By David Plotz

Updated January 23, 2024

Diversity is one of six core City Cast values, which is why we work hard to hire people from different backgrounds and with a wide variety of religious, racial, ethnic, and gender identities.

But staffing is just one element of diversity at City Cast. What good is a diverse staff if our guests are homogeneous? The cities where we’ve launched podcasts and newsletters are wildly diverse– so it makes sense that the guests we feature in those cities should be diverse too. But how to ensure we’re meeting that aspiration?

When we launched City Cast in 2021, we committed to tracking demographic information about our podcast guests. In the beginning, that meant tracking demographic data across a podcast and newsletter in two cities– today, it involves doing so across 11 (soon to be 13!)

We also committed to publishing that data. Publicizing guest demographics is a way for you – our listeners and readers – to hold us accountable for representing the diversity of the cities we cover. Reporting this data helps nudge us to ensure we have guests who are varied in race and ethnicity, gender, economic background, and geography – and it calls attention to ways we fall short of representing our cities.

While it’s uncommon to collect and share data about the diversity of guests, City Cast is not the first media organization to do it. NPR and Wisconsin Public Radio, for example, have been especially thorough about tracking their radio guests. We don’t know of any other podcast network besides City Cast that’s consistently tracking and sharing the diversity of its guests.

So are we living up to our values? How diverse is our podcast guest pool, really?

This is the second year we’ve surveyed City Cast guests. We published limited data from our first four cities in 2022: Denver, Chicago, Houston, and Salt Lake. Now we have 11 cities with podcasts, and a full year of guest data for all of them. We asked each of our podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. About 95% of guests responded in 2023. The following data encompass 1,390 responding guests who collectively made 2,132 appearances on the 11 different City Cast podcasts from Nov. 1, 2022 through Nov. 9, 2023. We did not count City Cast staffers who appeared on the podcasts.

We broke the data down by city, which gives a revealing picture of how we are doing in each particular city. But let’s start with the overall numbers across our 11 City Cast cities.

Here’s the racial/ethnic breakdown of all City Cast’s 2023 guests

These data are more interesting when you map them against the U.S. population as a whole.

As you can see, City Cast’s 2023 guests broadly reflected the U.S. population as a whole, with one notable exception: Only 9% of City Cast guests identified as Hispanic/Latinx, compared to 19% of Americans as a whole.

We did increase the percentage of Hispanic/Latinx City Cast guests between 2022 and 2023, but not as much as we hoped to. There are understandable reasons for this shortfall: Many Hispanics and Latinx people are immigrants, and immigrant communities are traditionally hard for journalists outside those communities to access. Some may not consume much English-language media. As a result, Hispanic/Latinx residents of our cities may be less likely to know City Cast and be part of the community we’re building, and we may not know the right people to contact to book as guests.

But wait a minute, you say, the racial/ethnic composition of cities is very different from that of the U.S. as a whole! Good point, and that’s why we also performed this same analysis for each city’s data, examining how its guests compare to the populations of the city and metro area. I think we’re doing pretty well at a city level, too – with a few areas to improve – but you should look at the data and judge for yourself. (See the city links below.)

We also surveyed our guests about their gender identity, and here’s what we found.

A narrow majority of our guests identified as male, and 47% identified as female, with about 2% identifying as nonbinary. The percentage of male guests in individual cities ranged as high as 65% in Houston and as low as 41% in Salt Lake City. The percentage of female guests ranged as high as 58% in Salt Lake City and as low as 34% in Houston. Most cities had 1-2% of guests identifying as nonbinary, except for Portland, where 5% of guests identified as nonbinary.

Please take a look at how we’re doing in your city, or in a city you care about. And if you have a great idea for a guest who can bring a wonderful new perspective to a City Cast podcast, please drop me an email at david.plotz@citycast.fm, and I’ll put your suggestion in the hands of the right City Cast producer.