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Description
The aim of this project is to understand what diversity as innovation in journalism is or is not going to be. This is critical for ensuring journalism remains a cornerstone of healthy democracies and open societies. Project explores the social activity of journalism, as it is managed and practiced in the era of digital and networked journalism, with the objective of increasing newsrooms'' diversity, across national and regional, print and broadcast legacy newsrooms in Sweden, the UK and Poland. While many differences (and some similarities) can be noted about these countries'' models of media and politics, they represent very different cases when it comes to the tradition of diversity management. On the one hand, the UK, due to its colonial legacy, is considered a heterogeneous society, and has a long diversity management tradition. Sweden is in transition, due to immigration and intake of refugees, from homogeneous to a more heterogeneous society, and while it has relatively little experience with diversity management it still represents, at large, an open and liberal society. On the other hand, Poland is largely a homogeneous society, making international headlines in recent years for refusing to respect the EU refugee quotas, sending thousands of women to the streets in defense of their reproductive rights and, recently, for declaring an "LGBT-free zone" in one-third of the country’s municipalities. Practical knowledge on the implementation of diversity management as innovation in journalism, its pitfalls, emerging risks as well as opportunities for new interventions and learning will be shared with relevant industry research partners. Project output will also contribute to journalism studies, and media and communication scholarship, bringing in empirical substance to the current debates at the nexus of changing newsrooms cultures, journalism, innovation and digital media, but also to questions of safety of journalists and freedom of expression.