- Thinking About It by Zee Feed
- Posts
- Calling Zee Feed out 🥴
First up, forgive me for not sending an email last Sunday. A very good dog crossed the rainbow bridge, and she is sorely, sorely missed 💜
There is no nice way to segue into a news topic from here so we'll just do a hard pivot: in Australian news reporting, 70% of all quoted sources are men. 66% of all experts quoted are also men.
The data is from the latest release of Women in Media's annual report (you can check out the full thing here). It's wild that even in sectors where women make up most of the workforce – like health, social issues and hospitality – men are still considered as experts more often, and are asked for their opinion by journalists more often. It's very yikes, but I completely understand how easily it happens.
I've gotta call myself out, because Zee Feed has failed here too.
From the very beginning, Zee Feed has had an underlying mission to increase the visibility and voices of people who are not white. Australian media is very white in all aspects, from TV screens to commercial teams and especially decision-making boardrooms (I know you already know this), so from the jump I wanted Zee Feed to be the place where Black, Indigenous and other women of colour were seen and heard more often than other groups.
In 2022, we set an explicit goal to reach out to women of colour to provide comment for every single piece that required a source or expert. It didn't matter if the topic related to race or not – in fact, it's even more important that diverse voices are not restricted to only speaking about identity. But I made a big boo-boo: I didn't create a process for tracking it. Which means I didn't realise how badly we were missing the mark until finishing the 2022 content review this week.
I'm very proud to say that 89% of experts and sources quoted in our articles last year were women – with really strong representation in subjects where women are usually sidelined, like finance/economics, politics, and tech. But I'm ashamed to say only 47% of our content featured comment from people of colour. That's probably a significantly higher percentage than almost every other media outlet in Australia, mainstream or otherwise, but I care so much about this topic that it hurts pretty bad anyway. It's a painfully important lesson: the best intentions for change-making are worthless unless you are tracking output. We're fixing this in 2023, don't you worry!
All this to say, I'm kinda sympathetic to bigger media orgs and their failure to fairly represent the Australia we live in. I mean, we were actively trying and we still fell way short. It takes a lot of reflection to realise just how much of a grip patriarchy and the default to whiteness has on all of us, and I'm not sure if other media orgs have the capacity for that level of reflection. The Big Bosses are still mostly surrounded by other People Like Them, so don't really see a problem. If the media landscape doesn't notice it is ignoring women, who are half the population, what hope do any other groups have of being heard?
As far as I'm aware, there are two women of colour who own news publications in Australia – I'm one of them. And I still clearly have some work to do. I promise to do that work and improve the diversity of experts, interviews, and freelancers on the Zee Feed roster. You can help me do that by sharing Zee Feed's content with your friends, family, cool co-workers – the more people know about us, the better chance we have of surviving as a point of difference in the Australian media landscape.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
People got heated about this article by Simran, but we've had a bunch of DMs from Gen Z followers saying how sit made them feel seen, so I'm calling that a win. My favourite line: "Casual sex and relentless sex positivity became an expectation, rather than an active choice." CLICK HERE TO READ.
Content I loved this week 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Ask A Music Critic: Why Aren’t There More Negative Album Reviews? on Uproxx"Instead of covering everything, music critics now are inclined to write only about genres they already like... Expertise is a virtue, no question, but when everyone 'stays in their lane' you lose that wild hater energy that keeps the discourse interesting."
World's Wealthiest May Actually Be Less Intelligent Than Those Who Don't Earn As Much on ScienceAlertI have a feeling this would have cause a huge spike in ScienceAlert's traffic. Who wouldn't want this to be true?!
Camp Cope leaves the Australian music industry forever changed by their fearless feminist activism on The ConversationA loss for the industry, and worth reading at a time when another Australian band with a history of violence, racism and sexism is headlining a local festival again 🙃
What BTS’ Military Service Tells Us About Soft Power in Kill Your Darlings"Unlike charging in with tanks, explosives and threats, soft power has to feel apolitical to achieve its purpose. In other words, its intrinsic value must resonate with its audience in an organic way... This messaging is central to the band’s cultural diplomacy efforts, one championed by the South Korean government."