This is the Future of Journalism podcast, and I'm keeping my associate director of the Writers Institute Fellowship Programme.
Let's meet our guests from episode Robin Zyl, a news reporter in the north of England and current journalist fellow at the institute.
Welcome Robin. Hi, thanks for having me. We're tackling a huge elephant in British newsrooms today, the underrepresentation of working class people.
We'll share some facts and figures, some real life stories, and we'll look at whether there are any concrete steps you could take to make your
organisation a more welcoming environment for working class journalists and contributors.
This is not a problem to tackle instead of diversity and inclusion.
This is part and parcel of the diversity and inclusion problem,
and if you have any lingering doubts about why this matters, it's because representation is not just a moral imperative.
A 2018 report by Deloitte suggests that organisations with inclusive cultures are six times more innovative and agile,
eight times as likely to achieve better business results and twice as likely to meet or exceed financial
targets than organisations with less diversity in the workplace and the bonus journalism benefits,
you get better access to the communities you're tasked with reporting on.
The Diversity in Journalism report based on twenty twenty one labour force survey data and published by the National Council
for the Training of Journalists found that 80 percent of people working in British newsrooms come from the top social classes.
That figure was up from seventy five percent in 2020. How does that compare to the population?
Only 42 percent of all UK workers had a parent and one of the three highest occupational groups, which is one of the key determinants of social class.
Only two percent of journalists have a parent and the lowest two occupational groups, compared to 20 percent of all workers.
And only five percent of journalists have parents in the skilled trades occupations, compared to twenty one percent.
So there is a real representation problem. But what you don't get from the numbers is the human impact,
and that's why we've invited Robyn to have a conversation about what those numbers translate to in real life.
You started a WhatsApp group for working class journalists. Can you tell me when you started it and why?
I think I might have started it maybe four years ago, which seems like a long time, but I think that's probably about accurate.
I think something might have set me off that day. I can't remember what it was. It was maybe a column in a newspaper or something.
So I messaged all the working class genocide now, and I also pasted on Twitter just asking, you know, because that's the other thing as well.
It's all right for me to add the working class people that I know.
But you know, when you don't have any kind of networks like, you know,
networks from school or university, sometimes you end up kind of excluded from this kind of thing.
So I posted on Twitter and had a few responses and added people I didn't know to it, and we've become like fairly good friends.
Sometimes we'll send it to the links to things that have been written and we go, Oh my God, have you seen this?
And sometimes we do a long voice note where we blow off steam about something that's happened in the office.
We're not happy about. So, yeah, so it's it's quite a good forum for support and discussion really in preparation for this podcast.
You asked some of them if they'd be willing anonymously to share some examples of
why British newsrooms sometimes do not feel inclusive of working class people.
Would you mind sharing some of those?
Yes, so I actually we talked for for a few hours about about this on aside asking and, you know, I started off with an example.
Sometimes you might get sent to do a food bank story that might be because you're a very good journalist and you're very good with people.
Or it might be because somehow you seem to fit in a food bank environment in a way that a posh journalist doesn't.
And then the other end of the scale as well, you know that my job might come up.
You know this interviewing the home secretary, for example, and it might seem more appropriate to send a posh person.
And that starts from kind of intern level, you know, junior reporter level or trainee level sometimes.
And you can't, you know, you can't prove any of this and you can't necessarily even put your finger on it sometimes.
But it's just, you know, like a lot of elements of kind of discrimination.
It's one of the is is very difficult to really be able to concretely say, you know,
this is this is classism, but you know, my friends kind of responded with their own stories.
One of them said, he he he's written a book and he gets comments from middle class people.
Middle class colleagues, you know, surprised that he's written a book, for example.
And he said that one, one very middle class co-worker said,
You wrote a book in such a way that she was shocked and then proceeded to explain over me to somebody, to someone else exactly what my book was about.
And again, he wasn't exactly sure that it was classism, but he said, you know,
she's the kind of person whose eyes glaze over if anything ever comes up, that's related to class.
One person said that they've been asked to do risky things in the name of journalism because and I quote,
we came to you because you're from a Scouse family. So I used to getting up to no good with the law, which is really bad.
And now, interestingly, she works in an international newsroom now and said that she is kind of free of free of that.
And actually, she's kind of considered the posh one, which is quite nice.
And that is something that I felt while I've been here, you know, the Voice Institute because everybody else is not from the UK.
It's just quite a nice break from it and from second guessing yourself.
And you know, if someone makes a comment, think, you know, I'm not thinking, Oh, that is that, you know, classes comment.
Was that something they, you know, was that about my background?
Because it's because it's not because because the class system is not really such an issue in other countries,
or at least not in the same way as in Britain. Yeah. So somebody said that there was a real gap in a newsroom that she went to and there's
a real gap in knowledge about what ordinary people would know and understand.
So when writing articles, they'd refer to things and expect the readers to already know, you know, who these people were.
So it might be like a literary reference or something like that.
And she felt like she was constantly go mad because she would have to explain that, no, not everybody will have heard of this person.
But yeah, I think you've said a couple of times now yourself not being sore and feeling like you're going mad.
And it sounds like there's a lot of psychological pressure within the wheelhouse of what might be called gaslighting,
because you're just not sure the conversations are being had.
Yeah, I love is interesting, actually,
a lot of a lot of working class journalists mentioned to me about having imposter syndrome and feeling like they don't belong.
And you know that I think that's probably a very natural reaction.
I had the opposite reaction, really when I when I started working in journalism and especially going into kind of the, you know, national newsrooms.
And, you know, I've worked for a lot of different national newspapers. I had to guess like reverse imposter syndrome,
where where it was like I couldn't believe that I had worked so hard for so long and sacrificed so much and
been so thankful to have finally broke into journalism and an expected looking around in the newsroom.
Everyone would be incredible and super smart and super honest and super hardworking and amazing people.
And actually, a lot of the people went like that. All you know, they were never even that enthusiastic.
Maybe that's why that's how I survived in the industry. Perhaps because I didn't actually feel like I was not meant to be there.
I had other people are imposters syndrome. I think I know it.
That's the problem with me.
Try not to articulate that. It's like, I want to talk about it.
I don't want to talk about it. OK, if that makes sense, because the real problems with classism and working class, you know,
the lack of working class people in the media, I wouldn't actually know about them because I'm here.
And you know, the real stories to be told to the people who aren't able to tell them because they do have a platform,
because they didn't because they didn't make it. You touched on the problem of the definition of working class people,
and I wanted to talk a little bit more with you about that because one in five
persons who earn over a hundred thousand pounds a month when asked to self classify,
said there were working class. So in other words, people earning in the top six percent of all households are self-identifying as working class.
How are we ever going to? Measure how many working class people are in a newsroom.
If people are self-defining in that way?
To me, it's actually very feasible that the EU could be earning that kind of money and still consider yourself working class,
especially if all you know, if you still live in the community that you grew up in or you live in a working class community or,
you know, your family and friends of a working class. I don't actually think that's too.
That's too much of a crazy. I mean, people do take it, take the time to mean whatever they want it to mean.
So you get people who, you know, because their granddad worked in a factory.
They consider themselves working class.
I think when it comes down to actually measuring it on any real level, self-identifying might not be the best way to go.
I think, broadly speaking, it is the best approach.
But there comes a point when you've got to, you know, look at, for example, what your parents did for a living, right?
So in terms of identifying what working class means so that we can track it because you have
to have the data before you can define the problem and then start implementing the solutions,
perhaps one way to do that then, is to say to your staff,
this is how we're defining it based on, for example,
whatever the labour force the Labour Force Survey defines as as these key markers like
the occupation of your parents and then asking people to self-report based on that.
Yeah, giving a definition and asking people whether they fit the definition makes sense or taking some data about parents occupation or,
you know, someone's postcode at age 14.
Or, you know, because actually in this country, we have we have data about levels of deprivation by postcode is quite granular data.
It's not perfect, but that's the kind of thing that can be quite useful. We wouldn't even need to bother people with.
Please fill out yet another survey for each other.
What are the assumptions that are made about you that are incorrect based on things like your accent, your tracksuit?
What are the biases that need to be addressed?
So the Social Mobility Foundation has done a lot of work around the concept of polish and often working class people.
You know, they may not make as much money them, they might not be promoted because they lack polish.
What's defined as Polish is a middle class way of being.
And that's the default and anything that deviates from that is not seen as wrong or not appropriate.
So, for example, wearing sportswear in the newsroom, right?
That would be seen as something that's not appropriate. I don't know, actually.
I don't know the answer to that question because I am not a middle class person,
and I feel that maybe that's something to ask middle class people if I just don't know.
Can I hazard a guess? Yeah. As an outside observer, that it seems to me like.
You are not you personally. The one is being regarded as.
At the most basic level. You can't be as intelligent as me because you aren't wearing the right clothes or sounding the right syllables.
Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, or at least that's the impression that I sometimes get.
It's so insidious because it's it's not. It's not.
I don't even think people are aware that they think that.
I mean, sometimes people are aware that they think that.
But I think it's so ingrained in society that it's not even something it's time to fault that people might notice that they have.
I want to start talking a little bit about solutions.
What would a working class journalist need in a UK newsroom to feel a sense of fairness and respect?
A lot of the problem happens before people even make it to the journalism industry.
There are a lot of things we could do in terms of recruitment to improve working
class representation in newsrooms having 98 percent of new journalists,
you know,
having a degree is one is one way of filtering out a lot of working class people who would be great journalists because you don't need a degree,
you don't need to write a dissertation. You know, to be able to be a generalist, you need to.
You need training to be a journalist. Right. I I think and I actually think we have to be around.
There isn't enough. There isn't enough specific journalism training.
So, for example, the next day is specific journalism training and you can do it as an apprentice.
You can leave school at 16 and you can train to be a journalist. And that system works really well for recruiting working class people.
What we've got at the moment is kind of the opposite of that.
Where we have the barrier to entry is you have to complete a very expensive degree in which you do.
You do all these things. You have to support yourself financially to even get to that point.
And you have to write a big, long academic dissertation.
In most cases, and it's just not it's not something that someone who is good at journalism would necessarily be good at,
say, a manager is ready to throw out the old system.
Right. So here you've identified the blockers.
They're structural. Stop looking at CVS for what university did you go to and what degree did you get?
What should you be looking for?
Well, when I when I run a Start-Up news organisation, it was very small, but we were almost all working class and I didn't ask for CVS.
In fact, I specifically requested dancing to see and if they sent a CV, then I ignored their application.
I gave them like based a simple exercise.
So I asked them to write, have a go at some headlines for an article and to pick out what they thought was the best quote.
And and that was it. And you know, if if they if what I got back from that made some sense, then I invited them in.
You know, I wasn't interested in what university people went to.
And actually, if anything, I was more interested in the people who didn't go to university.
They were great. They were practical people. Often they had their perspectives that when often seen and they added so much.
And I think sometimes people who go to a very good university are very good at doing certain things in a certain way.
And they don't necessarily think outside the box because actually think outside the box is not useful when you are,
you know, getting good grades and applying for a good university. So, yeah, so that's one thing I think I think we reached.
You've really got to address any internal biases that you might have, and everybody who is involved will think, Oh, OK.
So the problem with that is it's very, very hard to do in the society that we live in because we live in such a classist society.
So, you know, just the other day I was watching, I started watching a sitcom that was full of really appalling class stereotypes and classes tropes.
So the family in this in this sitcom were portrayed as being lazy, being kind of scroungers.
The mom in the sitcom said she didn't work. And the joke was that she said, for obvious reasons, all something in my condition.
And it wasn't clear what her condition was. So there was like a notion of that.
Maybe she was some kind of scrounger, like a real lack of ambition.
And in the sitcom, the working class characters were a kind of foil for the an almost like a prop for the middle class people on a moral as well.
And you know, we as an industry have so far to go on this stuff.
So when we talk about a newsroom culture that more than one class ethnicity, sexuality,
et cetera, gender can feel a sense of belonging in what is that culture look like?
OK, so I guess it depends on. The news right now,
there are places where there is there is actually probably no benefit to them or
very little benefit to them to extend their bubble further than it already is.
And the kind of benefits you'd get through that they won't necessarily get because they
are targeting a certain audience and that certain audiences is defined broadly by class.
So I think disregarding. Those kind of situations, you know, let's OK,
let's take a well-meaning newsroom that really does want to have a more representative staff and do better content and get more readers and,
you know, a broader range of readers. OK, so there's a real, tangible benefit to having working class people in the newsroom.
And it's about discussions that you might have internally about the kind of content that you want to do.
It's about being able to speak to different groups of people.
You're going to get loads of really good ideas and stories because because of that.
And I think it's it kind of comes down to that. It's like there's just a bit of a desire,
like there's just a bit of a gap when writing about working class people in the newsroom that I, oh, you know, cost of living crises.
What can we do? Food Bank, you know, or Universal Credit, you know,
and the same idea is being recycled over and over because there's nobody in that newsroom saying, Oh, well, actually, these are the real problems.
And actually, I'm speaking someone the other day about this. And you know, this is what's actually happening.
I think that's it.
And I think we have really poor media literacy in this country and quite poor participation from people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
And that's purely of our own making.
That's purely because we don't do the kind of content, you know, within journalism that they that they want to read.
Write all these. We don't talk about them. You know, that's it.
It's the recognition from the newsroom. We're not going to get these stories.
We're not going to get the story right. We're not going to tell every aspect of the story without your contribution.
And again, that's going to require a conversation happening first, like, Hey, what background are you from?
And feeling actually safe and open in this environment, say, Oh yeah, my my dad works at as done right.
My dad works at ASA and I identify as working class. OK, great.
Now I know that I can come to you and talk to you for perspective on this thing.
But if that conversation isn't had.
Then nobody wants to make assumptions, so there's just this sort of weird tiptoeing around the conversation and not having it.
Yeah, but I think we're so far away from being from people really being able to, oh, you know, a lot of people really been being able to be honest,
I'm being able to say that in most rooms, you know, and I think it has to be a culture shift within the newsroom.
That's not something you can ask your staff to do. Hey, please make this place feel open and safe for everyone.
It's literally it has to come from leadership where they've shown a commitment to addressing this issue.
They've invited contribution.
There's been a willingness from the leader themselves to be aware of their bias in themselves and in the system that they're curious
about the different cultures that people are coming from and different life experiences that they're bringing to the table that they
themselves are culturally intelligent because they've had these conversations and that they're then creating the conditions for these
conversations to happen safely and openly so that working class journalists can feel valued for their actual working class backgrounds.
I actually, I think, is actually that we don't that we already know what what the implicit biases are and we already know what is and isn't classist.
The problem is that some people think classism is okay, and that's that's where it starts.
So, you know, when someone makes fun of someone's accent, it's not because we don't have the words to describe,
you know, making fun of someone's accent is it's because no one ever said, Don't do that.
Is this an example of where you would hear, Oh, it's just a bit of banter?
Yeah, exactly. If there's training that needs to be had, the training needs to be we our newsroom that when people do this, we call out, OK.
And that's the way we make it more inclusive.
It will be very easy for people to get out of this by saying, Oh, like, you know, we don't know what class means.
Yeah. You know, people have always made fun of each other's accent, and I wouldn't mind if someone made fun of my accent.
And but I think deep down, everybody knows that is not appropriate.
You're right, you're a hundred percent right. And yet there's a contradiction in what you're saying because on the one hand, you're saying,
we shouldn't have to have these conversations, you know what's wrong and right?
Other hand, you're saying nobody wants to talk about this yet we don't want to talk about this yet.
It's too soon to have these conversations without it becoming really, really awkward.
And there's something in me that's wondering if it's so difficult to have these conversations
because we're worried about shaming people if we have these conversations and.
Having that concern, oh, will that person feel uncomfortable or ashamed if I ask them if they're working class or
middle class presumes that there is something to be ashamed of in being working class?
It's morally neutral or it needs to be. It should be.
I think it's actually kind of more complicated than that as well,
because it's like people will agree that there's absolutely nothing wrong with being working class,
but it's seeing those working class identifiers as there's identifying characteristics as something other than being working class.
That's where the problem comes from a lot of the time when people mix up.
Something that's not going to fire and class with something that seems to be a personal failing.
So, for example, lazy, yeah. So like it in flight scrounger, unintelligent?
Yeah, there's so much shared understanding of class.
Well, that doesn't get said. Actually trying to say those things now who?
He's actually quite hard, you know, it's quite hard to do that kind of thinking, Yeah,
if I were to summarise key takeaways for me, what I've learnt from you is that it's really,
really key that despite how awfully painful and awkward the conversation is,
we do need to create safe spaces where people from different classes can come together.
And genuinely just have a conversation about what those implicit biases are, because until you've heard that verbalised,
you're going to have a very hard time confronting implicit bias in your workplace to the point of actually fixing this problem.
I think you're probably right. Yeah. The good thing is I felt like there is an appetite.
You know, a lot of appetite in this industry to improve things. And and I think the problem is that nobody's done any thinking whatsoever.
You know, sometimes I've been asked before, you know, Oh, how do we know when someone's working class?
What do we do about it? And it's like, Well, you know what?
The problem is, really, you know, if you if you spend five minutes thinking about your organisation, you know what the problem is.
You can find a way to solve it yourself. It doesn't need me to write a framework where you know, it takes all these boxes, you know?
I find it quite difficult sometimes to have this conversation in a really kind of
open and genuine way when I feel like often I'm being asked questions from people.
Not not in this conversation right now, but I mean,
I'm being asked questions sometimes from people in news organisations that I haven't made even the smallest effort to address it and seem somehow,
you know, are acting like they're baffled by how this has happened.
So, yeah, so I think I think that's maybe why I'm why it's so difficult to articulate it and why it's so difficult to give advice.
You know, and body positivity, they have the sentence. All bodies are good bodies.
Yeah. What would that sentence be for class? I don't know.
I don't know. Is there like a class positivity movement?
Do we need like a Jameela Jamil? Can you be out Jameela Jamil? Like class positivity sort of movement.
I feel like people have what they think is class positivity.
I don't. I feel like I feel like the working class have class positivity.
I feel like the middle classes and the upper classes need to get on board the damn train.
Yeah. Yeah, maybe you're right.
Robin, I want to thank you for actually articulating really well, the problem where you think we can start looking for solutions?
Thank you to those of you who stayed with us. Our guest today was Robin Venter at Northern England Correspondent,
and you can follow our podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.
If you don't want to miss any news from the institute, subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking the link on our Twitter bio or on our home page.
Thank you for listening to Future of Journalism, Typekit and myself, and we'll be back to.