Fritzie Andrade
Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Business Insider
Bringing conversations on DEI into the executive ranks
Fritzie Andrade became the first managing editor of diversity, equity and inclusion at digital outlet Business Insider in October 2020. She pioneered a role that was new not just at the company, but within the industry itself — and just months after the George Floyd protests brought a reckoning on race across the country.
That role saw her involved in newsroom projects like internships for students from historically Black colleges and universities, finding new options for sensitivity reads so employees wouldn’t be asked to do extra unpaid work, and much more. She is now head of diversity, equity, and inclusion for all of Business Insider and its sister company EMARKETER.
She worked as a multimedia producer at NBC before trailblazing new types of media at the New York Times, Vice, and New York Magazine. Leaning on her “why not” philosophy, Andrade has taken on whatever brand-new roles are created as the industry continues to evolve.
By Tiffany Chang
One thing that happens for a lot of journalists, especially journalists of color and underrepresented communities, is that you see things reported a certain way and think, “That could have been better.”
You get frustrated. You speak up about it and no one hears you. You start looking out for your colleagues by advocating and forming committees and task forces in the newsroom.
Next thing you know, you become a little tokenized in some environments. You end up being the person that gets sent to diversity dinners when really the person in charge should be going. You’re the face of the company for it, and it starts to take up more and more time (and often, you’re not paid for it).
But for many, many employees of color, it’s sort of like, “If I don’t do this, who will?”
Getting Company Leaders Interested in DEI
Newsrooms, as we know, have historically taken a long time to evolve. So when Business Insider created this job, I didn’t know it existed or could exist. But as I would always say, “Can you imagine if we got paid to think about this all day long and didn’t have to do our full-time jobs plus this job that we all do for free in our own time?”
I was blunt in my interviews at Business Insider and asked, “Is this an optics job? Are you creating it so you can say you did the right thing but not really put any investment into it?” The company’s Global Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson was very honest with me in saying that maybe it was to some degree, but that it didn’t mean I couldn’t change things as well.
No one, including me, really knew what this job would entail. What does it mean to be a managing editor of DEI, a job that hasn’t existed ever?
I’m there to help guide and point out things that maybe weren’t thought about, whether it’s asking why Person X was promoted over Person Y when they have similar credentials, diversifying sources, bringing another point of view to a brainstorming meeting, discussing back-reads or sensitivity reads, and so much more.
Another thing I found was that there is a great need for a confidante or support system outside of HR. People have small day-to-day concerns they don’t know how to address, things like having their name mispronounced all the time or being inherently called by a nickname because their actual name is “too hard” to say.
I quickly became the person to go to when those things happened, either to help someone address it themselves or to take that concern and say to the entire newsroom, “Hey, maybe you didn’t realize you were doing this thing, but it’s pretty common.”
Having someone who has enough authority and enough access to the people in charge who can do something about it has really shifted the comfort of people who are underrepresented in the workplace.
It’s not a perfect system; it’s still very much evolving. I am but one person and we are a very large newsroom.
Fixing the Present to Change the Future
Still, there are some days where I’m just like, “What am I doing?” I’m trying to dismantle this thing that’s so much bigger than me. I’ll have a rash of bad weeks with some challenging conversations and I’ll get frustrated because I’m thinking, “Why am I even having these conversations? Like, shouldn’t people know better?”
Time will have to pass to assess whether this is working. There aren’t metrics to say how things have improved. Some days it feels like it’s making a dent, sometimes I’m not entirely sure.
Having someone who has enough authority and enough access to the people in charge who can do something about it has really shifted the comfort of people who are underrepresented in the workplace.
It’s also just constantly having to remind people that it’s not just my job — everyone is accountable to each other and to the people that work with them, not just when something terrible is happening in the world and everyone is suddenly interested again. We should be doing all of this work to make it so this job doesn’t exist. I don’t want this to be a thing we have to keep fixing.
It has not been an overnight solution. I constantly have to remind myself that the culture of journalism has worked a certain way for a very, very long time, and it has been built to help specific types of people along the way. So it’s slow.
But I think it’s working, and I think we can grow more jobs like mine to help the process move a little faster.