Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | September 13, 2021 | Worcester Business Journal 19 WBJ WEBCAST SERIES WBJ WEBCAST FORUMS WBJ WEBCAST FORUMS WBJ WEBCAST FORUMS WBJ WEBCAST SERIES A WBJ WEBCAST SERIES A Building a better business through Diversity and Inclusion WBJ WEBCAST SPECIAL FORUM SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 Noon - 1pm Zoom Virtual Forum Creating diverse, inclusive workplaces isn't just the right thing to do - it's a critical part to developing and maintaining a culture of respect and equity in your workplace. Research indicates that companies who focus on building an inclusive work environment can both increase productivity and encourage innovation, in addition to improving the bottom line. Please join us for WBJ's second annual Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum, where our expert panel will discuss best practices and concrete steps that you can take to foster a more diverse, equitable and inclusive environment at your organization. Panelists coming soon! For more info and to register: www.wbjournal.com/diversity Presenting Sponsor Banking LifeDesign ® QCC.edu | 508.853.2300 Do You Want A Diverse Workforce? Hire A QCC Grad! With 45% students of color, QCC has the most diverse students of any college in Worcester. ✓ Train your workforce ✓ Create Internship opportunities ✓ Become a mentor for a QCC student ✓ Provide training for your incumbent workers COLLEGE. MADE D I V E R S I T Y & I N C L U S I O N F O C U S Mark Henderson, who worked at the T&G for 15 years and is now CEO and founder of e016 local social media site, which aggregates local news stories. Henderson pointed to both a spate of layoffs across news media, as well as a tendency for some of the older guard reporters to stick around for decades. "It's very hard as an industry to measure up to evolving standards ... in an industry that wasn't hiring," Henderson said. e second hurdle, from Henderson's perspective, is the news media has so firmly cemented its audience – that audience being white – that from a business perspective, expanding can be a challenge. Newsrooms like those in Central Massachusetts are tasked with retaining their paying audience, while needing to expand their coverage to include communities they may have neglected reporting on in the past. It's a two-pronged issue where one problem runs the risk of exacerbating the other. "If the newsroom looks like the audience, they're going to write about that audience," Henderson said. Professor Hunt, from Worcester State, would like to see more support from community media outlets, which may not always include straightforward traditional journalism, but which provide opportunities for members of the community to platform stories and issues important to them. He pointed to local public access television stations like WCCA TV, or WCUW 91.3 community access radio. "When we have content creators or reporters that are from communities that they serve, they're going to have a better understanding of the values and the richness of those communities," Hunt said. W EDITOR'S NOTE: WBJ Editor Brad Kane, who is mentioned in a chart in this feature package on racial diver- sity in Central Massachusetts news media, was the main editor on this story and oversaw its production. Because of this, he and the article's author, Senior Staff Writer Monica Benevides, decided to not have him participate as an interviewed subject. Instead, Kane wrote a column about diversity in local news media, which appears on page 5 of this edition.

• Cover