The companies asked themselves how to appeal to varied cultural audiences, encourage different perspectives and how to ensure authentic storytelling. These elements are essential to guarantee quality news coverage, credible programs and rich articles. Therefore, ethnic and cultural diversity is an essential business case for the media companies.

‘There just are not any multicultural reporters!’

The recruitment of journalists with a multicultural background is for many media companies the biggest obstacle towards a diverse workplace. It is for this reason that Diversity at work invited Het Brede Netwerk to speak at the charter meeting. Het Brede Netwerk is an organisation that built bridges between aspiring multi-ethnic journalists and large media companies through masterclasses and workshops. Using their network, many journalists with a cross-cultural or migration background have made successful careers in the media sector. Het Brede Netwerk showed that there are in fact multicultural reporters, but job recruiters have to look further than their own networks and favoured schools of journalism. The media companies themselves also spoke about their diversity policy successes by sharing their best practices, such as the NTR whom with the help of the BBC organize unconscious-bias trainings for their employees to combat unfair prejudice and stereotyping. On this special day, the nine media companies have set themselves ambitious targets to ensure diverse and inclusive workplaces that represent the present-day multicultural Dutch society.