大象传媒

LARA: Hi everyone, hope you enjoyed that little treat of INXS in the morning.  Thank you all for joining, or if we have any of the Australian contingent in the evening as well.  Thank you all for joining.  This is our third day of the 50:50 Festival.  We are so pleased to be bringing you this session with our partners ABC Australia.  So, for those of who don't know me, I'm Lara Joannides, the 50:50 Equality Project lead at the 大象传媒.  I look after all the hundreds of teams who take part in the monitoring and have overseen our role of monitoring to include disability and ethnicity as well.  Little bit of housekeeping first of all. This is an interactive session, please do make sure you send in your questions to us using the Q&A option at the bottom of your screens.  We also do have live closed caption, if you need those please make sure to turn them on.  That option is at the bottom of your screens.  I will be speaking to the ABC Australia team very shortly.  We're really pleased to have them.  In the meantime, you can also share on social media that you are with us today with the #5050project.  Before I speak to the team, we will run a brilliant video from ABC Australia, giving us a taste of some of the people and the areas of content that have been taking part in the 50:50 project down there.

We wanted to get involved with the 50:50 project because 50% of the population in the Pacific are women, and it is important their stories get told.  This has become a regular conversation in our editorial meetings, it pushes us to reach out to women's talent in all those places of decision-making and power and it is very successful so far.  The 50:50 strategy was a no-brainer for the news channel if we could better represent the audiences we are broadcasting to they would notice.  In 2020 we achieved our biggest broadcasting audience ever.  For every single month of the year, we had 50% women or more on the channel.  It wasn't easy.

The organisations are male-dominated and women aren't in the roles.  We had to work hard to get the contact books full of women and talk to organisations about why women weren't being put forward to speak with the media.  So, the big story for us here in Victoria in 2020 was obviously the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly those 111 days that Melbourne spent in lockdown. What is great about this newsroom is the journalists kept their focus on the 50:50 goals.  Every day they were having conversation about how do we get more women into our stories, as case studies, as expert voices.  In their daily commissioning, everyone was thinking about how do we tell the stories that are really relevant to women, and how do we tell those stories about the distinct ways in which women experienced this pandemic.  We had two main aims when we signed on to 50:50 project, we wanted to increase our coverage and representation of women in sport.  Also grow our overall female audience for our sport stories.  By appointing a reporter who is really dedicated to that 50:50 work and through some experimentation and trial and error, we were able to make some huge gains in that area.  Our whole sports team benefited from the sharing of ideas and contact we generated through that process.

LARA: Love that video from all the ABC Australia news teams working so hard to increase their representation of women as part of a 50:50. ABC have been taking part in 50:50 equality since 2018, one of our earliest external partners to sign up.  And so, I'm very pleased to have with us today Emma Pearce, who is 50:50 eco-lead for ABC News, thanks for joining.  And Gavin Fang, ABC News' Head of Network and News Gathering and their diversity lead for news.  We are here today to talk about how 50:50 is branching out into looking at wider diversity monitoring.  Before that can you give me an idea of how you are tracking for gender has been going on at ABC, Emma, how you have been able to make it a success.  And also, you have so many teams doing it, how many now?

EMMA: We now have almost 50 teams Lara, almost the entirety of the News and Current Affairs division.  We are really excited to have that many.  We signed up two new teams as part of challenge month as well.  That was great.  When we started in 2019 we just started with two, maybe three teams, I think it was.  We just ran a pilot for a month, and saw we were tracking at about 42% representation.  So, a bit of room for growth there.  Really excitingly we did quite a bit of a push at the end of last year.  We really wanted to see what we could draw out of the teams after such a year.  We thought, let's throw one more thing on top!  We achieved 50% in December, which was really exciting and of course, we are really looking forward to sharing our results from March with everybody.  Stay tuned for that over the next couple of days.

LARA: Really excited to share that, it is brilliant having the partners all take part in the challenge.  Thank you for all your hard work in making a success for ABC.  What are the biggest challenges you faced in increasing women's representation?

EMMA: One of the first and biggest challenges is asking people who are working really hard and really stretch today do one more thing.  What has really helped us there is the fact that everybody really understands why we are doing this, what the end goals are, we want to achieve better gender balance in our content.  So that has helped us.  And the feedback from the teams has been that because this system is so simple, and the workflow is easily adaptable, because it's been formulated peer-to-peer, so journalists working with journalists, we understand the pressures and we can talk to them about where it is hard and find ways to help them.  Like the public broadcaster like us, like the 大象传媒, of course, we want to be really representative of our audience.  That is a big part of this as well, it fits really closely in line with our broader news strategy.  All of that means teams can then embrace the work and do it.  That helps us overcome some of those challenges.  I think too, last year, I don't know is it too soon to joke about the global pandemic.  It probably for a lot of people on the call today.  It was one more thing on top of so much.  We were all dealing with the pandemic all day at work, in our personal lives, every aspect.  Then when we started to look at policy makers and decision makers and people dealing with the response globally too, it was skewing really heavily male.  That became a huge challenge for teams last year.  Then what we saw was this amazing movement, as everybody rose to the challenge and really started to look for, where are the opportunities where we can raise female voices and experiences of what is going on.  We looked at the frontline, age care workers, childcare workers, teachers and we found more diverse and more females to talk about how they were experiencing the pandemic in their lives.  It results in richer stories for us. We really broadened out the sorts of people whose stories we were trying to tell as we lived through that.  It was a big challenge.  We got there in the end.

LARA: Amazing, I think a lot of our teams at the 大象传媒 will be feeling exactly the same way about all the work that's been happening over the last 13, 14 months.  Question to both of you.  Aside from the actual figures, and the new stories that we're getting out there as a result, what have been the other gains for ABC, have you had any feedback from audiences for example?

EMMA: I will go, do you want to go first Gavin?

GAVIN: You go.

EMMA: I actually have spent a bit of time over the last couple of days pulling together notes for our report for you Lara for March.  There has been quite a bit of feedback from the teams.  Some of the notes they have sent through.  It is really interesting to seem so of the themes coming through as well.  I think there has been quite a few gains for us.  I think the first one is that we're telling better stories, we're actually telling stories that are richer and with a lot more voices and perspectives in them.  Teams are saying that the tracking is influencing the story development process for us.  All wait from the story selection, to who we are include anything those stories, all the way through to where are we going to publish and where are we going to broadcast the stories.  Teams are also saying their contact books are starting to really boom.  We are just getting so many new voices in, which is great.  And those voices are more diverse.  So even going beyond just looking at beginner.  That, of course makes all this work easier, because we have the people there on the books, they are easier to go to.  We are starting to get really excitingly some feedback through from the audience.  So sometimes that's coming from the people that we're speaking to, the contributors and the talent in the stories, sometimes it's coming through social media and places like that.  It's really exciting to hear teams reporting back and saying we are getting this positive feedback.  People are noticing the difference.  But really excitingly, a few teams are starting to say to us now, we are noticing that as we are going to other organisations and asking them for spokes people, it's getting so much easier to get women and diverse contact suggestions from them.  We have been asking them and asking them.  And now they are saying we do have a woman who is media trained who can speak to you about that story.  We are actually seeing stories and organisations outside the ABC.

GAVIN: Just to pick up on what Em said about better stories, that is one of the biggest changes coming out of 50:50, triumphing a lot of cultural change in our organisation -- driving a lot of cultural change in our organisation, how what are we thinking about stories, are they relevant, who are we speaking to about this story, and it is laying the groundwork for what to do next around broader diversity.

LARA: That is what I was going to lead on to.  With all of that culture change, how have you moved out from monitoring gender to broader ethnicity and disability as well?

GAVIN: It is always our intent to add on from the work we have done around gender in the 50:50 project to look at broader diversity.  The ABC has a number of workforce goals as well around diversity in our organisation.  But we also have a charter obligation to reflect the country, to look and sown like Australia.  We really want to do that.  But also coming back to that better story idea, we have a new strategy which is about being more relevant to more Australians.  To do that you need to hear more perspectives from people, broaden out who you are talking to.  The 50:50 work has allowed us to start that journey.  Now we are embarking on what we are calling the Equality Project, that is an extension of the 50:50 work.  That's looking at indigenous Australians, culturally diverse Australians, people with disability, and looking at ways we can expand on telling stories that include or are more inclusive of a broader cross-section of Australia.  And again, to tell better stories by hearing their views and broadening out the people we are talking to.  Now we are starting down the track of doing the same things that we have done for 50:50 which, is tracking, talking to our staff about the best way to do this.  Finding ways to drive the editorial conversation around broader diversity and better storytelling, that involves a broader cross-section of the country.

LARA: I have been working closely with Emma on how you are doing that.  A lot of people on the call will really want to hear the practicalities of what it takes.  So, can you give me a bit of an idea of what some of the key challenges were in coming one your strategy for how to do this and how it differs from the gender monitoring, Emma?

EMMA: It's obviously far more complex and sensitive space, Lara, so one of the first things was just for us to grapple with and work through, and your team was so supportive in answering some of these questions and talking to you about it, is around that idea of identification and what a personal thing it is.  For a lot of these diversity vertical that is we are looking at.  But where we have really settled and where the 50:50 project and the extension of that has helped us, is we are really thinking about what we are monitoring here is the perceived diversity in our content and ensuring that then is just a tool that sparks an actual editorial conversation.  So that has helped us with that.  Some of the other practical things we have had to deal with.  I have spent a lot of time talking to lawyers!  About the privacy considerations here, because it is personal and sensitive information that we are talking about, there was a lot to work through with that.  That's led to great innovation, things like we have been, over the last couple of months, developing a new tool to help our teams track who are they using in their stories in way that completely anonymises the data.  We are looking at percentages and trend lines and see where we are having some movement there, which is good.  But it takes it away from that real personal element.  Some of the other practical things that have been really helpful as well, we have talked to our staff about it a lot internally, we have consulted with diverse staff about their experiences and perspectives on it.  But we have also consulted with external organisations as well who have given us guidance and we have spent quite a lot of time working through what are the questions we want to ask, how do we want to have these conversations. I would encourage any organisations that thinking about it to really have those conversations.  Sometimes it can be difficult at first because it can feel a little bit awkward to have the conversation.  The more you work through it and really workshop what are the difficulties here.  What we always keep coming back to is what we want to do is tell better stories and better represent our organisation and this is a tool that gets us to the end game.  And it is great to say look at the results we got with gender because it gives us the confidence to talk about T the more confident we are to talk about it the more confident people are to take the tool and run with it.

LARA: For sure.  Gavin did you want to add something?

GAVIN: I was going to say what Em is saying about the conversation.  One of the things that struck me about as we move on to doing more work in the diversity space, in addition to gender, is that actually internally people are quite concerned about getting this wrong.  Our staff are concerned about hey, if we get this wrong, are we offending somebody and doing the wrong thing.  They really want to get it right.  That's been a positive out of having a lot of conversations with them.  We did a pilot, like Emma launched a pilot about how we could do tracking, and to talk to staff about that.  That will help them build confidence about yeah we can do this in a way that is not getting it wrong.

LARA: I was going to ask, it is really interesting to hear what the reaction has been from the staff.  I have been talking to all the 大象传媒 teams here, and it's getting quite different concerns from each department and division.  Aside from being afraid of potentially getting it wrong, it is brilliant, because it opens up a conversation, what are some of the other difficulties or particular maybe barriers to really getting this monitoring rolled out that you have come up with, or people have raised?

GAVIN: I think there are practical issues around busy reporting teams and adding another layer of tracking on to that and being able to complain why we are asking people to do that and coming back to that audience perception that Em spoke about, in thinking about the audience.  Having an effective tracking system that actually works for that is another challenge.  E ma mentioned getting over the privacy concerns, there are specific legal issues in Australia about that and how we can collect and store data.  I think coming back to that culture, the idea this is maybe tokenistic, to be successful at something like this, and again coming back to 50:50, this is such great process to go through and build base for this.  We have had to convince staff over that period that it is actually about doing better journalism.  Any of these programmes to be successful, for journos, cynics like us, we have to take it back to, and we have continually done this, why we are doing this is it helps us tell better stories. That is a real change in the way the staff responded when we started with gender to where we are now.  Two years ago, even doing gender people thought is this tokenistic, we don't get much of that anymore.  I think that's been a really big challenge, but one we are progressively overcoming.

EMMA: I think too there is a real, when we talk to teams about it, they really agree they want to see this sort of change affected.  And what they really like about the tracking system is it is actually a practical thing they can apply.  Although it adds a few extra steps, it's not a lot of work and it's a small thing and they see the gains over time.  Because you are talking about trends and you can see movement and change.  That is self-motivating in itself as well.

LARA: Just to reminded everyone, please do pop your questions in the Q&A, we really want to hear from you, and it will be great to get your thoughts, if you have any specific things you want to hear from Emma or Gavin or myself about how to possibly do this in your organisation, please do ask.  We do have a question from an anonymous attendee, how do you monitor when you don't necessarily know what someone's ethnicity is.  What type of processing do you have in place for the monitoring to happen within your teams at the moment?

EMMA: So, we can talk about the results of the pilot we did last year, we haven't rolled out the full tracking module across the ABC yet, we are still tweaking that and developing the new tool.  One of the things we say is if you don't know don't count.  In that case just move forward.  We know it is not about the data.  It is not a sophisticated measure, it's really just about having something to look at that will then spark that editorial conversation.  We also advise teams to, you can look at things based on a perception, it is a perception test.  Think about what the audience might see or hear.  But don't make any assumptions based on one characteristic alone for example.  There is a lot of different factors that come into play when we are talking about the talent we are involving in stories.  Most of the time we have had a conversation with them.  It might be quite relevant to the story you are telling you might have picked up some cues based on a combination of appearance or how they sound or references to their culture or where they were born and that sort of thing.  If you have enough of those factors at play can you make an educated assumption there.  But also, of course, looking at what's available publicly in terms of information and things like that too.  But we always say, if you are just not sure, don't count and move on.  That's absolutely fine.  We know we won't capture everything, particularly when we start looking at people with disability.  There is a huge range of people who identify as living with disability, but those disabilities are not physically apparent.  So, thinking about all the sensory and mental health concerns and things like that. We know we are not going to capture that in this test.  That's absolutely fine, we just look at how we are tracking over time and that will set a benchmark and then we will be able to see where we need to go to improve.

LARA: Great, really good to hear, quite similar to what we are doing at the 大象传媒 as well.  It will be really interesting just in terms of logistics to explain how you set up the pilot.  How big or small the pilot was, what kind of teams you got involved in the beginning, and what would be some of your tips for organisations who want to start their own pilots.

EMMA: We started selecting teams doing well with the gender work.  We knew they were familiar with the process, they knew what best practice was, we said we want to add a couple of steps here.  We thought about things like, because we publish to so many different platforms, we are on-line, broadcasting for television, for radio, we thought let's capture teams that are filing to all of those platforms so we can get a sense of is it going to be harder for example for audio-first filing compared to the sorts of information that you find out about a person when you interview them for a digital story or television story.  And then we had a really close look at the guidelines about what we wanted to work.  We knew there would be questions around how do I know what I'm doing and make those assessments.  We spent time going through editorial notes.  We spoke to a lot of staff, and a lot of staff in the ABC offer guidance specifically around reporting diversity or in certain areas and things like that. We got some external advice, we got a huge amount of help from the 大象传媒 team and pulled together a guidance note around it, and we had the teams working out of spreadsheets initially and took further advice on privacy and had to actually change things like making sure there was passwords on those spreadsheets, that the data was corrected. We had to try different things like there are daily programmes do we look at the data daily or weekly to help anonymise it.  And really getting down into the weeds here, I don't know if you want that!

LARA: I think it will be so useful for women listening.

GAVIN: I would add we love all our teams, as we do everywhere, but we love some teams better than others.  The thing with something like this, you need to choose a team with a great leader or manager who is engaged in the process, and they will give you honest feedback about their staff around that.  See how it works, if you take a pilot to a team that isn't quite there, you won't get the same level of feedback. We took it to where we knew there was enough content and representative enough of the broader work that we do but has a really good practical leader and a team that can actually safely have a conversation about is this working and feedback this back to us honestly.

LARA: That is a really important point, Emma, carry on.

EMMA: I was just going to add that because of the disruptions we were facing last year, at the same time as trying to do the pilot, and the difficulties we had with things like navigating, I don't know, if you have the same problem, but giving journalists spreadsheets to work in is not ideal.  We had some problems there with the actual data collection, so we started to check in with them more regularly, so at least weekly, we were talking to every team.  And that really helped us build some context around why we were getting the results we were getting and what were the things we needed to change as we moved forward to the next step.

LARA: I think that's definitely something that has been one of the bigger challenges for our team as well.  With people working from home so much more now, you are all back in the office or most of you, but for our teams, getting them set up on the system so it's in the secure system, we can't have cloud servers with this information, for all the organises listening, definitely something to be aware of, that the logistical side of things is just as big in terms of how you collect the data.  Moving on, we have a question that links to that nicely.  Will all your teams likely move towards tracking ethnicity or is it optional or focusing on more appropriate teams than others at the moment.  You selected the best placed teams to do the pilot, how are you planning to roll it out?

GAVIN: My preference is all of our teams would eventually be tracking for diversity.  We will probably roll it out in a staged approach, with teams that we think we can work with initially but ultimately we would like all of our teams to be tracking.  I think and Em can add to this.  What we will do is allow them to come up with a target or baseline and then to work to improve on that.  Given that over a period of time.  For us we think every team should be having this conversation and changing their commissioning through it.

LARA: Great.  And then we have another question.  What's been the biggest success, and the biggest challenges, we have covered some of the challenges.  But from the small pilot that you have done so far.  What have been the most encouraging signs you have seen?

EMMA: Just that we are seeing a huge amount of enthusiasm for teams for this work at the moment.  I realise there is quite a momentum happening globally across media operations, particularly where we have been looking to really look at how we do better in this space.  Be more representative of the people we are going to serve with our content and have greater diversity in our content.  I think that has helped us a lot, the timing is really good for this work for us in that and teams are really enthusiastic about it.  Even before we have started the tracking work, just the work we have done so far is already prompting all these conversations and we are seeing more stories and greater diversity within that content already.  So, I think in some ways although tracking these broader diversity verticals is more complex than gender, we have almost got a head start.  It's almost an easier start than we had with gender in way.

LARA: That's exactly what we have been seeing, and actually we are even having teams, I'm not sure if you are getting this.  We are having people asking us what about taking it further, what about sexual orientation, age, religion, all of those, for various reasons we are not going to start doing those yet.  But it is great to see it's making the teams think about diversity as a whole and intersectionality in a much more considered way as well.  Which is fantastic.  So, we have a couple of questions that I want to see if you would like to ask yourselves.  Claire, I don't know if you want to speak up and ask your question live?

>>: I would love to, first of all, it's been brilliant to hear you guys talk with such conviction about what you are doing, it does raise questions as well about what does it mean to be an Australian and who tells those stories.  Just to ask this from a 大象传媒 perspective, because you are a public service broadcaster have you been publicly attacked on social media or on other platforms from people for doing this.  What impact has it had on your staff?

GAVIN: Yes.  So, we have a love fair with the Murdoch papers in Australia.  Or they have a love affair with us. Anything we do they put on the front page, and it sells newspapers or gets clicks.  We have had over the journey a number of critical articles about what we are doing and accusations that we are either you know some kind of left-wing conspiracy or trying to, I don't know, have some kind of campaign that shift what is the news actually is.  I think that initially there was some hesitation from probably managers more than staff, around what the impact of this would be.  And whether or not we wanted to be secretive about what we are doing.  But the success of what we have done and the stories coming through and that it's so visible that it has helped us do better stories has actually help us overcome that.  There is much less receipt since about this as an issue, and I actually like it when the papers now publish something about what we are doing.  Because I think it gives us more strength and actually helps us with the audience to know that, actually, ABC is doing this and maybe they are doing things that are more relevant to us as an audience.

EMMA: There was actually an article just before Christmas last year, it was written in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it felt confronting to read it as the person it within written about.  It prompted people from other organisations to reach out, and say hey, I have read about the work you are doing, I have some contacts and I would love you to add them to your contact book and use them.  And that old adage no publicity is bad publicity holds true!  I would say there has been more positive reaction from the people we really want to serve.

>>: That's great to hear.

LARA: Thank you very much so much Claire, fantastic question.  Anthony has answered a question and follows on from that well, Anthony did you want to ask your question live?

>>: Yeah, so if I understand it rightly, you are monitoring based not on asking anybody about their ethnicity or disabilities, but based on your perception of it, I wondered if you were concerned that a contributor was going to find out about how you had categorised them and disagree?

EMMA: Yes, Anthony, it is a big concern, and it is something we have grappled with a lot and talked about a lot, and work shopped a lot.  I think Lara's teams have done this as well, where it is the opportunity to ask somebody about their identification, it's such a personal decision, and feeling and it changes all the time as well.  What we realised we are doing what we keep coming back to that what we are monitoring is not actually diversity amongst the people we are working with.  Sometimes we do know, and sometimes we're not sure.  But what we're measuring here is what the audience is perceiving, because it's very much about what the audience experiences.  We are not doing this in a way to try to meet targets and fit quotas. We are just measuring the data, in a way that is anonymised, so it can't actually be linked to those people.  It gives us a sense of how our coverage is looking and then prompts us to have a conversation that goes down the line of, did we consider the right Mex of voices when we were talking about that issue and covering that story.  Other people we didn't hear from that we should have included.  How do we find those people and those voices.

LARA: That's very well put Emma, thank you Anthony, really good question.  Very similar for us at the 大象传媒 as well.  We have some steams that are collecting actual data at the 大象传媒.  They are asking their contributors to complete diversity forms and collecting that data.  But that is not really possible for a large number of our teams, if you imagine particularly your news teams, because they don't actually have direct access to a lot of the contributors they are featuring.  They are suing slots and clips from agencies, or archive materials, and not having direct contact with the individual.  We are doing our best to get as much of an accurate view of what is going on out in the content as possible w the constraints of production, resources and actually the information we have access to.  Emma's point there is really important, which you also said earlier, Emma, this isn't, even though we are collecting the statistics to help us know where we are, so we know where we need to get to, it's not a scientific statistical exercise where we are saying this is 100% the completely accurate reflection of everyone appearing in our content.  It's more a case of having as close an idea as possible whereof we are, so that we can use it to inform our decisions and change the way we are thinking.  As Emma said, it is having that impact almost immediately in changing the way teams are thinking and encouraging them to broaden their work in terms of who they are reaching out to, what stories they are including.  It's kind of a mixed bag of statistical and culture work really, and the two definitely go hand in hand.  This is actually going to follow on to another question we have had about how the gathering of the data differs from UK, the UK and Australia.  So how different it is to scope gathering ethnicity, in terms of legal and data protection terms for us and for Emma and Gavin in Australia as well, it has to be anonymised.  When we are doing the recording, it is essentially numbers being added into a spreadsheet, unless it is teams collecting actual data you are not having a person's name next to how they have been monitored and counted.  It is all aggregated.  Do you have any more of an idea, I know I gave you our background and our guide on how we are doing it Emma, how different is it for Australian teams and what are the differences for you guys in terms of how you have had to set up the monitoring and scoping out ethnicity?

EMMA: Within the privacy and legal constraints particularly, I think actually as we have worked through t and we are still having conversations with the privacy lawyers about it and nutting it out, it has been very similar, the anonymisation of the data has been key, making sure that the data isn't linked, in the instance of daily programme, for example, if you looked at the data for that just one programme and it five stories on it, you might perhaps be able to work out which data was affiliated with which package and which person.  So, we have looked at things like for some teams maybe they only look at their data weekly or monthly, if it is a weekly programme.  So, they are really just looking at trends.  One of the big things we have done, that we are really ready to pilot soon is develop this new tool, rather than a spreadsheet where the data is stored, it's the storage of the data that is the biggest problem with the Australia privacy laws.  The data is instead going into an app that gives awe percentage number.  So, you get a percentage trend line or bar graph, we are still working through the graphic, essentially, a representation.  So, the team can see how they are moving, but there is not really anyway of figuring out how that data is connected to any particular person.  It has been the security of the data and the anonymisation of the data that has been the key.  In the instance where if we were to ask, then we would have to ask permission to store the data and then it becomes a whole completely different set of parameters and things we have to go through.

GAVIN: We do want to help our teams and make it easier for people we do have commissioned to have their information and to store that by building out a better contact database that over time allows working journos to be able to access that in a faster way.

LARA: Definitely, one thing that has really helped our teams in the 大象传媒 is the launch of our new Voices database, which we made available to all of our teams on the 1st of March.  For any organisations who are interested and keen to do this, for your 50:50 leads, whoever is helping implement this, giving as much support to staff and teams doing the monitoring as possible in order to help them improve their representation can make all the difference.  Having a database that ticks all the data protection boxes and is already compliant, that isn't a concern of the teams they just access and search as they need to is really important.  Definitely something all of us would advise other organisations to do.  Gavin, yes?

GAVIN: I totally agree.  One of the excuses we often get is about what talent did you get, is I was so busy I went and got that person.  We have to help to fix that as well through something like a talent database or the new voices database that you have got.

LARA: So now we have talked a lot about the logistics and the workflow and the practicalities of doing this monitoring.  Looking ahead to how we hope to all replicate the success of the gender monitoring, with ethnicity monitoring, do you already have some kind of strategies and plans in place for trying to reach out to more people from different ethnic communities, I know in the UK we say ethnic minority or black, Asian and et cetera neck.  You know you have different terms it. Do you have plans on how to improve that pipeline of different people?

GAVIN: Absolutely.  One of the key parts of our new strategy about being more relevant is actually around community engagement and reaching out to different communities to make to them and hear from them about what the issues are.  So we have been doing a number of different community engagement events and things that we have loosely termed embeds as well, we send journalists out of suburban areas out of our big cities, because we know that is where it over-indexes for more diverse Australians, by focusing on the outer suburbs, not just diverse people, but the outer suburbs we know in the stories we will hear from more different and diverse communities, that is a really big part of our strategy we are starting. We have set goals around number of engagement events, talking to communities and going out using those as ways to tap into what are stories out there, but also just connect with people, build more contacts, hear about what's relevant and go back and tell more stories about those places.  That's helping with both the diversity work we are doing but also this broader new strategy about what is the most relevant stories, how can we as a public broadcaster be as relevant to as many people as we can, and not be inclined to an inner urban style of storytelling or story.

LARA: Fantastic work.  And I think it's so exciting for us to hear how much you have already thought about it and how much you put into it.  It is definitely something we can all learn from.  We will start to wrap up shortly.  But I have two more questions for you.  One is having your on-line teams been monitoring the perception of ethnicity, and how have they had to do it differently compared to broadcast teams?

EMMA: It's actually been much harder for some of our on-line teams, because sometimes, say with the home page team for example, they are just looking at photos and headlines, that's all the information they have.  So, we're thinking about whether it there's a way to tweak the system to make it a little bit different for them.  Or maybe it might be that there are certain parts of the production chain where it is not appropriate to monitor for this sort of thing.  But we have had a team, a multi-platform team involved as part of the pilot.  So, they were looking at on-line and broadcast, so both TV and radio.  But I think what's Devon there is because they are making the content themselves, they are closer to the content and the talent.  They have a lot more information about who has been interviewed and who has been included and who they approached but couldn't speak and that sort of thing as well.  I'm not sure if that answers the question.  And I didn't know whether you wanted me to go into social there as well.  Some teams are monitoring social content, when we are producing it for social platforms first.

LARA: I think that's exactly right.  One of the key things you referred to there, which is what we always do with 50:50 at the 大象传媒, is to really make sure we mould it and fit the methodology to fit that particular team and outlet.  With 50:50 we have said it is not one size fits all, we have kept the methodology as simple as possible so it can be tailored.  There will be on-line and social teams curating their own content and it is easier for them to monitor.  Even for broadcast content where the teams don't have that direct editorial control over what they are putting out.  There are different ways of doing it, happy to advise, not sure who asked that question, whether you are 大象传媒 staff or external, we are happy to work with you on how to tailor those efforts to make it suitable for the different teams.  This is a lovely question to wrap up the session for you and Emma and Gavin.  What is height light of being part of 50:50 for you?

EMMA: Well, opportunities like this, to work with teams like yours, Lara, and other organisations in Australia.  The opportunity to work with people at the ABC as well who are really so enthusiastic and passionate about this work, it has been a real labour of love, but to see the change that's actually happening.  As I said before, both within our own organisation and everywhere else as well and to be part of that has been, on the level of personal satisfaction, a really big win for me.

GAVIN: I would say people competing to do better and then coming and telling me what they have done and how amazing their story is and sending emails saying look I have done this, and that just goes to the keen of, if you can tap into the passion around it and find a way to actually grab hold of journo and their desire to do better yarns and get that out more broadly, this stuff can be really successful.  For mine, seeing people passionate about what initially would have been a strategy goal has been the best thing.

LARA: Thank you so much, I love hearing that, it's really fantastic, and I think, as we have been saying throughout the whole session, it's all stories and making sure we are telling the best stories and serving our audience.  But actually, doing this work and exactly what you have just said Emma and Gavin, seeing how it makes the team who is are doing it feel so much more positive about their work and really energising a lot of people in the organisations.  I think that's equally important as well.  We all want to be happy where we are and make a difference.  I think that's why most of us, touch wood, got into journalism.  It is great to have something that gives us the opportunity.  Thank you so much it has been so brilliant speaking to you, and so much valuable advice and insight for a lot of the people listening. Don't forget everyone, who has tuned in, this is day 3 of the 50:50 festival, we do have another event this afternoon, and then our big report launch tomorrow morning.  So don't forget to sign up for that if you haven't already, we are looking forward to seeing you there if you are joining.  We are also going to be putting the recordings for all of these sessions on our websites so keep an eye out for those links.  Thank you so much all, it was great speaking to you Emma and Gavin, and so great to have everyone who joined give us their questions.  Really appreciate it.  Bye everyone.