How Diversity Benefits Everyone

Jake Wernick
jw912314@ohio.edu

As someone who has taken specific time to make a group more diverse, the article "Why Newsroom Diversity Works" by Alicia W. Stewart stood out to me. In the fall semester of 2017, I decided to start my own student-run magazine, The Mess. As pop-culture is a particular passion of mine, I noticed that there were not any other student organizations that I could join to pursue this passion. Therefore, I decided to take it upon myself to create this opportunity for both myself and others like me. I started by recruiting some of my closest friends, and from there, they did the same. As we began producing content, we realized one thing; we wanted to be the voice of everyone, but looking at our staff members, we did not have representation of everyone. We had some diversity as far as ethnicity goes, but we were a group of primarily men, despite having made efforts to recruit females in the past. Therefore, we were not only missing out on the opportunity of having different ideas being brought to the table, but also missing out on many content ideas, particularly with women's style. Therefore, we were missing out on catering to a very large demographic that could be avid followers of ours. Once we realized how big of an issue this was, we started to think of new ways that we could recruit, specifically, ways that would appeal to women students at Ohio University. Through blast emails, organization fairs, stickers, flyers, and word-of-mouth, we were able to add more women members to our staff in time for fall 2018, as we transitioned from a magazine to a media outlet.

Photo via: The Mess

Diversity is important in any group for many reasons. For one, appearing as though you are intentionally leaving a specific group of people out is not the best reputation to have if you want to be successful. Additionally, adding diversity adds the opportunity for different voices to be heard. Different groups of people have different life experiences, different tones, different opinions, and sometimes different interests. Having these things not only expands the breadth of things your group is able to do, but also makes you more marketable to a wider demographic. That being said, adding diversity to a group can only lead to more success.

Diversity was also important to us as many companies in similar situations to ours have had issues in the past due to lack of diversity. For example, Barstool Sports, a relatively new and popular blog, has caught some bad press for ways in which they have attempted to appeal to young men, while offending other groups of people. Though groups sometimes are still able to achieve success by being non-inclusive and/or offending certain groups of people, this is absolutely not the way we wanted to do it with The Mess, for moral reasons above all else.

Though The Mess has become much more diverse since its inception, we are still regularly working to come up with new ways to become diverse in all ways possible. As with investing and most other things in life, diversification is a major key in being successful.