The New York Times wants to end the dominance of dead white guys on its obituary pages, using newly developed software to spotlight more and more biographies of women and people of color.
It was designed last year by in-house software engineers along with the paper’s audience-engagement team “to achieve a yearly 30% representation of women by March 2019,” according to the internal tech site. The authors recommend: “Now how about Part II—a tool that measures people of color in our obits, so we can see how we’re doing and make goals for improvements.”
Story continues“We’re not using quotas, and we’re not letting demographics dictate our news judgments,” McDonald told The Daily Beast—never mind the impression that some folks have picked up from descriptions of the new tool. “I think it’s kind of a rough wish,” McDonald added. “It’s not an iron-clad, ‘if you don’t meet this goal, you’re fired’ thing.”
McDonald acknowledged that gallows humor is not unknown to a group of wizened journalists who are daily confronted by the fact of the grim reaper. However, in the distant and not-so-distant past, much like many other American institutions, the paper’s obituaries overwhelmingly favored dead white guys to exclusion of other deserving subjects who happened to be female and/or members of minority groups.
“We’re trying to make up for lost time,” said a Times insider. “The people who have been left out include not only women and minority groups but all sorts of people who should have gotten obituaries but didn’t… It’s fair to say we are looking more carefully at how to be more inclusive, but if there’s a quota, nobody has told me about it.”
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)
NEW YORK TIMES SUCKS!!!
Stupidest thing I've heard of. 🤣
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