Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Invest in workplace diversity, equity and inclusion.

Learn how to address race, create equity and build a more representative, respectful and trustworthy organization by working with Poynter’s diversity, equity and inclusion experts. Our team will help you craft a flexible plan of tangible actions to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, with ways to track your growth to ensure that you make a real investment in generating positive change in your workplace that can also improve the bottom line.

What We Offer

Our flagship diversity, equity and inclusion program includes three two-hour workshops that help individuals identify and counteract unconscious bias and provide best practices to create more inclusive coverage. While these workshops can be taken separately, we recommend completing all three in order:

Creating the Workplace that You — and Your Audience — Deserve 

In this interactive session, you and your colleagues will:

  • Develop a shared understanding for creating an inclusive organization.
  • Use a Poynter-developed tool to visualize areas of potential unconscious bias.
  • Understand how you can overcome bias through power sharing and empathy.

How to Discuss and Monitor Issues of Diversity in Content

In addition to identifying at least one specific action item to make your own work more inclusive, in this session you will learn:

  • How content contributes to shaping perceptions.
  • To grow audience through coverage that embraces more diverse views.
  • To add nuance to source depictions and practical tips to diversify content.

When is Race Relevant?

This session focuses specifically on how to think about race in your content, including the gap that often emerges between intent and impact. Here, you will:

  • Get practical tips to change the habits that journalists fall into that can alienate audiences.
  • Learn how a journalist’s relationship to law enforcement and other authority figures can create the impression that news is meant for only certain audiences. 
  • Learn best practices to avoid coded language and images that display bias, as well as actionable ways that you can immediately create more inclusive coverage.

More Services

In addition, Poynter offers other specialized diversity, equity and inclusion workshops and consulting services, in which your organization is paired with an expert who conducts research and provides advice on internal policies and statements, coaching for leaders, strategies for recruitment and retention, and more. We also encourage you to explore our custom programs in other topic areas to help build on these efforts, as improving diversity, equity and inclusion aligns closely with strengthening your organization’s leadership, ethics policies and mental health and well-being resources.

“It gave me a chance to reflect on my own work habits, biases and power. And I really appreciate that what we learned can be applied both to how we work with colleagues, and how we work with sources and show guests.” – Cydney Grannan, WAMU Producer