Redressing the balance

The creative media sector and priviledge.

The creative media sector has seemingly always been one that favors privilege. Think back to the early days of the BBC, with its standard English accents and total lack of diversity. Thankfully things have improved somewhat since then but there’s still a long way to go in removing the barriers to entry in the industry.

Before I start this article let me begin with the declaration that indeed I am a privileged white male. And I have found the media sector hard to break into. So imagine how hard it is for someone from a different background. This means I have a massive role to play in redressing the balance and taking action to help make a change. I am fortunate to have been born to supportive middle-class parents and given the values of hard work, respect, and accountability. These values are intrinsic to the way I approach life and they ought then to transfer to the way that I approach business.

In my opinion, making beautiful content that our clients and their audiences will love is not just about the end product. It is about how, where, and by who it is made. But there is a big challenge and dichotomy with actively recruiting from underrepresented and marginalised groups which is the issue of virtue signaling. To my mind, it’s no good to just recruit on this basis and hire someone because they tick a box. It is difficult to find the crew from marginalised communities for one simple reason, lack of access. We need to make it easier for people from all walks of life to have the opportunity to showcase their talent and create a supportive nurturing environment for them to thrive.

What actions will we take?

Spellbinder as a brand is all about connecting with people on a human level. This is how we want to do business. We will create a supportive and nurturing environment for everyone we work with.

1. Continue to grow our pool of talented crew members who we love working with from diverse backgrounds
2. Create paid training scheme for diverse applicants to find and nurture new talent
3. Mentorship from the BME community to help advise on what actions to take as a business leader
4. Mentorship from the LGBTQIA community
5. Ensure freelance rates are fair, and in line with industry standards, never accept no-pay positions

The last point above is really important. We always make sure we pay our long-term freelance crew fairly and on time. This is how we create lasting relationships. I don’t like the term ‘runner’. It seems meaningless to me to give someone from a marginalised community an opportunity but then pay them the lowest possible rate. We prefer the term production assistant. And it’s not just semantics, this role will help any newcomer have a sense of pride and responsibility which in turn will help improve equality of opportunity.

The networking problem

Breaking into the media industry is all about networking and building up that list of contacts. It’s both a blessing and a curse. This is because we are creatures of habit and tend to work with the same small group of people for many years. You build up trust, mutual respect, and genuine love for one another over time. Often when there are big sums of money on a production, as a producer you need to know your team can deliver the goods! But this should not come at the expense of diversity and inclusion. Historically, this plays a big part in the creation of nepotism and lack of diversity.

The solution

It seems to me that the solution is to flip this on its head! Let’s have a more open and inclusive approach to networking. Once your network is broadened to include members from marginalised and underrepresented groups by extension it becomes easier to make sure that your production team more closely represents the diversity in society.

In short, at Spellbinder we want to do more to increase the diversity of people in our teams and this is not an exercise in ticking boxes. As human beings, we connect with people in real and meaningful ways and this is about having teams that reflect the beautiful diversity of life. This in turn makes us and the content we produce by extension, more relatable.