumptions or gut feelings — about equity, diversity, and inclusion in sourcing. And our audit of KQED reveals a baseline with at least two clear areas of success.

First, KQED’s sourcing is equitable with respect to gender and includes women and men at about the same rate. Among all source records, 50.6% were men and 48.9% women (the remaining 0.5% were either nonbinary/another gender or unknown). This gender parity can be considered a clear success, as other public source diversity audits show that even with conscious effort, men’s perspectives are still often included at higher rates than women’s.

Second, KQED includes the perspectives of Black sources at a rate that is double the percentage of the Black population in KQED’s listening area: 13.5% of KQED sources are Black/African American, compared with 6.5% of the population of the Bay Area and California as a whole.

4. Analyze and generate insights

When we drill down from the top-line takeaways, we can find bright spots, as well as areas of opportunity. For KQED, we found that while there is overall gender balance in sourcing, there are programs that include men’s perspectives at a higher rate, five of which had 55% or more men as sources in our sample. An actionable step for each of these five programs is to reflect on current processes, consult with team members working on programs with equitable inclusion of gender, and strategize ways to get closer to a more even distribution.

And while KQED includes Black sources at high rates, that success isn’t replicated when it comes to Asian/Asian Americans and Hispanic/Latinx sources. Each of those groupings comprise just under 10% of sources overall, while 28% of the Bay Area population is Asian/Asian American and 22% is Hispanic/Latinx. KQED will use this insight to drive strategy: Because there’s a success case when it comes to representing Black voices, the station will consider what it has done to achieve that success and make a plan for how it can be replicated to create more equitable inclusion of perspectives for other communities and demographic groups.

Finally, a deep dive into the source diversity data has the potential to uncover possible stories that otherwise would have been missed. One instance became evident when we analyzed how the axes of diversity intersected with one another. For example, while KQED’s sourcing overall has gender parity and is inclusive of Black perspectives, Black sources are more likely to be women than men (56% vs. 44%). Similarly, Hispanic/Latinx Sources are more likely to be women than men (61% vs. 40%). Conversely, Asian and white sources are more likely to be men than women.

We identified similar gaps when we looked at race/ethnicity and gender in conjunction with profession, as well as race/ethnicity together with geographic location. Government officials (64.5%), lawyers (59.6%), and academics (59.5%) were the three professions with the greatest percentage of men as sources, while the three professions with the greatest percentage of women were educators (59.6%), community organization representatives (58.5%), and journalists (56.8%). While this gender bias is perhaps reflective of these professions overall, KQED has committed to rectifying the bias in its own sourcing and will strive to include women equitably as sources, especially in those professions where they have been historically underrepresented, as well as men in those professions that tend to have historically been assumed to be women’s work.

What’s next

As part of KQED’s commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice, the organization is now using the insights from the comprehensive report to inform its ongoing work. This retroactive audit is but a starting point, and KQED has recognized an opportunity to systematize source diversity tracking, which will provide a constant source of knowledge and insights about sourcing practices in the newsroom. Our recommendations to KQED — and to all media interested in equitable and inclusive sourcing — as they build out this strategy include:

• Be intentional about change and outline specific goals. Establish a shared vision for source equity in the KQED newsroom and identify loose quantitative goals to be met across programs.
• Learn from one another. Identify which programming teams are doing well in any aspect of sourcing and collect a set of effective practices for newsroom wide distribution.
• Build knowledge continuously and adapt the system when necessary. Use the existing commitment to source diversity and the various tracking practices as building blocks for a source tracking system, and involve programming teams in a positive feedback loop to make needed adjustments to any new system.
• Develop a pilot plan. Piloting source diversity tracking can initiate change right away and allow KQED to beta test processes on a small scale.

If you’re interested in learning more about the process and findings from our work with KQED, check out this report. And if you’d like to learn more about implementing a source diversity audit in your organization, let’s talk!

info@theimpactarchitects.com