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I've spent the last 5 years building online audiences across social platforms - I now have some 2 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat, my Newsletter, YouTube, and my podcast. So this week I started thinking about new platforms - platforms that some might consider "more traditional" and platforms that would allow me to reach new audiences in new ways.

And this is when I decided that I wanted to be a columnist. Newspaper columnists are one of the most influential groups of people in our society; they influence culture, break the news, tell us what to think about it, and control the direction of public discourse.

The persuasive astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said in an interview "The most powerful people in our society aren't the presidents and prime ministers, it's those people that get to influence and educate the electorate" - the people we elect are merely a reflection of what society has been made to think and feel, so at the most fundamental level, much of the power lies in the hands of our media.

So off I went; deep into the internet to do my research on the wider industry, on journalists, and on the audiences they speak to. I read through press association blogs, research and insights blogs, and also YouGov's official ranking of the UK's most famous and most popular columnists based on a variety of data-points. As I scrolled through what is an exceptionally talented and acclaimed list of writers and thought-leaders, I grew increasingly concerned.

The full list is 68 names long. Of which, 67 of the columnists are white/caucasian and only 1 of the columnists (the 67th person on the list) was non-white. After a further 60 seconds of research, it turns out that columnist; Eugene Robinson, is in fact not from the UK, was born in California, works for The Washington Post, and should have never been on that list in the first place. So 100% of the UK's most popular, most famous and therefore most influential columnists are white.

Let me just be unequivocally clear; I'm not some pro-black, anti-white radical activist that hates white people. Generally I find pro-black anti-white radical activists to be just as racist and deplorable as the people and issues they campaign against.

My father is white, my mother is black. I grew up in an area, and was educated in a school, where 99.9% of my peers, friends, and teachers were white. On one hand I've had a very "caucasian experience", but I've also felt the pain of racial abuse, the frustration of racial prejudice, and the impact of racial discrimination.

I'll never forget being called a N***** by that kid Sam on the playground in school. I'll never forget the feelings of wishing I wasn't black because of how different it made me feel, and I have no doubt that the prejudice that comes with being young black and successful will follow me for many many years.

I won't forget the train attendant who walked up to me in the first-class carriage with a perturbed expression and said to me "This is first-class mate!" without ever looking at my ticket, or the estate agent that said "which team do you play for?" when I went to view a large house in the countryside, or the number of people that intentionally cut in front of me (and only me) when I join the business class cue for a flight and their apologies of "sorry I thought you were in the wrong line".

Although I may not be able to appreciate what it is to be 100% non-white, I've experienced enough to know there's a difference; a different experience, a different perspective, and a different opinion. I also know that when media organisations fail to address the unconscious biases that exist within their roster of journalists across their newsrooms, the standards of reporting suffer; particularly in their ability to tell stories about minority groups.

CEO and co-founder of journalist collaborative network Tabea Grzeszyk, discussed some of the key themes in her book Unbias the News: Why diversity matters for journalism.

She highlighted an example from Germany, where a far-right neo-Nazi terrorist group committing murders of immigrants, bombings, and bank robberies across the country was not exposed for 13 years. Grzeszyk said lack of diversity could have meant newsroom staff were jumping to the wrong conclusions all this time.

“[It's quite likely] the first thought that comes to mind when migrants have been murdered is ‘Maybe there was some drugs involved’,” she said.

“When you tell a story as a journalist, you are selecting some aspects over others, and there is a certain bias when the newsrooms aren’t as diverse as the societies they serve.”

“Just like anyone else on the planet, journalists have blind spots. We have an implicit bias because there’s so much information out there and bias happens automatically.

“We tend to see what we know. When we’re used to black teenagers as criminals, then we tend to see more of these stories, and when a white person does something, we really only cover the individual.”

Typically, when people read articles like this one, the end them by just asserting that diversifying is “the right thing to do”, and although it is, this narrative has not resulted in satisfactory change across the industry.

In a time when news organisations are facing tremendous duopoly headwinds caused by the macro trend of internet disruption, and where they're being forced to make cutbacks due to the global outbreak of a contagious respiratory disease; diversity is too easily seen as a luxury, after all, it must be hard to think about diversity when you're transfixed on survival.

Instead, I believe the diversity movement needs persuasive arguments on how and why improving diversity will help with some of the deeper, more urgent priorities that will ultimately lead media organisations to the sustainability they're searching for.

So here are three arguments:

1) Diversity in journalism makes money:

Without accounting for the range of lived experiences, media organisations fail to serve parts of the community, which leads to a decline in their relevance and a decline in their revenues. Journalism, should be produced for the benefit of all, not only those who wield a particular power, class, ethnicity, or authority.

Britain is becoming much more ethnically diverse which means as a media organisation, more of your customers, than at any time in history, will resonate with more diverse perspectives.

2) Trust is in freefall:

Across the media industry, trust has been in rapid decline since the end of 2016. If you've ever heard me speak on stage, you'll know how important I consider trust to be. It's the glue of human connectivity and the thing that holds us all together - it holds a CEO like me to my team - our customers to our products and our friends and family to one another. Every year I eagerly await and download the global trust barometer that Edelman produce, and every year for the last few, it's been an absolute bloodbath for the media industry - especially since 2017 where a certain president went to war with the media.

In 2020, the vast majority of us don't trust the media we consume, and journalists are now amongst the most distrusted groups in our society, according to the global trust report. By bringing more diversity to newsrooms, we can start to bring trust back amongst under-served minority groups and younger readers, who don't currently feel that their perspectives are reflected in the news they consume.

3) Diversity creates better news - when newsrooms are dominated by white people, they miss crucial context and facts:

Jelani Cobb, a US-based black columnist for the Guardian talks about reading an article that provided commentary on a spate of robberies in the Bronx. Confronted by armed antagonists, the article sighed, "many people refused to surrender their belongings, even when they had only a few dollars on them". The white journalist that wrote the article criticised community members in the Bronx for tempting fate. The white criminologist that contributed to the piece offered a suggestion that it was “nuts for the victim to refuse” - a few dollars, readers were told, are not worth one’s life.

Jelani Cobb was from that neighborhood, as a black columnist he knew that people who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for even small amounts of money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about.

The few dollars in their pockets may represent their only way to get to work; surrendering cash is not only an immediate loss but also one that can risk a future paycheck, which could risk feeding your family. More crucially, he said, these people are frequent targets, which means they've grown certain calculated stubbornness which has allowed them to survive and prevents them from losing all of their possessions, all of the time. What seemed like an idiotic decision to many journalists was actually a reasonable calculated decision in the context of that communities lived-experience.

This wasn't just about a journalist missing a story. It speaks to the wider consequence of undiverse newsrooms and what happens when columnists look nothing like the demographics of the communities they're covering. As Jelani Cobb said, "The people who are most likely to appear in these kinds of stories, are the least likely to have a say in how those stories are told".

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It's time to change this - for the good of under-represented communities and for the good of the media industry as a whole. Today I will be contacting all of the major media organisations and asking them to give me a coloum / radio show or other, which I will use to shine a light on under-represented perspectives. I'll provide social commentary on issues relating to young people, minorities, and broader inequalities.

I am only one voice. But I know that if more voices like mine join the conversation because they believe they can, we can make the news a more trusted, more balanced, more representative, and fairer source of information. I would urge everyone, especially under-represented voices to think about how you can bring their perspective forward.

“One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.” ― Barak Obama

Thank you for reading, and please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

If you have any questions, you can reach me directly here: Steve@socialchain.com