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On diversity, college newsrooms don’t get a pass

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On diversity, college newsrooms don’t get a pass

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"Low pay (for college newsrooms that pay at all) and long hours are just two of the many things that shut out marginalized reporters from joining their college paper. Many students of color also feel isolated in their own newsrooms, shut out by their white peers from decision-making and ascension into editing positions. As the predominantly wealthy, male and white culture remains dominant, marginalized voices are further stifled: When new editors-in-chief hone their ability to handle staff problems, the value of dealing with issues of racism and sexism in the workplace is often not a huge part of the process. So frustrated students leave instead, potentially walking out of journalism forever." contributed by Wesleyan Argus Arts Editor Sara McCrea 7.4.20

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I am the first Black woman to lead The Daily Northwestern in 140 years. Before I started at the paper, we didn't have conversations about the media's role on campus and in the country - instead, for example, we would have smaller, case-by-case discussions about using the word "racist." Seeing this need, I pushed my way through building a diversity and inclusion editor position at my newspaper from scratch.

Simultaneously, it is not lost on me that the majority of my team members who put in the time leading diversity dialogues with me are female, queer, and/or people of color. Many newsrooms hire from college papers around the country, but rarely do I see them emphasize hiring journalists who want to change the industry. Knowledge of data journalism or FOIA-filing can take precedence over a desire to reshape newsroom values in an interview setting. Sometimes, I wonder if it's worth putting all my energy into this work when editors at prominent legacy newspapers have said again and again that college journalists like me should stay in their lane and take the lead from professionals.

But professional journalism is having a reckoning of its own. Over the past few weeks, my Twitter timeline has featured journalists from a variety of marginalized identities unloading years' worth of frustration that they've felt within their workplaces. To know this isn't even the full picture because of non-disclosure agreements and other barriers makes me that much more nervous. I'm proud of those who have been able to speak up and those who have persevered in forced silence.

That same judgement needs to come around in college newsrooms as well.

Both areas are often majorly white. College publications are starting to release their diversity numbers, which helps add transparency to the homogenous world of college journalism at predominantly white institutions - for example, The Daily Bruin at the University of California Los Angeles put together a fantastic report highlighting their largely white, Asian, and cisgender female staff. While it is impossible to know just how homogenous college dailies across the country are, based on recent events, we can hazard a pretty good guess.

Low pay (for college newsrooms that pay at all) and long hours are just two of the many things that shut out marginalized reporters from joining their college paper. Many students of color also feel isolated in their own newsrooms, shut out by their white peers from decision-making and ascension into editing positions. As the predominantly wealthy, male and white culture remains dominant, marginalized voices are further stifled: When new editors-in-chief hone their ability to handle staff problems, the value of dealing with issues of racism and sexism in the workplace is often not a huge part of the process. So frustrated students leave instead, potentially walking out of journalism forever.

The trickier line of "objective, unbiased reporting" that gets played out in professional newsrooms - where white men are considered the gold standard of neutral reporting - is made even more blurry in a college space. We're all fellow students who are in the same classes, have similar friends and drink the same bad dining hall coffee. In other words, we have to face the people we can potentially harm on campus the next day, in a way that only small community-focused newsrooms do.

It's hard to watch your well-meaning friends make mistakes in their reporting: I know the reporting process inside and out, and I can see the gears turn in their heads as they choose this word or that one. But occasionally, when a finished product houses as many stereotypes or errors in judgement as it does good writing, I can't help but wonder: "Is this how they see me, too? Am I exempt from their way of thinking?"

Regardless of intent, race or gender-based mistakes in college reporting circulate beyond the larger campus community. They send a message to fellow student reporters as well.

When it comes to the classrooms in top journalism or communications schools, diversity and inclusion are often afterthoughts. Most introductory curricula at such programs focus on "the basics" for their general education courses: multimedia, basic writing, ethics and investigative work, if you're lucky. In my experience, receiving even adequate teaching about inclusive practices depends on your professor and their background in dealing with issues of diversity. There are classes that deal with marginalized groups and the media's role in covering them, but barely any are part of the core curriculum needed to graduate.

The onus then falls on the students running college outlets to teach themselves. College daily papers have the reputation of being one stone on the complicated path to working at a legacy publication. As a young reporter, you gather your clips, maybe win an award or two along the way, then move on to a series of grueling but rewarding internships, perhaps dabbling in different areas of news production before finding your first major job.

However, when you don't have professors instilling the values of diversity every semester, and your entire newsroom looks and acts the same, your reporting remains stagnant, leading to more potential to harm communities down the road as your audience grows wider. Without the opportunity to critique yourself in a safer college setting, a defensive attitude can further stigmatize marginalized readers and colleagues. Thus, as reporters progress to bigger outlets, self-reflection and criticism grow less important, and the cycle continues - even though there is nothing more stereotypically "college" than challenging the status quo.

When The Daily Northwestern responded to community backlash about our protest coverage, journalists across the country swarmed to argue that we represented the end of objective, good reporting by "bending" to the requests of fellow students who felt unsafe and unheard. Yet this pushback failed to mention how law enforcement, which frequently uses images and reporting about protests, targets activists who can then face fines or arrest. Now that America has erupted in its own set of revolutions, newspapers have been quick to walk back their policies on blurring faces or granting anonymity - but not their editorials or tweets against our attempts at responding to our communities last November.

For many college reporters that report poorly on marginalized communities, the failure to do any self-reflection comes with the paradox that is college newspaper culture: It's real until it's just a "low-risk learning environment." It's important until you realize only 20 people clicked on your story today. It's valuable until you receive a measly paycheck for the countless hours you spent balancing five classes and being an editor.

The lessons we learn - and more importantly, don't get to learn - while reporting for our small outlets end up shaping our futures, particularly for white, cis, straight, wealthy students who dominate newsrooms in college and beyond. My fellow marginalized reporters have already dealt with systemic discrimination in life and in the field, so while we all certainly have room to grow, that seed for inclusion is usually already planted. In comparison, when talking to my white peers about inclusive reporting, most of the things we discuss are new territory for them.

Through my work at The Daily Northwestern, I have seen the power of making the conversations about diversity that used to happen in back rooms and over frantic midnight text rants leave the shadows. Now my newsroom openly talks about issues like inclusion in page design or the struggles female journalists of color face frequently, whether it's during weekly editorial board meetings or just chatting in front of our beloved vending machines.

This approach can be tailored to any newsroom's needs. To start, more outlets need to be honest about their lack of diversity on staff, and why that's a problem. By holding specific recruitment sessions tailored to identities missing from the roster, newsroom leaders can open themselves up to criticism and questions in a productive dialogue.

While it's a bit harder to control the demographics of staff from quarter to quarter, whoever currently writes for the paper has the agency to make a change in their own writing and the way they treat others. Starting difficult conversations about the role of student media on campus or about how newsrooms have enacted harm in the past is necessary to move forward. It doesn't help anyone, especially new staffers, to pretend incidents haven't occurred in the past.

After our honest and thoughtful conversations, the quality of our reporting has increased, even as we continue efforts to diversify our newsroom. We are far from perfect: our quarterly source analysis shows a steady but slow rise in representation across the board, though some sections have tackled those divides more head-on than others. There's always room for growth.

It's not revolutionary to have a diversity and inclusion editor. The position shouldn't exist in the first place. Every single person on staff should be trained in inclusive practices that center marginalized voices as well as conflict resolution within the newsroom. And as our Editor-in-Chief, I'm working toward that - but one person can only do so much.

I do have faith that more college newsrooms will start taking their internal and external complaints seriously. Yet the past month has shown that it's not enough to just change the style of the word "Black," for example, without fixing a culture of insensitivity within most big newsrooms. The easy, one-size-fits-all solution many white journalists and editors have been searching for lately doesn't exist - many years of diversity work at The Daily and other college outlets have shown that.

But you have to start somewhere.
The Objective is an all-volunteer network of writers that publishes reporting, first-person commentary, and reported essays on communities journalism in the U.S. has typically ignored. You can sign up for our newsletter here and read how to pitch us here.

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On diversity, college newsrooms don't get a pass

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I am the first Black woman to lead The Daily Northwestern in 140 years. Before I started at the paper, we didn't have conversations about the media's role on campus and in the country - instead, for example, we would have smaller, case-by-case discussions about using the word "racist."

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Why journalists need to think twice about reporting on arrests

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Why journalists need to think twice about reporting on arrests

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"More fundamentally, crime reporting need not be rooted in the traditional methods of regurgitating the few known facts of an incident. Publishing underreported crime stories often has little benefit for the public, and catastrophic consequences for a suspect. Being arrested and charged is not the same as being guilty."

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Last month, Out of Omaha, a documentary that follows twin brothers Darcell and Darrell Trotter through eight years of their lives, made its broadcast debut. The film shows how the two mature into young adults as they face economic hardships, emotional turmoil, and the criminal justice system. In 2012, the filmmakers show, the brothers were charged with first-degree sexual assault. Then the charges were dropped, as their accuser recanted her story and pleaded guilty to falsifying her report. But a brief article published in September 2012 by the Lincoln Journal Star on the initial charges remained online. The film shows Darcell Trotter phoning multiple publications, including the Lincoln Star, asking them to remove mentions of his involvement in a crime now that the charges had been dropped. Some editors removed the information, but others did not. The Lincoln Star article is still online today, and on the first page of Darcell Trotter's Google results-a scarlet letter for any potential dates or employers to find.
ICYMI: Investigating the harsh realities of 'Cops'
In the United States, an individual's name and photo can legally be published in connection with criminal charges prior to the establishment of guilt. On any given day a search with the keywords "arrested" or "charged with" yields the names and mugshots of hundreds of people from across the country who have not yet had their day in court. Often, they're labeled criminals, as was pointed out in .

Americans believe violent crime is rising, despite its decline over the years. Crime is now at its lowest rate in four decades. Yet it remains the number one topic on local news.

Some journalists may feel that regardless of whether a person is guilty or not, criminal allegations should be published in order to inform communities of potential risks. But not all crimes put the public at risk, and not all reports of crimes are accurate or valid. In a viral TED Talk, Chimimanda Adichie, the award-winning author, called it, "the danger of a single story." In the case of criminal allegations, the narrative given to reporters most often comes solely from police officers (often unattributed) or prosecutors. Defense attorneys often decline to comment, and advise their clients to do the same, to prevent difficulties later in court. So there is usually no counter-argument, unless the case is high-profile enough to merit substantive follow-up. Most are not.

Sophie Haigney, who covered breaking news at a Bay Area outlet for just under a year before she stepped away, came to feel that the way we cover crime is intrinsically broken. The best she could hope for on deadline, she realized, was a name, age, charge, and a quote from law enforcement. "That is the job as we see it now," she says, "but it doesn't have to be that way."

Polling shows that Americans believe violent crime is rising, despite its decline over the years . Crime is now at its lowest rate in four decades. Yet it remains the number one topic on local news. "I think there are a lot of really messed up incentives for newspapers and TV stations to cover crimes they probably shouldn't be covering," Haigney says, "or should be covering in a way that focuses a lot more on systems and trends." She wishes that reporters didn't feel bound to publish any and all information they have, regardless of how the job has functioned in years past. "Why can't we start thinking about the job a little differently?"

For young men like the Trotter brothers, it's more than a theoretical debate. On many job applications, disclosure of one's criminal records are mandatory, although this only applies to cases of conviction. Ban the box policies, which aim to eliminate the question of conviction history from job applications, have been adopted in some form by thirty-five states , so that employers judge candidates on their qualifications first, and not their legal past. The European Union has "the right to be forgotten," a law that gives citizens the ability to demand that a search engine or website remove or unlink information they view as obsolete or a privacy intrusion. (Last month, France proposed to the European Court that the right to be forgotten be applied to internet users around the world, but the court rejected the expansion.)

That leaves the matter in the hands of journalists. What can we do? A starting point may be for daily news outlets to start publishing less about crime. Or to report charges without the use of names and photos, specifically in cases where the alleged aren't a potential threat to the community. Crime stories might also come with automatic unpublishing dates.

More fundamentally, crime reporting need not be rooted in the traditional methods of regurgitating the few known facts of an incident. Publishing underreported crime stories often has little benefit for the public, and catastrophic consequences for a suspect. Being arrested and charged is not the same as being guilty. "We had done nothing wrong," Darcell Trotter says. "It doesn't make any sense."
THE MEDIA TODAY: Facebook, free speech, and political ads This post has been updated to correct the amount of time Sophie Haigney spent as a breaking-news reporter.
Akintunde Ahmad is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @akintundeahmad.

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Why journalists need to think twice about reporting on arrests

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Last month, Out of Omaha, a documentary that follows twin brothers Darcell and Darrell Trotter through eight years of their lives, made its broadcast debut. The film shows how the two mature into young adults as they face economic hardships, emotional turmoil, and the criminal justice system.

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"NAJA serves and empowers Native journalists through programs and actions designed to enrich journalism and promote Native cultures."

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NAJA empowers a unique network of more than 900 members across Indian Country

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A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists

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A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists

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“The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.” (Twitter: @WesleyLowery) contributed by Wesleyan Argus Features Editor Hannah Docter-Loeb 6.24.20

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Opinion | A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists (Published 2020)

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What's different, in this moment, is that the editors of our country's most esteemed outlets no longer hold a monopoly on publishing power.

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A Moment of Reckoning: How Journalism Can Begin to Dismantle Its Systems of Racism

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A Moment of Reckoning: How Journalism Can Begin to Dismantle Its Systems of Racism

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6/15/20: This program takes a hard look at journalism and how it has been complicit in upholding systemic racism. Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, will talk with S. Mitra Kalita, the senior vice president of news, opinion and programming at CNN Digital, and Sara Lomax-Reese, president and CEO of WURD Radio, one of the few black-owned talk radio stations in the country.

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A Moment of Reckoning: How Journalism Can Begin to Dismantle Its Systems of Racism (Monday, June 15, 2020)

The inaugural episode of Informed & Engaged, a new weekly Knight show on the ideas and solutions impacting the media landscape, kicked off with a conversation that meets the moment but remains long overdue.

This program takes a hard look at journalism and how it has been complicit in upholding systemic racism. Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, will talk with S. Mitra Kalita, the senior vice president of news, opinion and programming at CNN Digital, and Sara Lomax-Reese, president and CEO of WURD Radio, one of the few black-owned talk radio stations in the country.

Informed & Engaged Homepage

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Informed & Engaged Episode 1: A Moment of Reckoning

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A Moment of Reckoning: How Journalism Can Begin to Dismantle Its Systems of Racism (Monday, June 15, 2020) The inaugural episode of Informed & Engaged, a new weekly Knight show on the ideas and solutions impacting the media landscape, kicked off with a conversation that meets the moment but remains long overdue.

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Many white journalists and managers are finally seeing how their coverage and representation have always been inadequate. Many JOC are thinking “It’s about time.” Listen to some current conversations the news industry is having about its diversity and racism problems.

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Sourcing Diversity: WHYY and the rocky road to “cultural competency”

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Sourcing Diversity: WHYY and the rocky road to “cultural competency”

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A case study on one newsroom’s path to improving its newsroom

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As much of the local news industry struggles for survival, public media-and public radio in particular-have occupied an enviable place of comparative stability. Stations do struggle for resources, but compared to their comrades in newspaper, the outlook has been less grim on the whole. Many have pointed to public radio's membership strategy as a model to consider, and as a way to build loyalty and trust with audiences.There is indeed a great deal to be learned from public radio, but it must be done alongside a significant home truth: Public radio continues to struggle with deeply entrenched issues of race and class. At the national level, it has been estimated that 87% of National Public Radio (NPR) listeners are white. NPR's audience are 129% more likely to be "top management," and 380% more likely to have a doctorate degree than the average U.S. population, according to its own public statistics. As of July 2018 In Philadelphia, a city where only 34% of the population is non-Hispanic white, the public media outlet WHYY had a newsroom staff that was 80% white, and none of the regular local on-air radio hosts were people of color. When WHYY conducted an online survey, only 5% of Black respondents expressed any awareness of the radio station (more were familiar with WHYY's public television station), and almost 80% of their listeners were white.

At the same time, some of the most innovative efforts to systematically challenge habits of journalism that reinforce whiteness are taking place within public radio. At the national level, NPR has taken a number of steps to offer more nuanced coverage of communities of color (though not without some controversy). Our study, however, focuses at the local level, following the efforts of WHYY public radio's newsroom. Over the past year and a half, I have used a combination of ethnographic observation and interviews to follow WHYY's effort to increase what they call "cultural competency"--a term they define as "understanding the nuances of the communities we cover, building relationships that further our knowledge and ability to accurately cover these communities, and recognizing and doing something about our own skewed lenses and how they impact the narratives we present."

The WHYY team sees this concept as informing their practices of news production (especially sourcing), their engagement with the region's many diverse communities, and their recruitment, hiring, and retention of staff from a range of backgrounds. The cultural competency initiative began with a series of foundation-supported deliverables including trainings and outreach events, but following the conclusion of the initial grant, it has transitioned into an on-going effort by the vice president for news and civic dialogue and key team members. They have sought to transform the initiative from a project to a process of institutional change.

In what follows, I explore how change is negotiated in the newsroom and in community outreach activities-where it is incorporated into systems, and points of resistance and friction. Through this, I note where these efforts do and do not challenge journalistic and institutional norms that buttress whiteness.

Some of the key lessons learned from observing WHYY's efforts include:

Processes that involve reporters and editors in auditing and tracking the diversity of their sources offer a potential pathway to encouraging reflexivity among participating journalists and increasing the range of voices included in stories.

Monitoring the quantity alone of sources of color will not address problematic narratives-or at whom those narratives are directed. In this case, journalists of color said they felt that narratives were often being crafted about communities of color but not for them.

To build trust across boundaries of race and class, public radio will need to go beyond covering communities of color with an elite white audience in mind. This requires narrowing the distance not only between these communities and reporters, but also the editors assigning and guiding stories. Such a change will require an adjustment of how public radio stations conceive of their membership.

Engagement and community outreach would help public radio accomplish these goals. But outreach initiatives will not have a sustainable impact so long as the people responsible for this work are siloed from core newsroom operations and hold limited power.

Foundations supporting journalism should look for ways to support mid-career and senior journalists of color, particularly editors, in legacy newsrooms. These roles play critical roles in shaping editorial direction and mentorship. Because there are fewer journalists of color in these roles, those journalists shoulder a heavy load in supporting new journalists of color.

There are limits to what can be achieved so long as organizational structures and the demographics of the workplace remain relatively unchanged. Given that cultures of whiteness have been entrenched since the inception of most newsrooms, changing the culture of institutions requires a long-term investment in implementing cultural competency at all levels of news organizations-not only in the newsroom itself.

A seminar on sourcing practices

"To make diversity count, keep a count," said the consultant leading a cultural competency training for staff at WHYY. The consultant shared examples tracking whose voices get heard on air. As part of the cultural competency project, WHYY had also conducted one of these "source audits." Adapting the framework used by NPR, they noted the backgrounds of interviewees heard during local programs over the course of three randomly constructed weeks over a three-month period. In addition to noting race, gender, and geographic location, they tracked the role the source played in the story with options including: doer/subject, explainer/analyst/expert, reactor/opinion/comment, affected, reporter, and host. They also recorded the themes of the stories and organizational and political affiliation of the person, if known.

The team organizing the cultural competency project strategized how to best share the results with WHYY reporters and editors. Overall, the results were not particularly flattering: 80% of the sources logged were non-Hispanic white. White voices were especially over-represented in categories like expert, where 78% were white. Concerned that staff would react defensively, the results were contextualized as part of a larger training with a consultant who shared how NPR and other stations had been grappling with findings that similarly overrepresented white sources.

Staff members sat in rows of chairs facing a powerpoint display, sipping coffee as they waited for the mandatory training to begin. Once underway, the trainer explained how various programs at NPR had responded to their results where white voices were similarly overrepresented. Many of the NPR teams had undertaken "experiments" aimed at adjusting their habits to include more sources of color and women. The trainer shared the example of one of these experiments, which sought to guide journalists to build lists of sources by calling people they already talked to and asking, "who do you know and respect on this topic who is also a woman or a person of color?" The trainer explained the importance of investing time into building these contacts when not under deadline pressure to call a familiar source. Some WHYY staffers expressed concern that explicitly asking people to refer them to sources of color required them to talk about race in ways that made them uncomfortable. Several were concerned that they would make people feel tokenized. The trainer gave suggestions for how to explain that they were contacting people because of the prospective source's qualifications but also so the journalists could include a fuller representation in their programming. The group also discussed how a number of NPR shows and stations went beyond these initial experiments to keep an ongoing tally to monitor their sources.

Several WHYY staffers perceived problems in trying to include a more diverse pool of voices on air. One person said for their topical beat, "every professor in the region is a white guy." Another added, "even when we find someone [who is not white and male] we tend to rely too much on them." The trainer led a discussion about how some fields posed unusual challenges-how politics tended to be even more white and male than a field such as religion or medicine. The group then discussed how they could benefit from considering expertise that didn't come from academia or think tanks, places that tended to be disproportionately white and male. As the trainer explained, sourcing choices that at first glance seemed objective were not. "You may think you haven't made a racial or gender decision by talking to a professor," he said, "but you have."

The trainer encouraged the group to consider showing the diversity of the community rather than attempting to be directly proportional. One staff member, who was white, asked how they could represent communities of color if they were looking at a phenomenon, such as the concerns of cyclists, where the majority of people involved were white.The trainer, who was Black, responded, "My experience of Philadelphia is not the data. It's my world. My world is Blacker than yours might be." For example, he said, "If you want to see a Native American in the news you better not look at them by demographics. You're going to have to overrepresent them in the coverage."

The training also included discussions of sample stories that addressed racist attitudes and behaviors toward people of color using different approaches. The trainer attempted to highlight the importance of asking questions, like "what do you mean," when sources make problematic statements about people of color, or identifying that a source was white when relevant. However, several staff members, all white, took the conversation in a different direction by focusing on their concern that the reporter in one of the examples would be perceived to be biased because she drew attention to the problematic and inaccurate statements of white conservatives in the story.

One person said, "this is why people don't trust us." Another complained that stories about bigotry spotlighted the fringe as if to say, "look at these people. Look how terrible they are." The staff in the workshop focused on trust exclusively among white conservatives, rather than trust among communities of color. And this was not the only instance where concerns over perceived political bias were raised. One staffer raised concerns that efforts to cover progressive perspectives and to include "the ostracized" may have the effect of alienating "the majority." And even the head of the station expressed concern that the station was perceived as sounding "too politically liberal." Again, during this particular training, the focus of the module was intended to be on addressing racism and bigotry directed against people of color. But by shifting the focus of the conversation to the political sensitivities of potential conservative white listeners, the participants in effect re-centered whiteness.

After the training, the trainer explained that the conversation went differently than it usually had with the unexpected focus on trust and political ideology. But he said the conversation revealed a lot of areas that would benefit from follow up: "I thought the questions and the observations in both of these sessions were themselves revealing challenges in everything from the kind of framing of the people who are doing the storytelling, to the kind of larger understandings of difference." He noted that one reporter had asked a question about choosing who to talk to, saying, "'I can go back to the Black guy on the bus, or I can talk to the well-educated...' You know, it's when people don't hear that sort of parsing of humans that happened in that sentence." The trainer explained that when he did a longer week-long seminar, he would have spent time just talking about that one sentence, and the problematic assumptions the reporter had made in it, but that wasn't possible in a half-day session.

Following this initial training, the managers of the cultural competency initiative convened all programming staff and assigned each work unit to set goals for making their sourcing better reflect the community, and to come up with an experiment to meet their goals. The experiments the teams generated varied. Most of the proposals spoke of increasing the diversity of voices featured on air. Half of the projects talked about "diverse" people and perspectives rather than denoting specific goals in terms of race or ethnicity. "Diverse people" was often used as a stand in for any non-white person, in a way that unintentionally re-centered whiteness. Some projects outlined more granular actions for particular roles, such as for news reporters. One project suggested the following:

Each reporter will:

a) Identify one diverse person or organization on their beat that they have not used before and arrange an in-person conversation. This is to get into the community more and get ideas for future stories or sources.
b) Identify two regular sources on their beat and find a diverse alternative.

Other projects simply stated their goals, such as, "develop sources who are women scientists."

Four months later, WHYY brought the cultural competency trainer back to the station to discuss the results of the different team's experiments around sourcing. Most teams reported success in improving the diversity of sources in their programs. On the news side, editors said they had tried to be more mindful of how to adjust deadlines when possible to make it more likely to include voices from communities of color. One editor spoke of trying to give reporters the time and space to go to community meetings even when they weren't sure they would generate a story. This editor also said they had changed coverage after getting input from a manager of color at WHYY. In this instance, the change allowed them to shift from covering a story from a gun violence lens to covering the story from a community lens. Another editor said they had held off running a story until they could get voices from key stakeholders who were people of color, in this case parents in a story about police in schools. This editor also said they were thinking about upcoming local election coverage and planned to talk to voters of color, particularly if the candidates running were not "diverse."

Others shared examples of limitations they faced. One producer explained that most of what they called "two-way" interviews-interviews between the host and reporters-were with white males, "because that's who's in our newsroom." Another person said she had felt awkward asking people how they identified. "One of the things I've been taught is, it's not what you are, it's who you are," she said. The trainer responded to this by suggesting that asking a source about race should begin with a clear statement of intent about how WHYY is trying to represent the whole of Philadelphia, what they need to do that, and how they'll use that information. The trainer also described potentially helpful strategies that had helped other stations in the public radio system, many of whom he met with.

Connecting to communities

This initial training on sourcing was followed by another session that included discussion of implicit bias and microagressions, and was attended by journalists from other Philadelphia area newsrooms as well as some WHYY personnel. During the cultural competency project, WHYY also held a series of initiatives to strengthen relationships between WHYY and local communities, supplementing the engagement and outreach work WHYY journalists were already doing. These initiatives included community storytelling events highlighting the experiences of residents-including residents from immigrant backgrounds and survivors of gun violence.

The team also organized workshops where residents were invited to come and learn storytelling skills. Small groups of residents worked with a trainer to talk about stories related to their lives and communities, and how they could develop them. The Producer/Editor of Community Media then followed up with some of these participants to see if they would be interested in working with her to tell their stories for WHYY. Workshops were held in community spaces located in neighborhoods that were considered to be more marginalized.

The project also followed up on the initial staff training by bringing reporters and editors to different communities to talk with community representatives. These included a visit to Germantown, a majority Black neighborhood where previous research found that residents perceived coverage of their community as overly negative and focused on crime. They met with community organization representatives and advocates. Much of the discussion centered around questions of sourcing and representation. In these meetings, community members stressed building relationships with a wider spectrum of people in Germantown. But when WHYY journalists asked about their recommendations for sources, they did not offer direct suggestions. Instead, they stressed the need for journalists to first invest time in showing up and spending time in the neighborhood, building relationships, and earning trust. Following this discussion, a few of the reporters looked into stories about this neighborhood. One reporter returned to the area to meet a community representative about a potential story about a lack of resources for cyclists. But wires seem to have crossed: The journalist said that after the community member showed him around the area, he didn't find a newsworthy story, but he did not communicate this to the community member. Meanwhile, the community member expressed frustration with the reporter's assumptions about the neighborhood. The community member complained, "Journalists come in with assumptions even after having a conversation about the assumptions."

Other follow-ups were more constructive. After another reporter did a story about a proposed development in the neighborhood, he and his editors were invited to come discuss the story with community members as part of a community journalism project. At the session, residents gave feedback, positive and negative, as well as suggestions for additional stories. Crucially, the reporter was asked why WHYY tended to quote the same people-specifically a community leader who was present in the room. The leader even agreed and said that she often suggested that journalists might want to talk to someone else. The reporter responded that "she gives good quotes." The audience bristled at this, saying that this could be problematic and reinforce tendencies to highlight people seen as able to speak in soundbites. The WHYY journalists and community members in the room discussed the challenges radio journalists faced reporting on deadline, but also agreed that this was an area that deserved follow-up. Afterwards, the head of the cultural competency effort agreed that WHYY would benefit from follow-up training.

While this work was positioned within a larger framework of WHYY's commitment to community engagement, several staff members identified internal disconnects regarding the meaning and value of this work. Some reporters seemed to disengage during trainings or meetings related to community engagement or cultural competency, they said.

One staffer suggested that for such reporters, success was measured by page views rather than sustainable relationships. Community engagement was only considered if it was something that could be done in the time they had available, and if it "continued a narrative...in line with their pitch." The staffer noted that the time-consuming work of engagement often did not fit reporting habits that focused on short-term products: "There was a basic acknowledgement that it could be helpful, but an unwillingness to change the way that they were doing things," they said. Several noted ambiguity in how engagement was defined, with some equating it with social media management. Because of these communication gaps, while the initiative taught community outreach and engagement, these skills were not seen as a core part of journalism for many.

Connecting to journalists of color

The cultural competency project also offered a series of trainings in radio skills primarily for local journalists of color who were either freelancers or from external publications. One of the barriers to including more voices of color on air had been a sense among management that few local journalists of color had backgrounds in radio production. The workshop focused on the basics of radio storytelling, discussing story examples, brainstorming story ideas, and developing technical skills. As the VP of News and Civic Dialogue explained, another goal was "to send a message that our doors are open at WHYY."

One participant, a veteran journalist originally from Mexico, said she appreciated the training though she felt she needed more hands-on practice with the recording equipment. She had been able to write some online articles for WHYY but had not yet been able to work on an on-air segment. She hoped the station would include more Spanish-language or bilingual programming in the future, and she was eager to collaborate with WHYY to increase the representation of Latinx communities: "I think we need to continue this for a while, because ... I think the American people need to know more about us."

A young Black journalist said the training exceeded her expectations. She was also new to audio, but when she pitched a freelance story, she said the station sent a producer out to help her record. "I felt more comfortable, because for my first story they sent me out with somebody ... So, all I had to do was get used to asking the questions." With her experience in training and freelancing, she found a job that involved audio, albeit in another state. She hoped WHYY would hire more reporters of color full-time. This latter dilemma was the goal of another participant, also a Black reporter. "I just wanted to get in the building," he explained. In the end his efforts paid off, and he was eventually hired, first as a freelancer and later as staff-one of the most concrete outcomes in terms of creating a pipeline for journalists of color to access the newsroom.

Whiteness and institutional culture

Getting journalists of color in the door did not solve the station's cultural competency problems.The overall structures of the newsroom and its demographic make-up were difficult to change. Communities of color struggled for representation in part because of the composition of the newsroom and who directed the editorial processes. At WHYY, the vice president of news and civic dialogue was a Black woman, as was the editor of one national program. But apart from this, the day-to-day newsroom editors who vetted local story ideas and managed the pitching process were all white. There had been an ongoing effort to train and recruit more people of color into the newsroom, and their ranks included a reporter and a few freelancers, part-timers, and interns, but these new positions lacked editorial decision-making power. At the same time, in the year and a half that I was observing the cultural competency efforts, several more experienced journalists of color left the organization.

Because of this ebb and flow, the overall percentage of journalists of color did not change much over the course of the project. But as the newsroom's sole Black vice president explained, WHYY has changed in ways that go beyond these numbers: "When the representation of people of color is so low to begin with, one or two people leaving makes it hard to demonstrably shift our numbers. But the overall makeup of this newsroom is very different now."

Despite this, nearly all of the staff and freelancers of color I spoke with expressed some lingering frustrations with navigating the existing editorial structures-particularly when trying to get stories on air about communities of color. Several said the process of pitching story ideas left them feeling that their perspectives were not valued. "When your entire editorial staff happened to be straight white people... trying to explain to them why certain things are important is difficult," one person explained. She had pitched a story that she believed was a big story for Philadelphia's Black community, the city's largest demographic. She said her editors didn't seem to understand why it was important, so she investigated it on her own. When the story was published, it was well-received by both the audience and staff, but she said she was only able to do the story in the first place because of a lack of oversight. Others shared variations on this experience. One reporter said that while he generally felt supported at WHYY, at times he had a hard time getting editors to understand why, for example, he wanted to highlight certain community voices in a story: "They should definitely hire more editors of color.... An editor of color will be able to see certain choices and catch certain nuances that white reporters can struggle with." Another journalist said that, when she was new to the station, she felt people didn't really pay attention to her. "I did feel like being a Black woman, I wasn't taken that seriously," she explained." Yet another staffer said she was usually either "overlooked" by white editors or was patronized by obviously low expectations. "When I come up with really good ideas, it's like, oh my God, [journalist's name]. ...You're like really smart," she said.

Over the course of the project, several Black journalists spoke about how the alternative to being ignored was getting "stuck in the Black community." One person called it "the Black person's burden in public media." Another said she sometimes would talk with her Black colleagues and decide "Yeah, that's a Black story. I'm going to have to do it, or it will not get done." However, for some, there was also a sense that they had an opportunity to represent the Black community fairly:

I know when I go out and do a story, I want to show that the community is represented properly...You know, because most of my stories put me in front of Black folks. So, on behalf of WHYY, I think I do a pretty good job of making sure that you know, the Black community out here is properly represented in the press.

Several of these journalists shared a concern that they were encouraged to craft narratives of communities, particularly communities of color, that were more about the community than for the community. This is a distinction that, as research in other regions has also found, can present a barrier to building trust between news outlets and communities. One journalist gave an example of an event, and a story about it that pointed out a deficit in a community. The journalist was frustrated because, as she put it, "I don't ever want to tell the community stuff they already know." The community knew about the problem already. In her view, "That's what happens when a story is written by someone who is on the outside looking in." Several of the white editors agreed that they "could do a lot better" in the way the station represented communities:

Sometimes it felt like, oh yeah, like we're reporting on liberal progressive stuff, but talking about it in a way that mostly resonated and probably felt meaningful to people who were totally not part of those communities. And if you were listening as someone who is part of the community, you would be like, why did they talk to that random person? Like, what are they even talking about?

Interestingly, some of these same editors tended to edit their stories in ways that reporters of color at WHYY felt were more about communities than for them. One journalist suggested that this might be due to "unintentional elitism":

I think that a lot of the news, what they feel is news is really about politics and is really stories told at a level that ... is more of interest to someone who isn't a stakeholder in that issue. So, they're talking about gentrification perhaps in an economic way as opposed to talking about what it really means to not be able to pay your taxes.

Many said that this culture of elitism went beyond a few editors. One journalist of color recalled learning that all the young white colleagues she was sitting with had gone to an Ivy League or other elite school. "They operate with a certain level of privilege, and you can see it," she said. She said her colleagues were all competent and tech savvy, but:

I don't know how reflective they are about things. I don't, frankly, I don't know if they see the value in bringing different voices to speak on different topics-not just when it's a Black thing or an immigration thing.

For journalists of color who were more junior, there were few role models in the newsroom who looked like them. Several referenced the two Black women who were leading the cultural competency project and how they played a role mentoring the newer journalists of color when possible. But this appreciation for their efforts was often paired with resentment. "It's an unfair expectation to expect one or two Black women to save the whole organization," one journalist said.

Some also suggested that their difficulties getting mentorship and guidance as new journalists was exacerbated by overall resource challenges. Editors were often stretched thin and had limited time to prioritize the learning and development of junior colleagues. For journalists of color who did not always come from traditional journalism backgrounds, this could be particularly limiting.

Given these concerns, the question of retention of people of color came up a number of times. Several journalists spoke of other staff of color who had left because they "didn't feel supported." Some left during the course of this project. These people felt their efforts to engage communities and produce coverage including more diverse voices was not really valued at all levels of the organization: "Sometimes I feel like I'm pushing," one person who left the organization said. "I'm trying to sell a product that they do not want."

A number of staff members, including white staff members, said WHYY needed greater commitment to cultural competency at the level of editor and higher. As one staffer said, "You have to have the people at the very top be committed to this thing in order to make it work."

When I spoke with top managers, they expressed commitment to diversity and inclusion. They said they had done a survey two years ago, and many respondents said they thought of the station as "white and more upper class." One manager said they had been working on cultural competency in response to the survey for the past year: "That's not enough time to really move the needle much, but I would hope in five years or so, you know, more people would feel that public media was for them than what you had in the past," they said. When it came to questions of recruiting and retaining staff of color, one manager acknowledged that there was work to be done to make sure the workplace was "welcoming": "With the environment here, do the people who are working here who are from ethnic or racial minorities, is there a comfort level in the place?" the manager wondered. "We're a pretty diverse workforce, but you want to just make sure that they'll stay." The manager spoke about possible measures such as mentoring. But the station's top manager used a more colorblind framing:

I don't think the rules used to engage any good employee differ depending upon race. I think where we fall down as management is when we don't follow those rules for everybody. I think it becomes more amplified for a person of color who may worry about whether they are welcomed or not to begin with.

With regard to how WHYY's content reflected the community, managers acknowledged room for growth: "Traditionally, there are certain age groups, and there are certain races and ethnicity which have not felt comfortable or welcomed within public media," one said. "So, altruistically, we have a challenge to improve upon people's comfort level with us."

At the same time, this top manager expressed a concern that these efforts should not "prostitute or compromise on the quality of information." As he explained, "I don't think we should dummy down our production value." He suggested there were other ways to make content more accessible through outreach and engagement.

Interestingly, the head of the station mentioned that coverage of diverse communities was valuable not just in connecting the newsroom with those communities, but in connect those communities with "our white middle class audiences" who "have a desire to know more about racial and ethnic minority issues." A focus on the interests of progressive white audiences informed the increased representation of communities of color in WHYY's coverage. At the same time, it also explained some of the concerns raised by journalists who felt coverage of communities of color was not intended for those communities.

Several people said that one barrier to institutionalizing cultural competency was the way management had traditionally centered the white audience when thinking about membership. While a number of recent efforts have highlighted the democratizing potential of membership models to encourage greater public investment and participation in journalism, at WHYY several pointed out that this model could also reinforce the whiteness of public radio. One staff member called it the "white dinosaur" problem. Several people worried that membership strategists continued to chase an aging white elite. While these "dinosaurs" would eventually die out, in a majority-minority city like Philadelphia, there was a much greater opportunity to pursue members of color who were more plentiful, and who would be around after the dinosaurs went extinct. But so long as membership devoted its resources (and its pricey special events) to courting the dinosaurs, the rest of the public would have little incentive to connect or feel a sense of belonging.

From project to institutional change process

The initial series of trainings, workshops, and community engagement activities for the cultural competency project largely transpired over the course of less than a year in 2018. But the leaders of the cultural competency initiative were adamant from the beginning that this be a long-term process of institutional change, rather than a project with a fixed duration.

Following the initial wave of source diversity experiments, the team working on cultural competency stayed eager to follow up to avoid losing momentum. The project manager investigated how other public radio stations had incorporated source audits into their daily practices. She reached out to one of these stations, who shared the spreadsheet they used-a simplified version of the source audit WHYY had done. A key difference in this form was that it was intended for reporters to enter data for themselves. This encouraged reporters to think critically about sourcing on an ongoing basis.

But beyond monitoring sources, were sourcing practices changing in the institution? Editors shared, at various points in the process, that they had tried to adapt their practices with reporters-including giving them more time in order to include a more diverse range of sources. But in a meeting to discuss the adapted version of the source audit and the sourcing practices they hoped to address, editors were asked how they did or did not consider "diversity" in the process of pitching stories. In some exchanges, it became clear that there were different expectations around when diversity was considered important. One leader of the cultural competency team said, "In every pitch, diversity at every level should be considered." However, other editors said this really only came up in some story pitches. There also seemed to be a lack of shared expectations for consequences if reporters failed to include more sources of color.

One of the complications was that WHYY is made up of a variety of teams working on programs with different structures. Not everyone was at every meeting, and some worked with freelancers or with reporters from outside the Philadelphia region. The issue of freelance photographers in particular came up in one of the meetings intended to clarify processes. While reporters and editors had participated in cultural competency trainings, often outside photographers, who had not been trained, were brought in to help with assignments. This led to an example of what the head of the cultural competency initiative called a "big failure."

The Women's March in Philadelphia had been plagued with criticism over underrepresentation of women of color in media coverage of the movement. When an online story about the march was posted, all the photos taken by the freelance photographer featured white women. But the head of the initiative noticed that when the reporter, who was a woman of color, tweeted about it-her photos had people of color in them. The manager instructed her to embed her tweets in order to offer a more complete understanding of the march. She then asked her staff to reach out to every photographer they worked with and clarify that they were mandated to show "diversity," and if they did not, they wouldn't employ that photographer again.

In this incident, the manager noted a structural weakness-that freelance photographers could unintentionally undercut their efforts to better represent the diversity of the city. She declared a change in how they would work with these freelancers. At the same time, several staff pointed out that the current source monitoring system did not include a way to monitor visuals-and they had not received training on representation and bias in selecting images. In the meeting, a few staff members suggested the freelancer at the Women's March could have made an innocent mistake, simply thinking "that's a good picture." This suggested there was room for a more critical exploration of how the quality of visuals were assessed in-house, as well as by freelancers-a change the cultural competency team agreed would be beneficial.

The example of the Women's March photos highlights the importance of understanding every element that goes into making the final product. Even if a reporter takes great care with their sourcing and writing, all of that could be undermined by a poorly chosen photo, headline, or social media framing. All the players that shape how a piece of content is presented must be brought into this process if it is to be effective.

Going forward, the manager leading cultural competency efforts is looking for ways to embed these processes throughout the newsroom. This includes revising a role previously devoted to working on cultural competency and community engagement to give it more editorial authority. The person who had previously held this role had expressed a sense of being siloed away from day-to-day news operations. By clarifying the remit of this position and ensuring that it has adequate power, this role has the potential to help routinize cultural competency practices both in the newsroom and in the station's engagements with communities-but this is unlikely to be successful if the person is seen as separate, sidelined, or lacking authority.

In addition, with support from another foundation grant, WHYY plans to work with a "Community Voices and Engagement Fellow" who would help them to better represent communities. Among other things, the fellow may be tasked with creating and implementing a stylebook to be used across the organization. Finally, the project manager is exploring how to develop functions within the ongoing source audit to make it easier for individual shows and reporters to track their progress. The team is also working to determine how to set goals for this progress-and how these might be tied into staff member's annual evaluations. Through this combination of efforts, the Vice President of News and Civic Dialogue leading this work is seeking to steer the newsroom to a point where cultural competency is no longer a project, but rather is central to how they approach the work of journalism.

Assessing progress

Despite a number of challenges and limitations, WHYY's cultural competency initiative was able to track a measurable change in the newsroom's sourcing. A little over a year after completing their first source audit, where 80% of local sources had been white, a snapshot of their ongoing audit showed just under 65% of sources were white. Sources identified as Black jumped from 4% in 2018 to 26% in 2019. The comparison between the two times is not perfect: The first drew from a random composite of dates and the second draws from a cumulative running total. But the totals do suggest incremental improvement. They are still well short of parity with the demographics of Philadelphia, where only 34% of the population is non-Hispanic white, but they are considerably closer to parity with their regional coverage area (which includes surrounding suburbs) which they estimate is 67% white. Progress was less noticeable with regards to the diversity of the station's newsroom. While just under 80% of staff members identified as white in 2018, a little over a year later, the staff was just under 75% white. While several journalists of color joined WHYY in that time period, others left, including several senior staffers. While the number of Latinx staffers rose, the number of Black staffers actually decreased.

Numbers alone do not tell the story of WHYY's efforts. As discussed, at the heart of these initiatives is a change in culture, and a shift in journalistic practices. Conversations and observations revealed some efforts to adjust editorial norms to prioritize the inclusion of more diverse voices. However, conversations also suggested simply increasing the amount of coverage of communities of color would not address concerns around the narratives framing that coverage. As mentioned, journalists of color in particular expressed worries that narratives were often more about communities than for these communities. This perceived distance between the newsroom and communities will likely only diminish if:

a wider cross-section of staffers is involved in sustained community engagement efforts that go beyond social media and are not just one-offs, and

more staffers in the newsroom come from these communities and/or are embedded in them. Tackling this will require sustained resources that prioritize this mission at all levels of the organization.

While shortcomings remain, the vice president for news and civic dialogue gave an example of how the cultural competency trainings and broader efforts had given them a shared language to handle challenges when they arose. When the marketing department had offered a few tickets to a coming music festival, "It seemed like every person of color said, 'Oh, I want those tickets.'" She said that should have suggested that the event was important, especially to communities of color, but no one had been assigned to cover it: "By not even assigning the story, it was like damn. So, how do we define what's of value to us?" She wondered if editors would have been more likely to assign a story if the event has been held at Philadelphia's Center City as opposed to its location in an area more associated with communities of color. After the event, she learned that the newsroom planned to cover an incident at the concert in which several concert-goers had been injured. At that point she intervened and encouraged editors and reporters to "flip the story" to offer more holistic context on the event, using a cultural competency framework. So while a lack of diversity in the editorial ranks led to an initial oversight, the newsroom was able to make adjustments: "That was one of those two steps forward, one step back kind of things."

Conclusions

What can we learn from this institution's efforts to build "cultural competency" in its journalistic practices, newsroom composition, and orientation to communities?

Perhaps one of the most tangible interventions of this initiative was the practice of auditing and then monitoring sources quoted in local stories. In the training with staff to explore sourcing practices, the trainer encouraged journalists to question those practices traditionally associated with "objectivity." As discussed, this included uncritically selecting sources from institutions traditionally associated with authority (for example, professors at universities), rather than looking for expertise in a range of forms within communities. These journalism practices, the trainer pointed out, often have secondary consequences of over-representing white voices. By encouraging staff to be more critical about their source selection and to monitor it over time, this program was able to have some influence, at least, on the quantitative representation of communities of color.

However, there were a number of moments in the training and the follow-up to it when narratives of colorblindness were not challenged-for example when a staffer expressed a reluctance to talk to people about race, or when others spoke about "diversity" in a generically broad sense that re-centered whiteness by suggesting everyone who was not white was "diverse." The ideology of colorblindness suggests that race no longer matters and should play no role in legal, social, or cultural decision-making. As scholars such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have pointed out, the rhetoric of colorblindness can be used to minimize racism or racist microaggressions. Examples range from the more overt " All Lives Matter" phenomenon, to the more subtle and increasingly common practice of referring to non-white individuals as "diverse" in a way that centers whiteness. By failing to recognize difference and racial power hierarchies, narratives of colorblindness can obscure structural racism, even when they carry an idealistic intent.

Critically, while the number of voices of color may have increased, this does not necessarily mean the narratives being produced are for those communities. Indeed, a number of staffers expressed concerns that they were complicit in reporting about and not for communities. Here, journalists may benefit from what City Bureau's Harry Backlund outlines as an information hierarchy of needs, riffing on Maslow's pyramid. Backlund argues: "A huge amount of journalistic resources go into the top of the pyramid to serve the abstract needs of a comfortable few, completely passing over the basic information needs of a great many. Journalists routinely cover inequity as an abstract phenomenon that can be observed and remarked upon from afar."

Of course, one way to narrow the distance between the perspectives of journalists and communities would be to give people connected to these communities more agency over the crafting of their own narratives. This is something WHYY has made some efforts to do by offering a platform for community voices, but it has largely been siloed to certain areas and under the purview of certain job positions. Likewise, while there has been a concerted effort to hire journalists of color, most of these hires have been at junior levels so far.

This experience, of course, is not only an issue for WHYY. Across the industry, retention of journalists of color is a critical challenge. While there has been growing attention to supporting the development of talent of color entering the journalism "pipeline," there are far fewer programs and funds supporting mid-career and more senior journalists of color. In many newsrooms, editors and other managers of color play key roles mentoring new journalists-as well as ensuring the cultural competency of numerous editorial decisions. But because there are often fewer journalists of color in these roles, they shoulder a heavier load that can lead to burn out. And retention problems earlier in the career chain lead to a smaller pool of journalists of color to recruit for mid- and upper- level editor positions. Foundations and others who care about fostering more culturally competent newsrooms should look for opportunities to support journalists of color to advance after they enter the newsroom, and as they progress to more senior roles.

Scholars such as Emily Drew have argued that news organizations should seek to practice "antiracist journalism"-and that projects like source audits can be one way to raise the consciousness of journalists about how racial power structures operate in their work. However, they also warn that these projects can fall short when they are not institutionalized. WHYY is working to institutionalize cultural competency practices. Continued progress toward routinizing cultural competency will depend on adjusting and strengthening structures and positions that support it. Given that, for most legacy organizations, the work of cultural competency requires pushing against years of entrenched cultures of whiteness, it is no surprise that these processes take time. But if these legacy organizations are going to survive, they must urgently prioritize cultural competency processes. Without these, they have little hope of building trust with journalists or communities of color, and claims of representing a "public" will become increasingly hollow.

For WHYY and other news organizations seeking to make a transformative shift toward antiracist journalism, pursuing greater inclusion and representation must be part of the work of journalism, and of the organization as a whole, and not just people with words such as "community" or "engagement" in their titles.

I have personal experience with these home truths having worked for over a decade as a white public radio producer prior to entering academia. Throughout my research I have attempted to be mindful of my own positionality, taking fieldnotes to record my perceptions of how my own orientation has shaped experiences interacting with study participants and observations of activities, and how I continue an ongoing struggle to be mindful of white privilege and assumptions of whiteness norms.

As of 2015: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/are_podcasts_the_new_path_to_diversifying_public_radio.php

https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/npr/audience/?profile=the-business-leader

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/philadelphiacountypennsylvania
https://current.org/2018/07/whyy-efforts-focus-on-increasing-racial-diversity-of-staff-audiences/ https://current.org/2018/07/whyy-efforts-focus-on-increasing-racial-diversity-of-staff-audiences/
According to WHYY market research (Scarborough), 78% of WHYY listeners are white, compared with 67% of their regional coverage area (which includes the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia).

Over the course of the study, I observed five training sessions, four community outreach events, and multiple staff meetings. I interviewed 18 WHYY staff members and managers (several multiple times), a training consultant, and four outside training participants.
Correspondence with VP for News and Civic Dialogue 9/7/19.
From cultural competency training at WHYY, 5/23/18.

This approach bears some similarity to an approach taken by Gannett newspapers circa 1988

WHYY's source diversity newsroom experiments list. Shared October 1, 2018.

Follow up cultural competency training 9/20/18.

Of course, there are limits to what this study can conclude with regards to how communities perceive narratives as it focused on the perspective of the journalists. For this reason, this study will be followed by a related study examining how the products of these efforts are perceived by community members. This includes a series of longitudinal focus groups with residents of a Philadelphia neighborhood where WHYY has conducted outreach.

Andrea Wenzel is a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She is an incoming assistant professor at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication, and a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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Sourcing Diversity: WHYY and the rocky road to "cultural competency"

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As much of the local news industry struggles for survival, public media-and public radio in particular-have occupied an enviable place of comparative stability. Stations do struggle for resources, but compared to their comrades in newspaper, the outlook has been less grim on the whole. Many have pointed to public radio's membership strategy as a model [...]

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Examples of some steps newsrooms are taking to improve their coverage and newsroom environment

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JOC: If you’re the only one in your newsroom, here are some communities to join.
White journalists: Instead of tokenizing the JOC in your newsroom and asking them to speak for all people of their racial identity, read the messages these orgs are putting out.

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Objectivity is a relatively modern value in journalism. Learn why and how prioritizing objectivity upholds the white (/cishet/upper-class) gaze as the pinnacle of truth

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Style changes you can make immediately and reference materials for further style advice

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Steps to take to make your newsroom to represent your audience

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How newsrooms are failing at covering COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement

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Start here!

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Tufts Daily 2018 Intentionality & Inclusivity Committee Initiatives

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Tufts Daily 2018 Intentionality & Inclusivity Committee Initiatives

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Tufts Daily Con Training: During these semi-annual Daily-wide trainings at the beginning of each semester, we led new executive editors and incoming staff in a conversations that asked them to reflect on their own biases and make connections between their personal backgrounds and the way they represented people. We also brought attention to multiple incidents of Daily miscoverage of the Tufts community in the past, in hopes that people would see how the past informs our present relationships with our audience and sources.

Women's Center Workshop: K Martinez and their interns from the Women's Center designed a workshop on the gender binary that was mandatory for members listed on our masthead. One activity, for example, engaged staff in looking through print issues and analyzing the diversity or lack of diversity of gender expression in our visuals and photographs.

I&I Style Guide: Over the course of the fall semester, each member brought in their own research about the representation of social groups that are frequently discriminated against in the mainstream media. As a group, we compiled a working guide with story frames and terminology we believed would better portray people and stories from marginalized backgrounds.

Covering Community Panel Series : We invited four professional journalists who had backgrounds in reporting, radio journalism, paper management, nonprofit media organizations and documentary work, and facilitated a conversation about 'insider' coverage, wherein a journalist who identifies with a group writes about that group, and 'outsider' coverage, wherein a journalists must gain the trust of people with whom they do not share common perspectives.

A collaboration with the Tufts Enigma : As former editor-in-chief of our university's data journal, Nina Joung worked with Enigma members to publish articles on trends within the Daily's coverage. Part of the project was the creation of a searchable database of The Tufts Daily archives. Links to be added.

Thank you to our Tufts Daily alumni, faculty members and supportive staff members who have informed, participated and contributed to these efforts.

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2018 Intentionality and Inclusivity Initiatives: A year in review - The Tufts Daily

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Tufts Daily Con Training: During these semi-annual Daily-wide trainings at the beginning of each semester, we led new executive editors and incoming staff in a conversations that asked them to reflect on their own biases and make connections between their personal backgrounds and the way they represented people.

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Minnesota Daily Content Diversity Board End-Of-Year Report

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Minnesota Daily Content Diversity Board End-Of-Year Report

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Mission, content tracker, discussions with student groups, goals and recommendations

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"SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, is one of the most dynamic journalism organizations in the U.S. and Canada. It serves as a network for education, inspiration and training South-Asian journalists in America and those covering South Asia and South Asian diaspora."
Membership: waived for the rest of the year due to COVID-19

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Become a Dollar -a- Day Supporter!

The dollar-a-day campaign is designed to let all SAJA supporters support the scholarship fund all year long. The money will be going to support the 60k in scholarships SAJA provides every year to aspiring journalists.

Be a SAJA Dollar-a-Day supporter!

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SAJA | South Asian Journalists Association - Home

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Become a Dollar -a- Day Supporter! The dollar-a-day campaign is designed to let all SAJA supporters support the scholarship fund all year long. The money will be going to support the 60k in scholarships SAJA provides every year to aspiring journalists. Be a SAJA Dollar-a-Day supporter!

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JOC-only

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You've found us! We are a community of Journalists of Color aka JOCs, and this website is for you - the public - to peruse, find out what we're all about and maybe even join us.

We created a Slack team to start gathering people and ideas, and we quickly learned a few things:

The media diversity struggle is real real in newsrooms across the country.

The conversations we're having are ones that need to be had on a wider scale.

Members agree that a community like this is wanted and necessary.

We founded this group to put Journalists of Color in the same "room" (you know, so you're not the only one.) And having a Slack team allows us to branch out and create infinite rooms to discuss a variety of topics, collaborate on projects or chat/scheme/vent privately via direct messages or private groups.

We are dedicated to growing and expanding this community, and its conversations and opportunities. We've already branched out from Slack to a couple of meetups on the East and West coasts. So stay tuned because we're just getting started.

WHO'S INVITED

You are or identify as a person of color and work in journalism.

"Work in journalism" = Do you identify as a journalist? Is your job something that helps to push journalism forward? Yeah? Sweet!
Join JOCs now!
Allies: While we appreciate your support, this space is for us. Check out our resources tab for more ways to encourage diversity.

The Rules

What happens in the JOCs Slack stays in the JOCs Slack - everything said or gif'd or bot'd is OFF THE RECORD. This is a safe space to talk about whatever, network, commune and support one another. Now, we're all smart enough to know that nothing on the Interwebs is 100% safe or secure and we're supposed to trust no one, so that's where common sense comes in.

In earlier discussions we agreed that the same decorum and discretion we apply to social media or professional listservs should be used in the all-access, public channels. Be respectful, don't be a jerk, and help keep this space as accessible and inclusive as possible.

Join

Please submit your information in the form below. We will get in touch with you after reviewing your response.

Once you get the invite in your email, click to join right away.

First steps:

You'll be asked to fill in your username - this can be whatever you want.

Pick a strong password we recommend enabling two-factor authentication).

You're in! Now you can finish the rest of your profile: Select "View Profile & Account" in the dropdown to the right of "JOC" and click the edit button. We encourage you to use your full name, title and a picture of yourself - it'll help people who don't already know you get to know you.

By default, you'll be opted into the #general and #intros channels. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself in the #intros channel!

Resources

Some Style Guides

More JOC Organizations

Other dope JOC projects

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You've found us! We are a community of Journalists of Color aka JOCs, and this website is for you - the public - to peruse, find out what we're all about and maybe even join us.

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National Association of Hispanic Journalists

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National Association of Hispanic Journalists

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"The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) is dedicated to the recognition and professional advancement of Hispanics in the news industry."
Student Membership: $25/yr

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While panel discussions are valuable, we will shift to mostly training sessions in English and Spanish. For those who can't attend training events in person, we will provide access to webinars.

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READ HERE! Scholarships NAHJ Student Projects Internships * Placement * Financial Support * Mentoring While panel discussions are valuable, we will shift to mostly training sessions in English and Spanish. For those who can't attend training events in person, we will

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National Association of Black Journalists

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National Association of Black Journalists

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"The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) is an organization of journalists, students and media-related professionals that provides quality programs and services to and advocates on behalf of Black journalists worldwide."
Student Membership: $40/yr

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View Our Resources for Journalists Covering Protests Here

The May issue of the NABJ RoundUp is now available. Members, check your NABJ emails or c lick here to view web version.
NABJ COVID-19 RELIEF & MEMBER SUPPORT DONATE TO OUR RELIEF FUND APPLY FOR A RELIEF FUND GRANT (NABJ MEMBERS ONLY)
* Must be a current member of NABJ and in good standing. (Please note your membership can be extended if you are experiencing hardship and your membership is soon to expire. Please email membership@nabj.org for details.)
UPCOMING NABJ EVENTS & ACTIVITIES MORE INFORMATION HERE

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National Association of Black Journalists

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View Our Resources for Journalists Covering Protests Here The May issue of the NABJ RoundUp is now available. Members, check your NABJ emails or c lick here to view web version. NABJ COVID-19 RELIEF & MEMBER SUPPORT DONATE TO OUR RELIEF FUND APPLY FOR A RELIEF FUND GRANT (NABJ MEMBERS ONLY) * Must be a current member of NABJ and in good standing.

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"Asian American Journalists Association is a membership nonprofit advancing diversity in newsrooms, and ensuring fair and accurate coverage of communities of color."
Student Membership: $25/yr

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For 40 years, AAJA has advocated on behalf of AAPIs in the newsroom on the front lines for stronger representation and more inclusion. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of our fearless founders. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary at a critical moment in U.S. history, and honor our trailblazers while looking forward to the next generation of AAPI journalists.

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Front Page, Asian American Journalists Association

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For 40 years, AAJA has advocated on behalf of AAPIs in the newsroom on the front lines for stronger representation and more inclusion. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of our fearless founders. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary at a critical moment in U.S.

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The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting

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The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting

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"We are a news trade organization with a mission of increasing the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting."
Membership: free

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The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting will host its inaugural public event with the Morehouse Department of Journalism in Sports, Culture & Social Justice to kick off the Society's new affiliation with the College. Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the Society's co-founders and creator of the landmark 1619 Project, will headline a panel of history and politics experts in a discussion about ongoing political challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion issues, as well as the ways public education institutions teach the history of people of color in America. The discussion also will focus on how the public can respond to...

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"We promote diversity in the news media through improved coverage, hiring, business practices and training programs that equip journalists with leadership, multimedia skills and subject expertise for news organizations across platforms.

Our primary mission is to ensure that all segments of our diverse society are fairly, accurately and credibly portrayed."
Newsletter: free

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The Maynard Institute is postponing its Maynard 200 and Oakland Voices training programs in light of threats to public health posed by the coronavirus.

The institute will keep the application portals open for both programs, and the application deadlines have been lifted.

Maynard 200 application link
Oakland Voices application link

The institute will monitor advisories from government and health authorities in setting a new start date for the programs. The earliest would begin in October.

For more information about the programs, please contact Odette Alcazaren-Keeley at okeeley@mije.org for Maynard 200 and Rasheed Shabazz at rshabazz@mije.org for Oakland Voices.

Maynard Institute and Northwestern University Partner for Maynard 200 Journalism Fellowship in San Francisco

EMERYVILLE, CA - The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications announce their partnership for this year's Maynard 200 journalism fellowship program, aligned in their mission to galvanize diversity in media and to bolster careers of more journalists of color nationwide.

Northwestern Medill will host the Maynard 200 place-based program in the Bay Area at its downtown San Francisco campus, starting with the first training round tentatively to commence in October 2020, dependent on the recommendations of healthcare professionals in light of threats to public health posed by the coronavirus.

The fellowship aims to train 200 journalists of color in the United States by 2023.

It supports the next generation of storytellers, managers/leaders and media entrepreneurs of diverse backgrounds by providing relevant training courses, resources and mentorship for a year by distinguished media professionals and experts in various disciplines.

A majority of the estimated 35-member 2020 fellowship class will be recruited locally, and the rest will be chosen from a national pool of applicants.

Candidates can apply for one of three tracks - Storytelling, Advanced Leadership and Media Entrepreneurship. Training dates are currently TBD as cited above and will be held at Northwestern's San Francisco campus at 44 Montgomery St.

Link to the Maynard 200 application portal.
Fellows are required to attend both sessions and to participate in the year-long mentorship and supplementary courses. Tuition is waived. National participants will be provided flight and hotel accommodations, and national and local participants will receive a weekly stipend primarily for transit costs.

"We couldn't be more excited to rekindle our partnership with Northwestern, and to be able to do so in San Francisco is all the more fortuitous," said Martin G. Reynolds, Maynard Institute co-executive director. "We are committed to helping support the next generation of journalism entrepreneurs, leaders and storytellers, and we know this great institution shares a similar goal and passion in service of its students. We look forward to collaborating with Northwestern's faculty to infuse Maynard 200 with their wisdom and expertise."

"For more than two decades, the Maynard Institute held its path-breaking Management Training Center at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management," said Evelyn Hsu, the institute's co-executive director. "We are pleased to be partners with the university again and look forward to recruiting speakers from Northwestern's renowned faculty."

"Medill is deeply committed to increasing diversity in all levels of media, and we're delighted to share our faculty and space with Maynard to prepare journalists from across the country," Medill Dean Charles Whitaker said. "These journalists will go back to their communities with an enhanced understanding of how to share rich reporting and insights with their readers, viewers and listeners."

Maynard 200 Director Odette Alcazaren-Keeley said this year's program cements the renewed alliance of the two institutions.

"In its third year, we see Maynard 200 as a catalyst in transforming the media landscape, especially in amplifying the voice, skills, growth and authentic power of diverse journalists," she said. "We are once again creating a dynamic, vibrant curriculum and faculty roster to address the current needs of diverse media professionals.

"Since 2018, we have had the expertise of distinguished speakers and mentors from The Washington Post, The New York Times, Google News Lab, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Impremedia, ProPublica, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC Marshall School of Business, NBC, CBS, Reveal and many other respected media and academic institutions. We look forward to having the knowledge and resources of Northwestern Medill's respected faculty, as well as of its academic affiliates and network of experts.

"We're continuing our mission to expand access to training for more journalists of color representing the general market, diverse and community media, and to spark a mini-movement of diversity in the industry, that gives real power to them."

The Maynard 200 journalism fellowship program cohorts with some of their mentors, faculty, track executives-in-residence and MIJE executive team. Top: The 2019 class at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, CA; Bottom: The 2018 class at the Google campus in Boulder, CO

Forty-nine Maynard 200 fellows representing mainstream and diverse media organizations and entrepreneurial ventures, as well as print, broadcast, online and multimedia portals, have participated to date from across the United States. They continue to express appreciation of the program.

"There is no experience like the experience of being a Maynard 200 fellow," says Hélène Biandudi Hofer, a 2019 participant in the media entrepreneurship track. "From the support that you receive, the resources you're given, the mentors that are there to help lead and guide you, the trainings, the workshops, webinars . . . and especially the family unit that is created with the other Maynard fellows and the Maynard leaders, it's unlike any experience that I've had as a journalist and as a media entrepreneur.

"I feel that not only has my passion for journalism been enhanced . .what this program gifted me is how it has really changed how I look at this work, and empowered me to be more of a leader in news in our country."

Hofer is host and producer of "Need to Know" on WXXI-TV in Rochester, N.Y., a veteran team member on CBS' "48 Hours" and founder of HBH Enterprises LLC based in New York.

The 2020 Maynard 200 program is supported by Google News Initiative and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

MAYNARD 200 APPLICATION PORTAL

CLICK TO APPLY

REVISED DEADLINE: TENTATIVE: MAY 31, 2020

For more information about Maynard 200:
contact director Odette Alcazaren-Keeley at okeeley@mije.org

ABOUT THE MAYNARD INSTITUTE FOR JOURNALISM EDUCATION

The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education is the nation's oldest organization dedicated to helping the news media accurately portray all segments of society, particularly those often overlooked, such as communities of color. The media play a pivotal role in shaping our perceptions of each other. The distorted coverage of communities of color influences public policy and the decisions we make in our personal lives.

Maynard seeks to help news media achieve both a diverse staff and provide the public with the most accurate and nuanced coverage possible.

Maynard breaks the cycle of inaccurate depictions by using a three-pronged approach: training media managers, journalists and correspondents from communities of color; creating content to demonstrate nuanced coverage; and keeping media accountable through its Watchdog program.

ABOUT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, MEDIA, INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications prepares the best journalism and marketing students from around the world to lead the media into the future. The school was established almost 100 years ago, and more than 17,000 Medill graduates now engage in all types of industries and are among the nation's most successful journalists and marketers. Medill, the only journalism school at a Top 10 university, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism and a graduate degree in integrated marketing communications. Visit medill.northwestern.edu

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The Maynard Institute is postponing its Maynard 200 and Oakland Voices training programs in light of threats to public health posed by the coronavirus. The institute will keep the application portals open for both programs, and the application deadlines have been lifted.

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The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity

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The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity

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Wallace's book that his podcast is based on

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The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity is available now from University of Chicago Press or your local bookstore.
PRAISE FOR THE VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE
"Nuanced and subtle. . . A compelling addition to the ongoing conversation on journalism and how it is practiced and consumed."-Kirkus Reviews

"Wallace dissects modern definitions of 'neutrality' in news and points to journalism's historic trailblazers-queer, Black, and immigrant reporters-to remind us how marginalized people have suffered at the hands of so-called 'objective news' and how we must urgently resist and reframe those definitions. An essential book for reporters, editors, and consumers of news."- Seema Yasmin, Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, and Stanford University professor

" The View From Somewhere is brilliant. Wallace slays the myth of journalistic objectivity, forcing the reader to wrestle with something profound: that all readers and creators of journalism have subjectivities, and that we can better perceive and create depictions of truth if we all examine these subjectivities instead of pretending that they don't exist."- Steven Thrasher, journalist and Northwestern University professor "

This new book from Lewis Wallace asks the right questions and makes a powerful case for a re-examination of what journalism is andhow it can best serve the public. American journalists will readily admit, I think, that our industry has let down the broader community in recentyears. Wallace posits a new solution for how we might avoid the mistakes of the past and move forward in a productive way. The book is both a fascinating dissection of our political body and a passionate plea for reform. It's also a darn good read."- Celeste Headlee, author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter

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The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity is available now from University of Chicago Press or your local bookstore. PRAISE FOR THE VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE "Nuanced and subtle. . .

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The View From Somewhere: The Half-Truth of Lynching hosted by Lewis Wallace ft. Nikole Hannah-Jones

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The View From Somewhere: The Half-Truth of Lynching hosted by Lewis Wallace ft. Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Why truth =/= objectivity (Twitter: @lewispants and @nhannahjones)

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New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that all journalism is a form of activism. Host Lewis Raven Wallace talks to Hannah-Jones, plus historians David Mindich and Mia Bay, about the enduring influence of Ida B. Wells and the early Black press, who uncovered stories about lynching the white press was unwilling to tell. They explore how early "objective" news failed in its coverage of lynching, and how "objectivity" can fall short in coverage of racial violence now.

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‎The View from Somewhere: The Half Truth About Lynching on Apple Podcasts

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‎New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that all journalism is a form of activism. Host Lewis Raven Wallace talks to Hannah-Jones, plus historians David Mindich and Mia Bay, about the enduring influence of Ida B. Wells and the early Black press, who uncovered stories about lynchi...

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5 lessons about sharing power in journalism collaborations

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5 lessons about sharing power in journalism collaborations

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Graphic recording of a session at the Collaborative Journalism Summit on Resolve Philly's governance structure by Derrick Dent

In 2020, collaboration in journalism is about way more than sorting through data together or expanding a story's reach. Now, collaborative journalism means sharing power among journalists, readers and viewers, community partners, scientists, and more - delivering information that centers and addresses people's voices and needs, together.

For four years, the Collaborative Journalism Summit has served as a touchstone for master media collaborators, journalists edging away from competitive instincts, and researchers delving into the data behind the process and impact of partnered journalism projects. But due to the COVID-19 crisis the Center for Cooperative Media transformed the summit into a two-day Zoom extravaganza, drawing more than 750 signups. (Democracy Fund proudly sponsored this year's summit, recommitting to supporting it when it became clear that an in-person gathering was not feasible. As others have said, the future of journalism is collaborative, and these kinds of convenings are vital for building the community and collective learning that shapes that future.)

The pandemic has elevated the need for robust collaborative and local journalism to tackle a story of this size and specificity. But it's also reinforced the importance of seeding collaborations with equity and respect, recognizing the unequal effects of COVID-19 on our communities. At this year's summit, collaborators shared their best practices and insights into sharing power in collaborations around COVID-19 and beyond. Here's what stood out to us:

Collaboration is all about the community.

Collaborative journalism first took hold in the industry as a network of partnerships between newsrooms, overcoming competitive instincts to deliver impactful journalism to the broadest audience. But, as panelists pointed out, journalism can work at its strongest when those collaborations are representative of, legitimately include, and are trusted by the community at large.

This year's summit raised the question, exacerbated by COVID-19's impact: How are you recognizing and amplifying, not co-opting, the power that communities already have through your collaboration?

What are you doing to make sure that the people who you are trying to serve are represented in the collaborations and planning process?

Important question from @jemarsha11 #collaborativej
- Christine Schmidt (@NewsbySchmidt) May 15, 2020

Share your power, throughout your workflow.

A collaboration can be most impactful when it involves the community in every step of the process by sharing power. As Darryl Holliday said at last year's summit, "At City Bureau, we believe that journalism is not fundamentally a profession or an industry; it's an act of citizenship, and our role is not simply to inform the public but to equip people to access the information they need to strengthen their communities."

That theme was threaded throughout the 2020 summit, with panelists calling on journalists to consider the needs of the collaboration by asking and listening to community members, like Outlier Media does by texting Detroiters service journalism about their housing; and centering diverse perspectives in the planning process and leadership structure and financially supporting partners and freelancers in the collaboration, like Resolve Philly does with its non-hierarchical governance structure.

Communication keeps the collaboration grounded.

The need for an independent, "balcony view" facilitator of a collaboration was emphasized in nearly every explanation of a project. ( See job descriptions previously rounded up by the Center for Cooperative Media here.) Cat herder, cheerleader, gatekeeper are other descriptions for collaboration point people like the team at Resolve Philly in its Broke in Philly and Reentry Project initiatives, Stephanie Carson of Carolina Public Press, Jeremy Bernfeld at Guns & America and WAMU, Vanessa de la Torre at the New England News Collaborative, and Rachel Glickhouse from ProPublica's Electionland.

Their biggest task: clear communication and expectations.

Give everyone Google doc access early in the game, make sure everyone knows how/can access them. Specify roles and responsibilities, don't just wait for folks to volunteer. Ask if people will do something and let them say yes or no, and lock the Google doc data. #collaborativej
- Authorslargeandsmall (@smallandlarge) May 15, 2020

Target your teamwork.

The journalistic prowess gathered in a collaboration can be harnessed beyond hitting "publish" on a piece. The News & Observer's Robyn Tomlin explained how a group of North Carolina outlets were able to pressure government officials for more transparency during COVID-19 than they would have been able to on their own. Kathy Merritt of the Center for Public Broadcasting described how the CPB funds collaborations among public media stations based on the presence of "collaboration as a way of doing business rather than collaboration as a project."

These targeted approaches can help transform, not just sustain, the way that journalists focus their work together.

In COVID "we can't get face time with the public officials who need to be accountable to the decisions they are making," says @robyntomlin.

"The power of coming together as a multimedia collaborative and asking for answers has been empowering." #collaborativej #PressFreedom
- Christine Schmidt (@NewsbySchmidt) May 14, 2020

Respect yourself and others.

Collaborations are only as successful as the relationships that comprise them. The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the need for a healthy relationship with oneself as well as relationships with others.

"We can't control our partners. We can't control their business. [Each challenge] is a learning opportunity for us to strategize around," Donna Vestal of Election 2020: America Amplified, said. "Every obstacle is there for reason and you have to understand what is revealed."

During one break, DaLyah Jones of the Texas Observer led participants through guided breathing and a discussion on self-care. She reminded us: "I can't heal my community without also healing myself."

Excited to be sharing some simple grounding techniques and discussing selfcare with journos around the world today during #CJS2020

Let's remember to check in with ourselves as we report on our communities. ☺️❤️ https://t.co/360apOmn49
- Thee Environmental Reportréss (@DaLyahJ) May 15, 2020

"I'm always asking people to work with me because there's so many things I don't know and there's so many things other people know."

Love this. I can relate, @terryparrisjr. #collaborativej
- Keri Mitchell (@thequotablelife) May 15, 2020

More resources

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5 lessons about sharing power in journalism collaborations - Local News Lab

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In 2020, collaboration in journalism is about way more than sorting through data together or expanding a story's reach. Now, collaborative journalism means sharing power among journalists, readers and viewers, community partners, scientists, and more - delivering information that centers and addresses people's voices and needs, together.

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Collaborative Journalism | Montclair State University

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"There are several different ways to look at collaborative journalism, but we define it broadly as the practice of executing journalistic endeavors using a cross-entity approach.

This encompasses news organizations working together (and with other non-news entities) on reporting projects, partnering on audience engagement efforts, co-collecting and sharing data, or even teaming up to build technology that supports multiple organizations working toward a shared journalistic goal." -Montclair State University's Center for Cooperative Media

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2018 Allied Media Conference Movement Journalism Track

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2018 Allied Media Conference Movement Journalism Track

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For further research purposes: names of speakers for the movement journalism track in 2018

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To rebuild trust, we need to change journalistic process

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To rebuild trust, we need to change journalistic process

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Why newsrooms need to look beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to overhauling their ethics (Twitter: @lewispants)

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Even in the age of Trump, and with trust in journalists at historic lows, much of the industry remains convinced that it can triumph on truth-telling alone. But the problems are self-evident: News makers and consumers alike are overwhelmed with a constant frenzy of terrible news. For news producers, the questions feel urgent: Why are we telling the stories we tell, and whom do they serve? What ethics and values should govern our work? Should journalism, in short, take a lesson from activism?

In June, I co-organized a series of workshops at the Allied Media Conference, a gathering of media-based organizers, hosted annually in Detroit. This year the conference drew over 3,000 people, and the track focused on "movement journalism" drew hundreds of mostly independent and left-wing journalists, activists, and organizers. The journalists, predominantly people of color and women, came from around the country to participate in conversations about transforming journalistic ethics, economics, and aims for the twenty-first century.
ICYMI: Kennedy's retirement sets off months of SCOTUS coverage
As journalism organizations reckon with audience distrust and failing business models, they continue to gravitate towards "engagement," often just a word for using community organizing tactics in journalism. Grassroots community organizers listen to groups of people to assess their needs, analyze power, and then use that listening and analysis to develop campaigns. Journalists may not be campaigners, but there are two skills that more journalism organizations can and should be using.
Accountability to the audience
Engagement seeks what community organizing already has: participation from a well-defined group of people. What makes the difference? Grassroots organizers are accountable to their constituents.

Sarah Alvarez, one of the presenters at Allied Media this year, has shaped herself into a community-accountable reporter. She started Outlier Media in response to a clear problem: Most news media (in particular public radio, where she worked for five years) is targeted toward upper-income audiences. She set out to start a news service that would provide high-value information for low-income people in Detroit.

Careful assessment of call center data on the needs of Detroit residents led her to focus on housing and utilities-"Detroiters' number one and number two information needs," she says. Rather than publishing on a website, she primarily communicates with her readers through text messages; news consumers can ask her, the journalist, for information about the ownership, utilities, and tax status of houses they plan to rent or buy-information that is public but can be hard to access. Instead of working on long investigative pieces about tax foreclosure geared towards audiences outside Detroit, she individually tailors her reporting to consumer needs Detroit. The information isn't award-winning storytelling, she says, but it's useful for the people who need it.

Rather than publishing on a website, Alvarez primarily communicates with her readers through text messages.

"There are many people who have saved their homes with this information," she says. "There are many people who have avoided eviction."

She believes journalism should be as deeply involved and accountable to its community as community organizing.

" I definitely have an agenda," she says. "My agenda is for low income Detroiters to have the same access to information as high income Detroiters."
Analyzing power
"You can't have accountability without relationship," Alicia Bell says. She works across North Carolina to connect journalists with underserved communities through an organization called Free Press (which just this week brought in $5 million in new funds for local news in New Jersey). Her project, News Voices, is focused on empowering historically underrepresented groups to work directly with their local media.

Her tactics for organizing with journalists are similar to the ones she used when she was organizing to stop evictions. She has one-on-one conversations with journalists and community members, then convenes people in groups to analyze problems and power structures together. These gatherings have led to story ideas and new coverage streams for reporters, and the hope is that they will also lead to new audiences, or at least more committed and trusting ones.

Like Alvarez, Bell confronts resistance from journalists who feel that deeper connections to community could compromise their independence. To Bell, the ethic of objectivity is in conflict with the effort to be more representative and accountable-or perhaps appears as an excuse not to be.

As an outsider to journalism, Bell says she's stricken by how actually subjective this ethic is-each outlet she works with has a different process for establishing what is important and what is true. And, she says, "the thing that's really salient for me is that it wasn't people of color, it wasn't queer and trans folks who created that ethic and decided that that was important for journalism." Straight, white, non-trans men created newsroom structures and continue to hold disproportionate leadership positions, which means that changing newsroom culture is also about addressing power.

Alicia Bell says analyzing power structures is part of the responsibility of journalism; to address rising white supremacy and the realities of workplace sexism, to stop violence and discrimination against LGBTQ people, and to serve the rural communities we have long overlooked or oversimplified, journalists need to look at how we operate. That means, in Bell's words, "shifting away from the kind of reporting that dehumanizes people and promotes transactional relationships, to media rooted in community that prioritizes deep listening and collaboration."

Some of us don't want to just describe this messed-up world. We want to describe its power dynamics in such a way that helps and motivates people who are working to change it. And we want to work in organizations that don't discriminate against and oppress us.

The framework of media-based organizing could help journalism reckon with its own power structures. Allied Media Projects defines it as " any collaborative process that uses media, art, or technology to address the roots of problems and advances holistic solutions towards a more just and creative world." Not a bad definition for the process of journalism, if journalists were willing to try it.
ICYMI: Capital Gazette shooting shows the vulnerability of journalists
Lewis Wallace is a white transgender writer, editor, and multimedia journalist from the Midwest. He worked in public radio before becoming a freelancer, and his work focuses on people who are economically, politically, and geographically marginalized. Find him on Twitter @lewispants, or www.lewispants.com.

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To rebuild trust, we need to change journalistic process

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Even in the age of Trump, and with trust in journalists at historic lows, much of the industry remains convinced that it can triumph on truth-telling alone. But the problems are self-evident: News makers and consumers alike are overwhelmed with a constant frenzy of terrible news.

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Detroit-based service journalism organization

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Outlier Media is a Detroit-based service journalism organization. We identify, report, and deliver valuable information that helps residents create more accountability around the housing and utility issues they care about.

WHAT IS SERVICE JOURNALISM?

Service journalism is a news consumer-oriented approach to identifying information needs, building trust with news consumers, and creating accountability. By keeping residents first, we hope to give more than we take, and leave people with the information they need to create change and accountability in their own communities.

HOW DOES OUTLIER WORK?

We send personalized data over SMS text to Detroit news consumers. The text snapshot below shows what an early interaction between Outlier and a resident looks like from our end. If you want to try it yourself txt the word OUTLIER to 73224.

Message and data rates may apply. You may receive up to 4 messages a month, or more depending on interaction with the survey. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel at any time. Privacy and Terms can be found here.

After this chatbot driven interaction we invite each of our news consumers to talk directly with a journalist. About 40% of our users take us up on this offer. They ask questions about housing, taxes, or utilities and we report out the answers for them. These conversations drive our deeper-dive accountability and investigative work and are published in community, local, or national news outlets.

Click here to learn more about Outlier's data and privacy policy.

BUT, DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK?

It does! Outlier reaches roughly 400 Detroiters each week with valuable housing and utilities information. Consistently, 40% of our users ask for a personalized follow up. This means we are in regular conversation with more Detroiters than newsrooms many times our size. Our consumers are empowered to make important decisions to protect their families, avoid tax foreclosure and evictions, purchase new properties, and determine the most cost-efficient energy resource for their households.

Our individual engagement with residents has allowed dozens of residents to navigate or avoid altogether eviction, foreclosure or utility shut offs. Our broader based accountability reporting has led to local changes in policies and practice in rental inspections, and the county's tax foreclosure auction.

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE HOUSING AND UTILITIES?

When we decided to launch Outlier, our team used call center data from United Way's 211 service to identify the issues Detroiters frequently ask for help with. Given the national housing foreclosure crisis, years of economic disinvestment, and the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, the data revealed residents' top priority revolved around housing. This became Outlier's first area of interest.

The second most reported inquiry was utilities. As a result, Outlier recently added a second focus around utilities. We are looking forward to providing news consumers with the information they need to navigate loosely regulated utility companies and agencies.

WHAT IF I NEED MORE OR DIFFERENT INFORMATION?

Outlier is willing to look into any housing, property tax or utility question you might have. To get in touch with an Outlier journalist, contact info@outliermedia.org, or just tell us to "FOLLOW UP" with you when you text Detroit to 73224.

Message and data rates may apply. You may receive up to 4 messages a month, or more depending on interaction with the survey. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel at any time. Privacy and Terms can be found here.

WHAT ARE SOME OF OUTLIER'S DATA SOURCES?

We use public data, FOIA requests, and sometimes even buy data to help Detroit residents receive updated housing and utilities information. Sources include:

Detroit Parcel Points Ownership Database (Detroit Open Data)

City of Detroit Building, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department (Detroit Open Data)

City of Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (FOIA requests)

The Office of the Wayne County Treasurer (LOVELAND Technologies web scraper)

WHAT IS OUTLIER'S EDITORIAL POLICY

Outlier Media makes decisions about how and where to focus our reporting resources based on where we see information and accountability gaps for Detroiters. We do not make decisions about what to cover based on anything else, including the opinions of our donors or supporters. This "firewall" is part of what keeps us editorially independent.

We accept donations and grants from individuals and foundations but we do not make reporting decisions based on this support. News judgments are made independently. Outlier does not accept donations from government sources, political parties, elected officials, candidates seeking public office or groups likely to intersect with our reporting as sources or subjects. Outlier Media does not accept funding where an NDA is required.

Outlier journalists do not accept gifts or favors of more than nominal value, nor any special treatment, from any person or group that is or could be a source or the subject of our reporting. We follow the conflict of interest policy of our fiscal sponsor, Investigative Reporters and Editors.

DOES OUTLIER EXIST IN OTHER CITIES?

Outlier is proud to call Detroit home. We also encourage others beyond The Motor City, especially journalists and foundations, to utilize this framework to connect residents with the information they need and value.

HOW DOES OUTLIER MAKE MONEY?

Outlier is a fiscally sponsored project of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Over the years, we have been supported by grants from the Facebook Journalism Project, Kellogg Foundation, the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan, Democracy Fund, and the News Integrity Initiative. If you would like to support Outlier's work, we encourage you to click on the DONATE button on your desktop or mobile device.

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Outlier Media is a Detroit-based service journalism organization. We identify, report, and deliver valuable information that helps residents create more accountability around the housing and utility issues they care about. WHAT IS SERVICE JOURNALISM? Service journalism is a news consumer-oriented approach to identifying information needs, building trust with news consumers, and creating accountability.

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"Service journalism is a news consumer-oriented approach to identifying information needs, building trust with news consumers, and creating accountability.  By keeping residents first, we hope to give more than we take, and leave people with the information they need to create change and accountability in their own communities." -Outlier Media

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Six highlighted findings from the "Out of Struggle" report

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Hi, I'm Anna. I'm an editor here at Scalawag, and while I've been doing my part to help produce this wonderful magazine, I've also been working on another media experiment with an organization called Project South. Recently, we published a report about what we've been up to. I want to share it here, because Scalawag has played an important role in shaping what could become a powerful force for reporting on social movements in the South.

Once when I was visiting a Northern state, someone asked me if there are any liberals in the South. Dumbfounded, I reached for a reference that would be familiar to him. "Where do you think all the people from the Civil Rights Movement went?" I said. "Where do you think their children and grandchildren are?" I assumed he was asking me if there were people who valued and fought for justice in the South, though it later occurred to me that those things aren't implicit in the term "liberal." Maybe he was just asking me if there were middle class white people like him who read The Nation. Of course, they are in the South too. The South has everybody.

Either way, it's true that there are vast numbers of people across the South who are fighting for the survival, well-being, and self-determination of their communities. It's also true, as this person's question demonstrated, that the ups and downs of these struggles are unknown to many people both within and outside the region.

Did you know that municipal workers in Greensboro, North Carolina, recently fought for and won a union? Or that refugee groups in Clarkston, Georgia, successfully pushed for a city ordinance that prevents local law enforcement from helping ICE detain undocumented people? How about that formerly incarcerated people in Alabama crafted a bill and got it passed, restoring voting rights to thousands of people with felony convictions? Hopefully you know that this month the Federation of Southern Cooperatives celebrates fifty years of fighting to protect Black farmers from land loss and discrimination, and that next month the Highlander Research and Education Center celebrates 85 years of training and supporting Southern organizers who have catalyzed liberatory change on many fronts.

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These short-term wins and long-term movements matter not only to the Southerners who are more free as a result. They also matter nationally and globally, because the South is a testing ground for oppressive systems and policies that are eventually exported to other regions via the nation's largest conservative Congressional delegation. Repressive and regressive policies remain intact through entrenched voter disenfranchisement and corporate investment, including corporate-controlled media. Movement wins create space for community-led solutions, but how do they spread and build to ultimately challenge the right-wing stronghold on the South if they don't get widespread attention?

Enter the Southern People's Media Network. For the past year, I've worked as a Movement Communications Fellow at Project South, a movement-building organization that works with communities on the frontlines of struggle in thirteen states from West Virginia to Texas, as well as with partners nationally and throughout the Global South. We have undertaken a project to develop and launch a media vehicle that meets the information needs of Southern social movements through "movement journalism."

When we talk about "movements," we mean people coming together to build the power of everyone to collectively control the conditions of our lives and our communities. Movement journalism is investigation and reporting in the service of the social, political, and economic transformation necessary to make this vision of grassroots power a reality.

We set out to take stock of independent media infrastructure in the South, explore experiments and innovations in the journalism field nationwide, study the history of movement journalism and what it has to teach us, and collect input from organizers, media-makers, and cultural producers throughout the region.

Recently, we released a report called "Out of Struggle: Strengthening and Expanding Movement Journalism in the U.S. South." Here are six highlights from what we found:

1.) There is a rich legacy of journalism rooted in struggle. In the journalism field today, there's an ongoing debate about whether journalists can and should be neutral, versus staking a claim in the issues they cover. Historically, oppressed peoples have used journalism to contest their subjugation and disseminate information critical to freedom struggles. We looked to journalists of color like Ida B. Wells, who was pushed to investigate lynchings after three of her friends were murdered by a white mob. Another white mob burned the office of the Memphis newspaper she owned in 1892, but Wells continued her work as both an investigative journalist and activist dedicated to abolishing lynching. We concluded that our approach to journalism, while not embraced by everyone in the field today, has powerful precedents (as well as plenty of contemporary examples) that we should build upon. An excellent resource for further reading on this topic is, " News for All the People," by Juan González and Joseph Torres.

2.) Across the South, independent media are doing vital local work, but some important stories are still unreported. There's a significant opportunity to partner with existing media to support and expand their journalism. We identified dozens of media outlets that are serving communities engaged in social movements in 13 Southern states:

91 radio stations -- There's WYDO, started by a migrant workers' rights group in Nashville, Tennessee, and WKCG in Dothan Alabama, founded by a formerly incarcerated pastor who works with prisoners to challenge mass incarceration, to name just two.

85 Black-owned newspapers -- The Green County Democrat in Eutaw, Alabama, is an inspiring example. Its publishers are long-time civil rights organizers who led a successful campaign to take over the paper from racist, white editors in the 1980s.

28 alternative weekly papers -- These papers have a long history of critical reporting, and some are now looking for ways to expand their reach, like the Arkansas Times in Little Rock, which recently launched the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network to produce and disseminate stories with "the potential to bring about change" throughout the state.

25 community access television stations -- At these stations, like The People's Channel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, anyone can learn to produce content for television, access the necessary tools, and broadcast their work.

A handful of regional publications -- Like Scalawag! And like Facing South, the online successor of Southern Exposure, a magazine that published investigative reporting about the South for decades.

An innumerable array of local news websites and blogs

Many of these outlets are under-resourced, and those that we spoke with could quickly name important investigative stories and creative projects they would tackle if they were able. They expressed interest in being part of a network that could offer quality syndicated content, greater capacity for original reporting, access to shared tools and resources, and opportunities for collaboration.

3.) Connecting independent news organizations and fostering participatory journalistic methods can make their work more broadly impactful. The financial failure of newspapers over the past decade no doubt created a crisis in journalism. But it also led to some fantastic new journalism projects designed to fill in the gaps where legacy news organizations have fallen short, foster collaboration between newsrooms, and directly involve the public in newsmaking. For example, Chicago's City Bureau trains community members to produce investigative reporting on themes decided in public forums. The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) supplies hard-hitting stories to various publications by supporting a network of freelancers who hone their skills through collaborative reporting. BINJ has created a public presence with pop-up newsrooms and other creative strategies that enable the public to shape their coverage. These and other projects offer models we can draw on to make journalism directly responsive to communities engaged in social movements.

4.) We need to change how mainstream media cover social movements, and how national media cover the South. As Carlton Turner, Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS, told us, "The national media uses Mississippi as an example of how not to be." The same could probably be said of the entire South. When it comes to coverage of social movements, we heard from organizers that media tend to portray campaigns as individual struggles, rendering invisible the power of organizing to transform society. We found promising models for changing these shortcomings, including coordinating op-ed placements, creating a clearinghouse to connect journalists with grassroots sources, and working directly with editors to improve their coverage, and in turn, expand their readership.

5.) Access to strategic media engagement services can benefit grassroots groups that journalists are overlooking. In frontline communities, the people doing impactful work often don't have the extra capacity it takes to make journalists pay attention to their work and tell their stories right. We conducted a case study in which I served as a media specialist for The Ordinary Peoples Society and the Free Alabama Movement as they organized an historic, nationwide prison strike in September 2016. We found that working directly with organizations and providing specialized support can dramatically improve media coverage. We looked to the Twin Cities Media Alliance, which publishes the Twin Cities Daily Planet and offers media trainings to the public, for ideas on how a media organization can both provide media relations services and operate an independent newsroom.

6.) There are creative and principled ways to fund movement journalism. We found several initiatives, like the Banyan Project, working to create cooperative newsrooms financially supported by members. Syndication is a traditional revenue model that continues to sustain independent media networks like The Pacifica Network. And the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair University is developing the concept of Community Information Districts, where community media would be funded through a local tax or fee. There are myriad ways independent media have found to create additional revenue streams, from rewards cards, to merchandise, to events. Combining some form of membership structure with a strategic combination of funding sources can ensure that movement journalism is sustainable.

We don't know yet what exactly a Southern People's Media Network will look like--now that we have this foundational knowledge, we're working with organizational leaders, journalism partners, and experienced media makers to hammer that out. What we do know is that we need journalism and a communications infrastructure that advances Southern freedom struggles and amplifies them to the rest of the world. We have the tools to make it happen.

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Hi, I'm Anna. I'm an editor here at Scalawag, and while I've been doing my part to help produce this wonderful magazine, I've also been working on another media experiment with an organization called Project South. Recently, we published a report about what we've been up to.

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Out of Struggle: Strengthening and expanding movement journalism in the U.S. South

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Out of Struggle: Strengthening and expanding movement journalism in the U.S. South

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Simonton's report on community and minority-owned media outlets in the South

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A survey of independent media in the South asks if “movement journalism” can help newsrooms better cover social justice strife

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A survey of independent media in the South asks if “movement journalism” can help newsrooms better cover social justice strife

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Interview with Anna Simonton, co-founder of Press On

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Civic journalism, advocacy journalism, engagement journalism: All are buzzwords in the industry right now, particularly as the Internet allows groups underrepresented in the mainstream media to stake their own claims and amplify their own voices.

But Anna Simonton, an Atlanta-based freelance reporter and researcher for racial and economic justice nonprofit Project South, hopes that "movement journalism" creates a strong impact - and she plans to lead it by starting her own collaborative media organization. (Simonton also edits Scalawag, a magazine of Southern politics and culture and is on the board of a community radio station, WRFG, in Atlanta.)

Simonton recently took a deep dive into the community and minority-owned media landscape of the American South - so deep, in fact, that she spent over a year researching and reporting her findings in a 62-page report called Out of Struggle. Her report takes stock of the independent media landscape in the 13 states of the traditional South, from Texas to Florida to West Virginia, and was commissioned by Project South.

"We have good stuff that people are doing, [but] it's very localized. How do we strengthen that and expand that impact?" she told me. "That's what we think we can bring to the mix: finding some ways to offer services, support, training, et cetera, to increase the amount of journalism that's going on in these already existing media outlets."

This endeavor is geared toward connecting existing media groups and community and minority-owned news outlets, as well as producing original reporting about social justice movements in the region. It also aims to cross the digital divide that separates many news organizations, especially those who are exclusively online, from potential audiences. Next up: Simonton's bringing the project to the Southern Movement Assembly, a gathering of 600 people organized by Project South in Whittaker, North Carolina this October.

I spoke with her last week - before this weekend's violence in Charlottesville - about her experience with movement journalism and how digital-based news fits into the landscape of the South. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation.

Christine Schmidt: What made you think this study was needed?

Anna Simonton: After college and an internship [at liberal magazine The Nation], it felt like the next steps would be a job in New York City or San Francisco or D.C., somewhere in the realm of progressive-leaning media, because I knew that was my place as a journalist. I wanted to come home to the South for various reasons and see if I could find an outlet like that essentially to work at. There are some, but our independent media environment here is just not as robust as it is in the hubs, in the big cities on the coasts and D.C. I went at it on my own as a freelancer and learned a lot that way, did end up doing what I think is some meaningful reporting...on things going on in the South that weren't getting covered.

We think that we need more coverage of people who are taking action to change their lives for the better, more reporting that sheds light on the forces they are up against - how is oppression functioning, why do these problems exist, who is responsible for them. Through our own experiences, we felt we needed this sort of journalism, starting with a research phase to this open-ended project of developing and launching something. We said, "Let's really map the independent media landscape and find out what people are already doing and strengthen that, then create something original to fill in whatever gaps may exist."

Schmidt: What makes movement journalism different from advocacy journalism?

Simonton: It's something that I'm still thinking through. In some ways, it's a bit of semantics, but advocacy journalism is in the same tent. There's something about the term "advocacy" that almost implies you may or may not have a journalist have a stake in this, or that there may or may not be people outside of you that are doing something about it. You might be the journalist writing about this thing saying some change needs to happen and you might be acting individually. Movement journalism is about realizing there are people who are trying to build collective power and organizing together to make fundamental shifts in the power dynamics of our society. That's our priority in terms of coverage.

Schmidt: In the report, you tallied the number of alternative media outlets in the 13 southern states and found 91 radio stations, 25 public access television stations, 85 black-owned newspapers, 28 alternative weekly papers, 9 street newspapers, and various local print and online publications. What has the community and minority-owned digital landscape been like?

Simonton: With digital, honestly, some of the research on that was ad hoc. I didn't arise on a really concrete method for comprehensively identifying the digital media landscape of the South. It was whatever came across my radar and if I could dig in and find a trail of breadcrumbs. Most print outlets have their online presence and especially for these big regional publications like Facing South and the Oxford American and Scalawag. On the local level, there's a huge range. What some people would all citizen journalism in local areas for people who may not have a journalism background have taken it seriously and done really good reporting. It includes people who have gotten laid off through the upheaval of the journalism industry.

Schmidt: You also noted in the report that there is a divide between those who access the Internet and those who can't access it, especially in the South. What are some of the best ways, in your opinion, for news organizations to cross that divide, especially for digital-based organizations?

Simonton: A brilliant way to do it is where there's a digital home for southern regional reporting that gets tweaked a bit for a local angle for partners on the ground. It can get disseminated in a way that attempts to bridge the digital divide. Or you put it online first and then take that into a monthly roundup of that reporting and producing a little newspaper that gets distributed all over the place. Radio is a huge one - I want to start with print and radio [with the media organization she's developing].

Schmidt: Right, because with audio you can put that online as a podcast or on air as a radio program.

Simonton: Yes, radio feels like the most salient way to me to not only bridge the digital divide but also the literacy divide. It's in such a heyday right now.

Schmidt: Can you tell me more about the member-owned cooperative model that you said has strong potential in your report? What funding options have you discovered through your research?

Simonton: The main one is the Banyan Project. It's online-only, based in a small town in Massachusetts, but their basic idea is to have these hyperlocal online-only news sites that are funded through a $36 annual membership. In some way, it's not too different from how we fund public radio because that's membership driven as well, but in the Banyan model, members not only have the great benefit of journalism as they need but they also have tangible benefits on top of that like voting power over the director. I think that we're interested in taking that and saying: What would it look like if a community owned its own news outlet? There's one in Canada that has started an online community news co-op that creates this incredibly direct relationship between the people producing news and the community that this news is for and about and that's a big part of what we want. It's inherent to movement journalism.

Schmidt: What's something that surprised you in your findings?

Simonton: What surprised me was how much we do have in the South. As I mentioned, coming back [from cities with a lot of media like New York City], it's easy to look around and feel like there's a pretty bleak picture. That's true in a lot of ways. As I started to do this mapping and reaching out to folks, it was amazing to me to be able to look at this map of 91 radio stations and it covers 13 states. We have good stuff that people are doing, [but] it's very localized. How do we strengthen that and expand that impact?

I was also surprised by people's eagerness and willingness, because a lot of these folks [in media] are under-resourced in a way that's "get through the day and keep the lights on." Not all these places are doing journalism per se, they're definitely meeting a need in terms of information in their community but it may not include original reporting. That's what we think we can bring to the mix: finding some ways to offer services, support, training, et cetera to increase the amount of journalism that's going on in these already existing media outlets. This is something a lot of people do want - "If you can find a way to make this happen, we will participate!"

Schmidt: What is the timeline like for this endeavor going forward?

Simonton: Now, the development phase is taking this body of knowledge that we've collected and already vetted through a roundtable we had with some of the folks featured in the report. Does this report reflect everything that it could? Are there glaring gaps? It was a long process and that was important to us, that our processes are as collaborative as we're saying is important in journalism. Moving on from here into development and the launch phase, I could see development taking another year as we fundraise and in order to be able to bring more people onto a core team. The ultimate goal is to launch separate from Project South. This will not be a project within their org; they're incubating it.

Image of the Greene County Democrat team in Alabama provided by Anna Simonton. The current owners bought out their successors after picketing and boycotting them for what they considered racist coverage in the 1980s and have run the paper ever since, which Simonton describes as a prime example of movement journalism.

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A survey of independent media in the South asks if "movement journalism" can help newsrooms better cover social justice strife

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Civic journalism, advocacy journalism, engagement journalism: All are buzzwords in the industry right now, particularly as the Internet allows groups underrepresented in the mainstream media to stake their own claims and amplify their own voices.

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Press On: A Southern Collective for Movement Journalism

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Press On: A Southern Collective for Movement Journalism

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"Social movements are made up of communities of people who are building power to change conditions for the better. When we talk about movement journalism, we mean journalism that strives to meet the needs of communities that are directly affected by injustice, and that are taking action toward liberation for all people."
- Anna Simonton, co-founder of Press On

Our Mission

Press On is a Southern collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation.

We are journalists, storytellers, and organizers rooted in, and practicing solidarity with, oppressed communities that birth social movements. We are based in the South, and we strive to uphold Southern traditions of storytelling that have long resisted the systems of extraction, exploitation, and colonization that have defined mainstream journalism.

By providing a diverse set of resources including trainings, fellowships and opportunities for network-building, Press On aims to help journalists and storytellers produce reporting that's driven by communities that are building power to create transformative social change.

Our Values

WE BELIEVE that the South is the critical site for leadership in the growing practice of movement journalism, and that Black Southern freedom struggles serve as a model for liberation.

WE BELIEVE that journalism driven by people who are building power within marginalized and oppressed communities is necessary to creating transformative social change.

WE ARE COMMITTED TO producing journalism that is transparent, accurate, and evidence-based.

WE ARE COMMITTED TO using journalism as a tool to support social justice organizing, and to use organizing as a tool to transform the field of journalism.

THROUGH THIS WORK WE HONOR the legacy and lived experiences of the communities we are a part of and in solidarity with: Black and indigenous people, immigrants, oppressed people in rural communities, queer and trans people, and all systematically oppressed Southerners, from the Delta to Appalachia, who tell stories to ensure our humanity, dignity and power.

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"Social movements are made up of communities of people who are building power to change conditions for the better. When we talk about movement journalism, we mean journalism that strives to meet the needs of communities that are directly affected by injustice, and that are taking action toward liberation for all people."

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[Transcription]
- Prioritizes stories that amplify the power of people in action to transform the world
- Produces news that is based in the experiences and identities of oppressed peoples
- Uses investigative reporting to expose how agents and systems of oppression operate
- Eliminates hierarchies between editors and reporters, between reporters and sources
- Trains journalists to be stakeholders, and stakeholders to be journalists
- Honors the many ways people use language and grammar
- Shares information with organizers so that movement strategy and reporting develop simultaneously
- Develops shared political analysis between journalists and communities

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“[An] ethical model for the production of journalism that is based in and accountable to grassroots and under-represented communities and social justice causes.” -Lewis Wallace, host of "The View From Somewhere" and co-founder of Press On

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The history of journalism's relationship with the police and over-reliance on police sources (Twitter: @alexandrianeas)

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It was unseasonably warm the day Joshua Beal, a twenty-five-year-old Black man from Indianapolis, was killed by a white police officer in Chicago. Beal was in town to attend a cousin's funeral. Around three o'clock in the afternoon of November 5, 2016, a long procession of mourners lined up their cars at the exit of Mount Hope Cemetery and spilled out into the neighborhood of Mount Greenwood, in the city's southwest corner. Mount Greenwood is home to many of Chicago's police officers and firefighters; nearly 85 percent of its residents are white, in a city where people of color make up the majority. The ensuing altercation-between a family of Black mourners and two off-duty cops-would trigger pressure points familiar to Chicago, and to the rest of the country.

By the official police account-and the media retellings that echoed it-the killing resulted from a bad bout of road rage. On 111th Street, near South Troy Avenue, an off-duty firefighter called out from his car window to a member of the funeral procession: they were blocking a fire lane. Both drivers got out of their cars and began to argue. The argument escalated. According to a postmortem examination report, Beal, a passenger in a Dodge Charger, retrieved a firearm from the Dodge. An off-duty police officer, later identified as Joseph Treacy, was at a business nearby and, per the examination and press accounts, aimed to break up the altercation and got caught in the fray.

There were numerous witnesses. In all, thirty-two calls were made to 911 as Beal's family struggled to de-escalate the situation. Soon, Thomas Derouin, a police sergeant from the 22nd Precinct who happened to be driving by, stopped and, according to the Chicago Police Department, announced that he was an officer. He yelled, the report stated, attempting to intervene. Then he noticed that Beal was holding a gun. "Beal fired at the Off-Duty Sergeant one time," according to the examination report. Derouin, "in fear of his life," returned fire, discharging his weapon seven times. Beal collapsed. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center and pronounced dead at 3:44pm.

As news of the shooting spread, a familiar police narrative began to take shape in the press. Articles said that the officers, despite being off duty, were in full uniform. The implication was that the cops involved were justified in shooting Beal because it was clear they were cops, and because Beal chose not to lower his weapon. The examination report, filed at 10:53pm the night Beal died, stated that Derouin "was in full uniform on his way to work." Anthony Guglielmi, the senior spokesman for the Chicago police, repeated this detail to reporters at the Chicago Tribune, the local CBS affiliate, and other outlets.

The Beal family's account sharply contradicted the police narrative. (Some articles included their version of events, or said that the family rejected the police explanation, but most prioritized the official account.) Beal's sister, Cordney Boxley, told local reporters that a cop in an unmarked car cut off both her and a seventeen-year-old girl also driving in the funeral procession and later pushed another family member to the ground, pointing a gun at her. The family insisted that it was never clear that the men who had arrived on the scene were law enforcement-a claim supported by the 911 calls, which would be released to the public months later. Eyewitness videos would also surface, depicting a crowd of people jostling noisily to break up a tense argument, as well as loud music playing from a nearby car; there's lots of chaos and little clarity.

Only a year earlier, Chicagoans had erupted in protest after the release of footage depicting the killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager, by a white cop. For months, the police department had insisted that the officer's shooting of McDonald was justified, because McDonald had been holding a knife and lunged at police; witnesses disputed that account, and it took a judge's order, in a lawsuit brought by an investigative journalist, to make public the video that proved the police were lying. McDonald had never lunged at the officers; in fact, he had begun to walk away. When Beal was killed-and, once again, the family's story diverged from the police account-the city experienced a tragic sense of déjà vu.

It was not the first time that a white cop had shot and killed a Black man, nor the first time that police officers had described it in ways that contradicted witness accounts. The very concept of a "justified" killing-in police terminology, a "good shoot"-betrays the paradox inherent in police communications: A police department exists to protect the public and to protect itself, but can it ever really do both? In relaying information about a crime in which an officer may have been at fault, brand management becomes a priority. Victims-who more often than not are Black-have long listened to police with skepticism, expecting misinformation about themselves and their communities. Journalists have struggled to tell the whole story.

Modern American police departments emerged in the 1830s out of a desire to control "disorder" in growing cities, starting with Boston. New York City followed, then Albany, and then Chicago, in 1851. Police officers were offered steady, full-time employment supported by public funds, and had a broad mandate to define what "disorder" meant-drunk people in the street, prostitution, hooliganism-in the interest of protecting the citizenry. According to Gary Potter, a crime historian at Eastern Kentucky University, "Early American police departments shared two primary characteristics: they were notoriously corrupt and flagrantly brutal." They were also valorized by American culture, including in the mainstream press. Crime stories provided great hero's tales and horror dramas to sell papers.

A police department exists to protect the public and to protect itself, but can it ever really do both?

In the eyes of people from marginalized communities, the press was an ally of police officers who enforced white supremacy. In 1955, for instance, when Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was beaten and shot to death by white men in Mississippi, news outlets in the South presented Till's killers sympathetically and focused on Till's alleged infraction-whistling at a white woman while shopping for candy-rather than the investigation into his abduction and murder. The New Orleans Times-Picayune featured quotes from police officials who cast doubt on whether the disfigured Black body pulled from a river was actually Till's. A headline in the Atlanta Constitution referred to him as the "Wolf Whistle Boy" in its coverage of the trial. The Jackson Daily News quoted the unverified theory of a local sheriff: "The whole thing looks like a deal made up by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

The Black press, read widely among African Americans but virtually ignored by white people, took a different tone. The Chicago Defender ran headlines that referred to Till as a martyr. Black newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News and the Atlanta Daily World described Till's injuries in greater, more graphic detail than was typical in white newspapers. A headline in The Crisis described the tragedy as "Mississippi Barbarism." But in the days of state-sanctioned racial apartheid, the reach of these reports was limited, and the dominant narrative was the white one. An all-white jury, having deliberated for just over an hour, declared the killers not guilty-despite the fact that the men had been identified by eyewitnesses and confessed to kidnapping Till. (Last year, the Justice Department said that it had received "new information" about Till's death, after his accuser admitted that she'd lied.)

The status quo held for generations: to an overwhelming degree, the relationship between cops and reporters was symbiotic. Jim Mulvaney, on the beat in New York City in the seventies and eighties, was born in Hollis, Queens, and the officers he wrote about were, like him, mostly Irish. "So there I was," he recalled to me, "Jim Mulvaney, in a bar with a couple Irish guys hanging around." Reporters working the cops beat saw themselves in their subjects-"They were blue-collar types. Jimmy Breslin didn't go far in college; Pete Hamill did not graduate from high school. They were from working-class families," Mulvaney said-and in those days, they were given plenty of time and money to cultivate sources. "I would start my morning at Dunkin' Donuts-would buy three dozen and get three rolls of dimes for pay phones," Mulvaney recalled. "I would go into the detective squad room, and everyone is like, 'Where's the donuts? All right, have a seat, Jimmy.' " He had an evening routine, too. "I had an obscene expense account where I could walk into a bar in the early eighties and put a hundred-dollar bill down, and everybody drinks on me, all the cops."

Conversation flowed, and the narrative that emerged was sympathetic. "In the old days, there was more favor-trading than now," Mulvaney said. "I would frequently carry wads of Yankees and Rangers tickets." He was relatable, and he was plugged in. "If you establish a reputation as a stand-up person," he explained, "you're more likely to find some cooperation." Maintaining that reputation generally meant accepting what information cops offered, not challenging it.

Over time, however, the dynamic changed. "With Watergate, the new breed of reporters wanted to be investigative," Mulvaney said. Journalism began to attract a wider variety of people and its makeup no longer reliably mirrored that of the police force. In the years that followed, violent-crime rates began to drop, and reporters, with fewer shock-and-horror stories to tell, instead unveiled police corruption. In response, police leadership increasingly prioritized reputation; across the country, departments formalized communications. Police sources became more and more likely to direct reporters to public information officers, known as PIOs, or to defer to their commissioner. Reporters could still sometimes call upon sources in police departments, but the opportunities diminished. The shift made it easier for departments to disseminate misinformation that protected cops who abused their power-something that never required online troll farms, only the simple, human technology of false statements, obstruction, and evasion. "While PIOs are nominally in charge of information, it's really the public relations arm of the police department," Mulvaney, who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explained. "The job of public relations is advertising, not transparency. It's improving the image of the department. There's some stuff they have to divulge, but the main function is to make the cops look good."

In 1991, when officers from the Los Angeles Police Department violently beat Rodney King, a Black man who had been driving home from a friend's house, footage taken from a nearby balcony made cops look bad. The owner of the video took it to KTLA, a local news station, after which it was viewed widely. A year later, the officers involved were acquitted, and LA erupted in riots. More than any event prior, the assault on King upended the way police stories were told. The availability of video, and the visible contradictions in police comment about the case, made it impossible for journalists to ignore the dreadful reality at hand.

Since then, reporting budgets and newsroom staffs have declined, which means the press-police dynamic often gets pared down to bare, transactional dialogue, prying for information about the most controversial cases. At the same time, body cameras and social media have provided more alternatives to the official police line. In 2016, a police officer shot and killed a thirty-two-year-old Black man named Philando Castile, a school nutritionist who had been pulled over in his car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The incident was captured by a dashboard camera; Castile's fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, was in the car with her daughter and quickly began streaming video of the aftermath on Facebook Live. Coverage of Castile's death was able to draw upon non-police accounts as never before; meanwhile, the public's perception of events was shaped by a narrative other than what police officials wanted to push. In offering a more nuanced, more complex portrait of what makes a "crime" story, journalists were only just beginning to peel away layers that, for years, insulated the police from real press scrutiny.

Cops, for their part, are vexed when reporters seek out information beyond what's provided. A 1995 encyclopedia of police practices characterizes the Freedom of Information Act as inherently antagonistic, deepening "the rift between police and the media." The book describes law enforcement's belief that media is "extremely liberal and permissive" and interested in "zealously" pursuing stories of police corruption because it "almost always garners headlines and television attention." Joseph E. Scuro Jr., a consultant to police departments, writes, "Part of the problem is that reporters often believe that the police routinely withhold information from them, or worse yet, regularly release inaccurate information. Sometimes this causes a reporter to 'dig' for the 'real' story when, in fact, there is none."

Chris Burbank, the vice president of strategic partnerships at the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), a think tank that studies disparities in policing, spent twenty-four years working as a police officer, including nine as the police chief in Salt Lake City. The relationship between police and the media, he says, is crucial on both sides. "Law enforcement is suffering a crisis of legitimacy," he told me recently. "And in order to gain that legitimacy back, you have to have good third-party validators, because you telling your own story does not work."

Over time, police departments have done some things to really wear down public trust. We've treated people poorly."

When officers don't talk, Burbank argues, their silence reinforces a pervasive belief that they don't, in fact, work chiefly for the public. During his time as police chief in Salt Lake City, he hired a radio host to act as media director of the department-a move that he says was considered controversial, since it was the first time that position had been filled by an outsider rather than a loyal cop. Where police chiefs used to appear in public only on select occasions (to accept an award or to boast about department accomplishments), Burbank went on local media frequently, in an attempt to garner trust with reporters-often to the chagrin of his own officers, who accused him of spending too much time on television. His instruction to his communications staff was to provide "as much truth as you possibly can." That is, while there may be details that shouldn't be released to reporters-such as the type of weapon used in a homicide, information only the suspect, still at large, would know-police should explain everything but. "You need to articulate that, not in a 'no comment,' but as 'There are things that we are investigating that we can't tell you right now. When the point comes, I'll be happy to tell you,' " Burbank said.

In his role at CPE, Burbank travels the country advising police chiefs on research-based reforms, including those that would improve their dealings with the media. Some departments are open to what he has to say, but too many still cling to a preference for silence. "It often takes on the tone of 'Tell them the bare minimum that you have to and then don't say anything else,' " Burbank said. "I think that's the wrong thing to do."

When it comes to cases like the Laquan McDonald shooting, if there's video evidence that a cop shot a civilian, Burbank tries to persuade cops to be open. "We routinely show bank footage or 7-Eleven footage of a robber coming in, and then we say, 'Hey, who is this person?' That doesn't seem to jeopardize our ability to prosecute a robber," he'll tell them. "Why, then, when an officer is involved in a shooting, and there's film, why does that somehow jeopardize our ability to investigate or conduct a proper prosecution? That's where it doesn't make any sense."

Burbank encourages the use of body cameras, though he argues that footage won't solve what underlies the trouble with misinformation in crime coverage: competing claims over truth. "I don't have any problem with the public filming all they want, but it doesn't provide truth," he told me. "What it provides is a factual representation. And then you may look at that and say, 'Boy, that officer was heavy-handed there.' And I'm going to look at it and say, 'No, I think he was all right there. I mean, it looked to me like this, and oh, by the way, I think the sky is blue today.' And you say, 'No, it was really overcast and gray.' " Information is one thing, but judgment can always be up for debate.

Chicago, of course, is not the only city where tensions arise between the press and police. But if the complicated case of Jussie Smollett, early this year, showed anything clearly, it was that there is deep distrust between the Black population of Chicago and the police force, and that from distrust can come confusion, misinformation, and resentment. Guglielmi, the Chicago police spokesman, offered regular updates about the Smollett investigation on Twitter: an Empire star had reportedly been the victim of a hate crime; officers were seeking tips; surveillance footage was found; suspects were identified, interrogated, then released; Smollett was classified as a suspect, and charged; case closed. The story attracted wide fascination and outrage. When it was making headlines, a friend wondered aloud to me, "Why is anyone believing the Chicago police?"

Guglielmi, who has been the CPD's chief communications officer since June 2015, previously worked in public affairs for the police in Baltimore and led communications for the US Office of Special Counsel. He is tall and clean-shaven, with rectangular black glasses and a pursed-lipped smile. "The media, in my mind, is a vehicle to reach the public," he told me. His task in Chicago, a city with a long history of mistrust in the police, has been to transform his department into "a fully functional messaging and communications office," he said. In the past decade, he explained, standards have changed. The way things used to be, "When there was a criminal investigation, you didn't talk about it until charges were filed." But in Chicago and elsewhere, that will no longer suffice. "Over time, police departments have done some things to really wear down public trust," he said. "We've treated people poorly."

Guglielmi began streamlining how media inquiries would be handled, as his team was fielding about three hundred press requests per week. (In Baltimore, the average was closer to ninety per week.) "The first thing we did was set up a process in which information that was coming out to the media would be the same going out to police districts, community meetings, and in face-to-face interactions with officers and residents," he said. "Everybody is speaking from the same sheet of music, and that was hugely important." He also hired journalists and videographers to work for the CPD. "What we aim to do is be our own newsroom and storyteller," he told me.

Guglielmi started his job amid challenging circumstances. The Laquan McDonald case had gripped the city and country; the police department, via its communications team, was refusing to release dashcam footage showing what happened. In February 2015, an independent journalist published McDonald's autopsy report, detailing injuries that did not match police accounts. At least fifteen Freedom of Information Act requests for the dashcam video were filed; all were turned down because, the department argued, its release would interfere with an internal investigation. By the summer, when Guglielmi arrived, a freelancer was suing the city for the footage, and it came to light that, when the foia requests were denied, there had been no evidence of an active internal investigation.

"Laquan McDonald was a very high-profile, national incident that really tested our trust," Guglielmi told me. He wouldn't say why the CPD withheld the video-he didn't work there when reporters began to request it-but he speculated that the department was trying to avoid interfering with a federal probe into the shooting. "I don't know if that was the reason why the department didn't release the video," he said. "Speaking strictly from a communications perspective, you want to release as much information as possible without hurting the case."

In court, a judge ruled in favor of releasing the video. On November 24, 2015, Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, was charged with first-degree murder, and hours later the footage was made public, igniting a national uproar. The video was mostly without on-the-scene audio, however, and reporters soon learned that, among the dashcams on the squad cars present, none recorded sound; at least three didn't work at all. Police told DNAinfo that 80 percent of the department's dashcam systems failed to record audio due to "operator error or in some cases intentional destruction" by officers. When I followed up about this, Guglielmi told me, "We've got body cameras now, on the actual officer. It's a fail-safe." In October of this year, a report by Chicago's inspector general, newly released to the public, revealed that sixteen CPD personnel were involved in covering up the McDonald shooting, including by giving false statements and fabricating details.

Van Dyke was ultimately sentenced to just under seven years in prison; he'd been charged with sixteen counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for each shot that tore into McDonald. He was the first on-duty cop to be convicted of murder in nearly half a century. Since then, the CPD has made some adjustments to its communications strategy. Guglielmi installed computer terminals in the newsrooms of all major Chicago outlets to provide real-time information about police activity. After shootings in which officers are involved (what Guglielmi calls "use of force"), he is now consulted about what information can be released to the public and when-a change from the pre-McDonald days. "With Laquan McDonald, the department never updated the public record," he explained. "That's what really broke the trust between CPD and the community. I don't know why that didn't happen. What I can tell you now is that we built systems to try to make sure that we have a check and balance to the information we put out."

He went on, "All we have is our work and our trust. And if that is broken, it doesn't just affect our reputation-that's not what we care about-it affects our ability to do our job, make the city safer. It's not about the image." He also told me, "Every day you come in and look at how you're conducting business and improve it. You do better."

Investigative reporters have time to file information requests to the CPD and vet other sources, but those working on daily deadlines rarely get that opportunity-and it's their stories the public is most likely to read or see on TV. Josh McGhee, who writes for the Chicago Reporter, started his career at DNAinfo, where he filed multiple crime stories per day, often before 9am. "We were talking to the communications team every morning at 6am," McGhee said. "They would give us basic crime information on shootings. Usually there's not a lot of statements from the communications team, unless you go directly to the spokesman." Even when he was skeptical of the police, he was dependent on them. "You have to trust them as a source," he explained.

Over the years, McGhee came up against obfuscation, omission, and delay. Sometimes, officers would present uncertain information as fact, advancing a certain story line. "You don't realize how often someone is saying the kid had a knife and they don't recover the knife, a kid had a weapon and they don't recover the weapon," he told me. "How often that changes the narrative."

For McGhee, McDonald's death was a turning point. "I would say that I was always wary of stories from police and narratives given from police," he said. But after the McDonald case, he began asking himself, "How many times did I start the narrative by listening to police officers and printing what was said?" McGhee explained, "It forced me to realize that a lot of the time, if you're just taking the police side, you're getting a very one-sided story. How many times are the people who are calling in to a communications department going to go back on the ground and ask witnesses what happened?"

The demands that newsrooms place on crime reporters, particularly those working the daily beat, McGhee argues, make it too tempting to rely solely on police communications officers instead of building sources in neighborhoods where crime happens. "Depending on police sources is the number one way to go down the wrong road," he told me. "You can go to a crime scene and you can try to be the night crawler and get some kind of information, but is that the appropriate time to figure out what happened? This is a time of fear, this is a time of panic, this is a time of worry. But coming back to these instances and trying to talk to these families, you can piece together a better story of why this incident happened."

McGhee, who is a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, said that he's uniquely positioned to do that work in areas beset by crime-much in the same way Mulvaney once was, with cops. "They look like my family, they look like my mom; you're from around here, you know people from this neighborhood, you know people in these situations even if you don't know these specific people," he explained. "I think you can feel that when you're asking them to tell these stories. You're asking the right questions empathetically."

Two days after the death of Joshua Beal, the Chicago Tribune published two videos recorded on a bystander's cell phone. Screenshots circulated online; protests flooded the streets of Mount Greenwood. In January 2017, an independent review board released 911 calls and additional witness videos.

What emerged changed the nature of the story, Maya Dukmasova, of the Chicago Reader, told me. "The people calling kept saying there was a white guy waving a gun," she said. "No one who was calling 911 identified that the cop was a cop." One caller described a white man in a red shirt and jeans. Another reported a man with short hair and a gun. Twelve more callers sought help after shots rang out. Someone characterized the chaos as "a total race thing."

In the video, "nobody was wearing a uniform," Dukmasova observed. Derouin, who shot and killed Beal, was wearing blue cargo pants. "I guess they were uniform pants, but they were not immediately identifiable as such," she said. "He was wearing a White Sox hoodie or zip-up jacket. And he indicated himself, in his paperwork about the incident, that he was in plain clothes."

In initial press releases and interviews, Guglielmi had insisted that Beal and his family knew that the men who approached them were cops. But when Dukmasova compared press comments to the transcripts, she found that "the public information team was completely disproven by the 911 calls, the video, and the officer's own report."

On March 26, 2018, sixteen months after Beal was killed, Dukmasova published a follow-up story, exposing the misinformation in previous coverage. "No one reported the inconsistencies between the Police Department's prior accounts of Treacy and Derouin's actions and appearance and the information conveyed by the video, 911 calls, and internal documents," she wrote. Of Beal's mother, she added, "Although this incident has since disappeared from the news, the day's events are a never-ending tragedy."

When I asked Guglielmi about the conclusions of Dukmasova's piece, he told me that the frenzy of a crime scene makes it hard to get the facts right. "News is instant; information is instant, it's demanded in minutes," he said. "Unfortunately, when you go to a chaotic scene, whether it's a shooting or a fire or anything that requires great attention to detail and it's very chaotic, you're going to get misinformation. You're dealing with emotion, you're dealing with chaos." But aren't misstatements harmful? "What's important," Guglielmi said, "and this was a lesson from Laquan McDonald, is you have to update the record."

This past June, Chicago's Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) cleared Treacy and Derouin of wrongdoing. The official report acknowledged that the situation emanated "from a racially tinged confrontation between people who live in the neighborhood where it occurred and people who were merely driving through it." Both of the cops involved had received dozens of misconduct complaints that had gone unpunished, including, according to Dukmasova's reporting, incidents in which racial epithets were used.

As I've talked to various reporters and law enforcement officers, I've often heard them say that truth is at the root of their work. But to get to the truth, of which there are often many versions, we need access to a basic set of facts. What happened? To whom? By whom? Misinformation, whether by omission or outright lie, whether intentional or not, can confuse those facts and weaponize them. In cases of police brutality, law enforcement still has the upper hand: American culture, including the press, gives cops the benefit of the doubt. We ask what Beal did to cause Derouin to shoot him, not why a police officer would shoot a young man on his way home from a funeral in the midafternoon. Some interpretations of the truth, we have been taught, matter more than others.

And even having the facts can't save us from injustice. After the officers were sent back to work, the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times published a piece in support of the COPA ruling. "Ask yourself what a police officer is supposed to do when an angry young man pulls a gun-and points it-on a busy street on a Saturday afternoon," the board wrote. The editorial acknowledges the role race played in the initial altercation, describing it as "good ol' Chicago racism." It says that an officer was the first to draw his gun and mentions that much of the truth of what happened "will remain forever in dispute." Still, the board concludes, Treacy and Derouin did as they were trained to do: shoot. "All else-the racial taunts, verbal threats and general stupidity-becomes background noise." The editorial does not mention that, contrary to the official line of the CPD communications team, neither cop was in uniform.

Alexandria Neason is CJR's Staff Writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow. Previously, she was a reporter at The Village Voice and covered education for the Teacher Project, a partnership between Columbia Journalism School and Slate. A team she worked on won the 2016 Education Writers Association award for news features. Follow her on Twitter @alexandrianeas.

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It was unseasonably warm the day Joshua Beal, a twenty-five-year-old Black man from Indianapolis, was killed by a white police officer in Chicago. Beal was in town to attend a cousin's funeral.

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Why diversity must become sports journalism's most important priority

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Why diversity must become sports journalism's most important priority

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"To recap my research, these are the diversity numbers @TheAthleticHQ," Lee tweeted in April. "87.3% white, 74.6% white males, 4% Black journalists, 0 black females, 0 black editors, 7% Asian, 1.4% Hispanic, 12.6% Women." (Twitter: @carronJphillips)

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Diversity in the field of sports journalism, for lack of a better term, sucks.

It's always been that way and continues to be, despite the fact that the racial dynamics and sexual orientations of athletes on the field don't even come close to resembling what you'll find inside a local or national press box.

It's a sad reality, and one of sports journalism's oldest and ugliest secrets. Women and people of color are few and far between. And as the journalism industry is constantly dealing with layoffs and downsizing, the numbers that have always been dismal, are getting even worse.

Last week, the 2018 Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) Racial and Gender Report Card was released. It's a biannual account put together by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida, ran by Dr. Richard E. Lapchick, a human rights activist, author, and professor and pioneer for racial equality.

In full transparency, while myself, as a columnist, and sports editor Eric Barrow are two black men in positions of prominence at the New York Daily News, we too need to do better in terms of our sports desk, as well. Of the three editors directly under Barrow, two are white men. And of the 21 employees who are listed as a columnist or reporter on staff, 19 are white men. Nine of the 11 copy editors, designers and producers on the desk are also white men. Eighty-nine percent of our staff is made up of white guys.

According to the latest report: 85 percent of the sports editors, 76.4 percent of the assistant sports editors, 80.3 percent of the columnists, 82.1 percent of the reporters, and 77.7 percent of the copy editors/designers are white.

Added to that, 90 percent of the sports editors, 69.9 percent of the assistant sports editors, 83.4 percent of the columnists, 88.5 percent of the reporters, and 79.6 percent of the copy editors/designers were men.

I told you the numbers were pathetic.

And according to the report, the numbers get even worse when you take away the diversity of ESPN.

"Under the leadership of John Skipper, former President, ESPN has been a leader in the hiring of women and people of color in key positions. In fact, as will be seen, if we take away the ESPN hires as editors, assistant sports editors and columnists, the percentages of women and people of color in those positions would plummet precipitously," notes Lapchick.

The report goes on to reveal that if the ESPN assistant sports editors of color were removed, the percentage of assistant sports editors of color would drop from 23.6 percent to 7.8 percent. And that if the same happened for women, the percentage of female assistant sports editors would drop from 30.1 percent to 6.3 percent.

The decline could also be seen when it comes to columnists. If the ESPN columnists who are women were removed, the percentage of female columnists would drop from 18.6 percent to 2.9 percent. If the ESPN male columnists who are people of color were removed, the percentage of male columnists of color would drop from 21.6 percent to 5.6 percent.

The APSE newspapers and websites were given their fifth consecutive F for their gender hiring practices. The grade for racial hiring was a B, putting the combined grade for 2018 as a D+, the lowest of all the reports issued by TIDES.

But, while that B may look promising in terms of racial hiring, a closer look at the raw numbers will tell you that these could be considered "alternative facts."

"The Lapchick study came out and showed some improvement from the last one from 2014, and that the racial hiring percentages actually went up. But if you look closely at 2014, they had more participants. This year, they had less," former National Association of Black Journalist President Greg Lee told The News.

"So this study shows that the percentage of people of color working in the industry increased, but that's because the number of organizations that participated went down," he continued. "So look at the raw numbers and not the percentages. Because I wouldn't have given us a B for racial hiring at all, it should be a D at best."

Last month, Lee lashed out about diversity on social media when he reported some heart-stopping facts that were directed at The Athletic's hiring practices. The new sports website runs a subscription-based model and has come under fire multiple times in the last nine months for its lack of diversity. As of today, there isn't a single black female writer on staff.

"To recap my research, these are the diversity numbers @TheAthleticHQ," Lee tweeted in April. "87.3% white, 74.6% white males, 4% Black journalists, 0 black females, 0 black editors, 7% Asian, 1.4% Hispanic, 12.6% Women."

For a site that was thought to provide a blueprint for the future of sports journalism, seeing the same old hiring practices in a new space has been a gut-punch to women and people of color in sports journalism.

"You sort of think that there's this new kid on the block and maybe they'll sort of be a fresh start in a lot of different ways. So yeah, I get that," Taylor Patterson, The Athletic's communications director, told The News about the frustration that some minority journalists have expressed about the site.

"Diversity is a huge priority for us, and we have a lot of work to do on that front," she continued.

According to Patterson, The Athletic has been in constant contact with Lee and Sherrod Blakely, who serves as the President of the NABJ Sports Task Force.

"Listening is a huge component to what we need to be doing," Patterson said.

"We're now looking at other ways to make sure we're not just talking about diversity in terms of hiring numbers, but investing in diversity long-term. We're working on some projects internally which will reflect that.

"We have a very diverse readership and the writers that are covering their cities should reflect that."

Only time will tell if The Athletic makes good on its intention of having a more diverse staff or if it is just saying what its critics want to hear. But if real change is going to take place, it will also have to start within the culture at APSE.

"The NABJ Sports Task Force is always there to help with diversity staffing, and we've always been there," Lee said. "But it's time for the newsrooms to also put in the work, and using the excuse that the 'economy is bad and that everybody is trying to survive,' really doesn't cut the mustard for me. When we did these studies 20 years ago, during the good times, these same excuses were going on."

"There can't be any more excuses."

In the four-plus decades the APSE has been in existence, only six minorities have ever held the title of president. That includes one black man (Garry Howard), one Latino man (Mike Fannin), one Asian-American (Lynn Hoppes) and three women (Sandra Rosenbush, Tracy Dodds, and Mary Byrne) out of the 44 people that have ever held the office. And only three news agencies within APSE have African-American sports editors: ESPN, Syracuse.com (Jason Murray) and the New York Daily News (Barrow).

In 1993, the Sports Journalism Institute was created as an internship program for minority college students to enhance racial and gender diversity in sports departments across the country. In 2011, former APSE President Michael Anastasi created the APSE Diversity Fellowship Program for working, mid-career minority professionals who are interested in pursuing a path as a manager or sports reporter in the industry.

As you can see, APSE has had its moments in terms of making progress in diversity. But honestly, the organization has never lived up to its end of the bargain. However, the year 2020 could be the start of a new era.

In two years, Lisa Wilson will become the first black woman to serve as president. It's a situation that Wilson, the current sports editor of The Undefeated - ESPN's site that's dedicated to exploring the intersection of race, sports, and culture - said is overwhelming and flattering.

"It's not that even that I'm going to be the first president, but I'm going to be the first black woman elected to office in the 44 years of this organization," Wilson told The News.

"It's amazing to think, 'Wow, that's me!' But also to think, what's taken so long?"

Last month, Wilson was elected as second vice-president and will serve a three-year term that will ascend her to the presidency in 2020-21. She ran her platform on a simple slogan: "Representation Matters."

"It's no secret that diversity is what I want to do," Wilson said. "I want to increase membership overall, but I certainly want to increase membership among journalist of color and women. Because when you look around the room at our conventions every year, you can see that there's still work to be done."

Before joining The Undefeated last year, Wilson served as the sports editor of the Buffalo News, where from 2011-2017 she was the only black woman running a sports desk at a major metropolitan daily newspaper, which is why going to work every day at her new job has been so different for her.

"In my experience of always being the only black female in leadership, what struck me about walking into The Undefeated was the number of black women in leadership there," she said. "The managing editor, deputy editor, sports and culture leads, and copy chiefs are all women."

"I'm not the only voice, and it's incredible."

The Undefeated serves as a utopian society for minority sports journalists, it's a place that caters to and is operated by minorities. It's a black site that covers black culture.

That kind of diversity isn't necessarily what's needed across newsrooms and sports desk throughout the country, but the idea that representation matters is.

Diversity isn't about giving black sports journalists a job just to serve a quota. It's about hiring women and people of color from different nationalities to better connect with and relate to the athletes they're covering.

There's a reason why it was a black sportswriter, Steve Wyche, who was the first reporter to recognize and ask Colin Kaepernick about his peaceful protest. Giving the quarterback someone he could feel comfortable talking to, knowing his message would not be lost or misconstrued.

And for those who think that color shouldn't matter when it comes to hiring practices because "the best person should get the job," I'm here to tell you that you're thinking is not only wrong but myopic and covered in racism.

Newsrooms must have differing perspectives in order to grow and best serve their readers. How can a paper/website properly report or editorialize on issues that impact people of color or women without having voices in the newsroom that can add greater context?

If the goal is to build the best newsroom, diversity must be demanded.

Now is the time for change, as excuses can no longer be accepted.

Because if there's one thing to be taken away from the report and the current landscape of this industry, it's that diversity has to be a priority like never before.

Recommended on Daily News

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Phillips: Why diversity must become sports journalism's most important priority

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Diversity in the field of sports journalism, for lack of a better term, sucks. It's always been that way and continues to be, despite the fact that the racial dynamics and sexual orientations of athletes on the field don't even come close to resembling what you'll find inside a local or national press box.

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Letter from JOC at the Philadelphia Inquirer

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Letter from JOC at the Philadelphia Inquirer

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6/11/20: Five actions to make coverage and newsroom more representative

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One Thing Newsrooms Can Do: Capitalize "B" When Reporting About the Black Community by Sarah Glover

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One Thing Newsrooms Can Do: Capitalize "B" When Reporting About the Black Community by Sarah Glover

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Past president of the National Association of Black Journalists Sarah Glover explains why the "B" in Black should always be capitalized (Twitter @sarah4nabj)

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In the wake of the George Floyd tragedy and the subsequent call to eradicate racism that's manifested via protests worldwide, I'm writing today to request the mainstream news media begin capitalizing the "B" in Black when describing people and the community.

I'm also asking the Associated Press (AP) to update its Stylebook to reflect this change, effective immediately. This book is the bible for working journalists and sets journalistic industry standards. The AP has tremendous impact as a wire service with more than 1,000 subscribers worldwide.

Black is an encompassing term that is readily used to refer to African Americans, people of Caribbean descent and people of African origin worldwide. Capitalizing the "B" in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities. We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.

This step is a good first step to affirm the significance of being Black in America. This matters. It's to bring humanity to a group of people who have experienced forms of oppression and discrimination since they first came to the United States 401 years ago as enslaved people. I ask for this change in honor of the Black Press, which already capitalizes the "B" in Black, and in honor of the legacy of the 44 brave men and women who founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1975.

I'm not the first to propose this change. I've read multiple published opinions on the topic over the past decade in particular. I first asked AP editors to consider the change last August. As the then president of NABJ, I sent letters to all the candidates for presidential office to address the 4,400 Black journalists, media professionals, students and attendees at the 2019 NABJ Convention in Miami. I took note of the candidate responses by Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg as they both capitalized the "B" when describing the community and people.

"Just as Ethel Payne found herself the sole reporter asking about desegregation in the White House briefing room, Black journalists are still too often a lone voice of scrutiny. This gathering is an important opportunity to help change that by growing networks of Black journalists and ensuring that diverse perspectives are covering the stories that impact us all," Buttigieg wrote in response to my invitation.

While I was following AP style in my outreach to the candidates and not capitalizing the "B" in Black, I knew that, fundamentally, that style was wrong and inadequate.

"All too often, the interests and needs of Black Americans are underrepresented in mainstream media, and so are your stories," Sanders also responded last year.

During the riots following Freddie Gray's death while in custody of the Baltimore police in 2015, I wrote to the AP on behalf of NABJ stakeholders, and asked that the definition of the word "boy" be updated. The AP made the change in the 2018 Stylebook to include context to the word "boy" for describing Black men, which if not used properly can be racist due to historical connotations that may evoke Jim Crow-era references, including lynchings of Black men.

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One Thing Newsrooms Can Do: Capitalize "B" When Reporting About the Black Community

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In the wake of the George Floyd tragedy and the subsequent call to eradicate racism that's manifested via protests worldwide, I'm writing today to request the mainstream news media begin capitalizing the "B" in Black when describing people and the community.

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"Conscious language lives at the intersection of critical thinking and compassion." -Karen Yin, editor/creator/keeper of the Conscious Style Guide (Twitter: @karenyin)

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Conscious Language + Design - Conscious Style Guide

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For anyone curious or serious about conscious language. The latest observations, opinions, and style guides on conscious language-all in one place.

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'Unarmed Black Man' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

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'Unarmed Black Man' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

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When journalists write or broadcast these words - "unarmed black man"- what do you hear? It's a phrase that has become pervasive in the American news media, including on NPR's airwaves and in its digital news stories.

Since a string of deaths of young black men at the hands of police gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, the phrase has become journalistic shorthand for this message: white people unjustly shooting a black man, because their racial prejudice led them to assume he was a threat.

That's a lot of work for three words.

One loyal NPR fan pointed out to me that when we utter that phrase, it doesn't always mean the same thing for the speaker as for the listener. And now I can't stop hearing it.

Deirdre Moultrie noticed those words peppered throughout her two favorite sources of news, NPR and The New York Times' The Daily podcast, most recently in reference to the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Ga. Every time Moultrie, 41, from Randallstown, Md., heard the phrase spoken, it caused her pain.

As a preschool teacher and someone who devotes a lot of energy to educating and mentoring children, she wrote to our office: "I am begging NPR to stop referring to black men killed unjustly as 'unarmed black man.' ... Please stop! As a black woman and a lover of black men, it hurts me every time I hear this despicable phrase on the radio."

A search of the archive reveals that NPR has used the phrase 82 times in the past year. Five of those were headlines, 26 were in newscasts read at the top of the hour. And most of those references - 65 to be exact - occurred since Arbery was killed in February. In that same time period, "unarmed white man" does not appear anywhere in NPR's coverage.

After talking to editors inside and outside NPR, criminologists, journalists and Moultrie herself, I've concluded that the phrase is overused. Journalists everywhere, including those at NPR, should be cautious about when and why they use it, because it is rooted in hidden assumptions that are different, depending on who you are.

Most of the time, when a journalist writes or says, "unarmed black man," she is using the phrase as code, signaling to her audience that a victim of violence did not pose a deadly threat to the killer or killers, be they citizens or cops. Often that may well be true - but the headline-speak is insufficient journalistically to get to the explanation of why. What's more, that cliche presumes the first question we should ask about a black jogger is: Was he armed?

Indeed the entire story of unjustified violence by white people against black people is rooted in more than whether the black man did or didn't have a gun. Had Arbery been shot in the back while jogging by two men who assumed because he was black he was a fleeing burglar, and a gun was found in his pocket, would that make it more justifiable? The core narrative doesn't make sense unless you are familiar with and accept the premise that rooted deep in the collective American psyche is more than armed or unarmed: It's about a false assumption that black people are more likely to be criminals.

"The fact that you have to signify that a black person is unarmed is problematic," said Lorenzo Boyd, assistant provost for diversity and inclusion, and the director of The Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. "I understand it's descriptive, but it's hurtful."

The research is conclusive, Boyd said. Racial prejudice is deeply embedded in our culture, and it results in systemic discrimination by authority figures including police, security guards and even teachers.

"If we are assuming black people are armed, that premise is flawed," Boyd said.

This is not to suggest that when journalists use the phrase "unarmed black man," they are buying into that erroneous narrative of black criminality. In fact, it's more likely the exact opposite. Journalism is rooted in a long history of questioning authority - and usually the guys with the guns have the authority. We are also wired to explore the research that demonstrates how deep-seated prejudice seeps into the assumptions that lie under the judicial system, as well as the extra-judicial systems.

And when a journalist writes or utters the phrase "unarmed black man," she is often honestly trying to quickly convey the key question the audience has: What was the circumstance of the confrontation?

Here's how that logic plays out.
Journalist: A white man shot a black man.
Dubious audience member who might dismiss the story: What was the black man doing that caused the white man to shoot him?
Journalist: Well, the black man didn't have a gun, he posed no deadly threat.
Audience: That's important for us to know (because we have these hidden biases).
Journalist: Right, a white man shot an unarmed black man.

But it doesn't work.

"Language itself is complicated and it changes context," said Karen Yin, a veteran editor and the creator and keeper of the Conscious Style Guide, a resource that amalgamates dozens of recommendations and best practices for language describing communities historically marginalized by communicators. "The same language that works in one setting doesn't work in another setting."

Without being completely aware of it, journalists are using the phrase "unarmed black man" to indicate an episode in the wide arc of unjustified violence by white people against black people.

But from her home in Randallstown, when NPR listener Dee Moultrie hears the same phrase, she's really hearing: NPR journalists don't think white people will be sympathetic to a black man, unless they stipulate that he didn't have a gun.

"NPR and The Daily are where I get my news. That's what keeps me afloat. That's what keeps me entertained. It's almost like base, like home," Moultrie told me in a video chat this week. "I couldn't allow my space to be invaded by that phrase. So I had to say something. And it wasn't even out of anger."

Then she reconsidered, and realized that her media consumption was impacting the way she herself talked about the phenomenon of white violence against black people.

"Well, I was a little angry," she said. "But it was more so because I've said that phrase before. So like, OK, I have to tell Michael Barbaro (of The Daily podcast) to stop saying that. I have to tell NPR. Because they just don't know."

Now we know.

Gerry Holmes, NPR managing editor for planning and enterprise, told me there are several opportunities for newsroom journalists to discuss using this phrase. One comes as a related story is in the works, when reporters and editors decide the best words to use. Another opportunity for a discussion comes when someone inside or outside the newsroom raises a question.

"We try to be intentional about everything, every bit of language that we use in any written story for radio or online," he said. "Looking at this particular case, in this particular story, there were critical aspects to what we knew about the circumstances of that story that ended up in using that descriptor in that way. This is a black man, who was unarmed."

If I did have power to implement policy, here's what my guidance would say:

Be careful and intentional about using the phrase "unarmed black man" in stories about white people killing black people. While the specific information is vitally important to the story, use precise language in full context rather than speak in a code that is not heard in the same universal way by each member of the audience. Instead, slow your explanation down and stick to the facts. Imagine these questions about the phrase "unarmed black man." Answer them, but in more than three words. Why is it important that the assailant was white and the victim was black? What do you mean by unarmed? Are the shooters claiming to believe the victim had a weapon? If so, what kind of weapon? Would the victim being armed have justified the killing? Would you use the term to describe a white person? If not, why?

Yin told me this is the overall message of her style guide: "Conscious language lives at the intersection of critical thinking and compassion."

Language is messy and it evolves. As professionals, the best we can do is continue to evolve with it.

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'Unarmed Black Man' Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

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When journalists write or broadcast these words - "unarmed black man"- what do you hear? It's a phrase that has become pervasive in the American news media, including on NPR's airwaves and in its digital news stories.

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"According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 13 percent of newspaper leadership."

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In 1979, the American Societyof News Editors pledged that,by the year 2000, the percentage of racial and ethnic minoritiesin newsrooms would match thatof the population at large.Noting that this was "the right thing to do" and in the "industry's economic self-interest," ASNE stressed the particular importance of lifting people of color into management.

Newspapers have failed spectacularly at achieving that goal. According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 13 percent of newspaper leadership.

Despite being in majority-minoritycities, the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are both 81 percent white. The Washington Post is 70 percent white. Minorities make up 72 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but only 33 percent of the Los Angeles Times. According to the Radio Television Digital News Association, the numbers in other media look slightly better, if still not impressive: in 2018, about a quarter of staffers in TV newsrooms are people of color; in radio, it's 11.7 percent. The American Society of Magazine Editors doesn't track racial and ethnic diversity, though its industry's mastheads remain stacked with old white men.

The structural forces that contribute to the problem are well known and largely reflect how race and privilege intersect. The main entry points into the profession-unpaid internships and journalism schools-tend to favor people who come from wealthy backgrounds. Many jobs are never posted; hires are made through existingnetworks, in which people tend to affiliate, and empathize, with those like themselves. When people of color do manage to get hired, they find a lack of formal mentorship and they are infrequently promoted intomanagement positions. When job cuts come along-in the past 10 years, the newspaper workforce has been sliced in half-minorities are often among the first to go.

The solutions to these problems are also well known. Trade groups and minority journalist organizations have issued report after report, recommendation after recommendation, about how to make journalism more inclusive. Among the editors in chief at media outlets that have succeeded in cultivating diverse staffs-and in turn, telling rich stories about life in America that draw broad audiences-the key, they say, is leadership.

"It's not up to people of color to do this work alone," Dodai Stewart, a deputy Metro editor at The New York Times and a vocal advocate for diversity in media, says. "The people who have the power are the ones who need to fix this.'"

But white editors can be afraid. Most "teachable moments" about diversity injournalism, she points out, are the majorcoverage blunders- The New York Times profile of Michael Brown, a teenager shot and killed by police, referring to him as "no angel"; The Hollywood Reporter cover story on the "great eight" actresses in cinema that only featured white women-and the enormous blowback generated on social media. "Basically, editors don't want to be singled out as racist and have the Twitter mob come after them; they don't want to be politically incorrect," Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of Teen Vogue, says.

Alas, there is no primer for talking about diversity. "People in positions of power in media have to check their privilege and be willing to listen to people of color, to be open and non-defensive, to be willing to be wrong," Mukhopadhyay says. "That's rare in this profession because the higher up you go, the more right you think you are about everything, and the more you surround yourself with yes men."

"It's very hard for white men in positions of power to relinquish-or even recognize-their privilege," Meredith Talusan, theexecutive editor at Them, an intersectional queer publication launched by Condé Nast last fall, tells CJR. "It requires white, male editors to be aware that they likely got to where they are notstrictly because of merit." Part of the corrective, Talusan says, extends beyond professional circles. "To empathize with people who are not like you-to really see them-you have to become their friends."

Racial and ethnic minorities are projected to overtake whites in America by 2045. For news organizations, a lack of diversity is amatter of social fairness and of relevance. Job applicants with the top credentials-Ivy League degrees, internships at prestigiouspublications, recommendations from prominent editors-will most often be white, but hiring managers would be wise to consider the life experiences of people of color, who have insight and access that others don't. Ultimately, the value of diversity to journalism is not about skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. It's about the stories people can tell.

The Wall Street Journal

In 2017, as part of a WSJ2020 initiative to modernize its newsroom, nearly all of the Journal's leaders had to reapply for their positions. The goal, according to Karen Pensiero, the managing editor, was to create transparency. "Where newsrooms can get into trouble is if it's not an open and even playing field." She says the shakeup, which created new positions and altered existing ones, "changed conversations." Still, the Journal 's overall percentage of minority employees has budged a mere 2 percent between 2001 and 2017, and only 4 percent among leaders.

Vox Media

"We need to be willing and open to admitting when we've made missteps and make changes to adapt and learn from those mistakes," Melissa Bell, the publisher of Vox, says. Vox meticulously tracks diversity on staff-as well as the reasons people leave-and has implemented quarterly surveys to gauge whether people of color on staff feel included in the organization. The company also offers formal training to managers on inclusion and diversity. These efforts appear to have paid off: since Vox was founded, in 2015, the percentage of minorities at the publication has approximately doubled.

HuffPost

"Folks don't really know how to talk honestly about diversity," Lydia Polgreen, the editor-in-chief of HuffPost, says. "Editors don't even necessarily feel they have the language to talk about what their goals are, the terms to use." HuffPost did not make available information about its newsroom demographics. According to CJR's analysis of its published masthead, diversity in its newsroom lags behind its digital-only peers. Polgreen stressed that it's up to hiring managers to solve the problem. "If you're a senior leader who really wants to make journalism better and more inclusive, you need to educate yourself."

The Washington Post

Since 2013, when Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought the Post, the paper has undergone a hiring spree. Tracy Grant, the managing editor for hiring and development, ethics, and standards, says that it's easier to diversify an organization when it's expanding rather than contracting. "I have enormous compassion for colleagues in this space who are not adding jobs," Grant says. "The reality of it is that it's really hard work, and it's impossible to do when your newsroom is shrinking or not growing. Diversity is essential to newsrooms and yet in that environment, it can feel like a luxury that people can't afford."

The New York Times

In 2017, Carolyn Ryan was promoted to assistant managing editor and tasked with overseeing a surge of hiring that brought in around 200 people. "You have to be flexible in looking at their skillset and what they can bring to you rather than this anachronistic notion of who's going to fit in your culture," she says. Diversity at the Times has inched forward a mere 3 percent over the past 16 years. Diversity among leadership, however, jumped from 10 percent who were people of color in 2001 to 19 percent in 2017.

BuzzFeed News

In conversations about journalism's struggles to diversify, one often hears of a "pipeline problem." But Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, thinks that newsroom leaders are simply not availing themselves of the extensive talent that's out there. "If you're not hiring a diverse pool, you almost have to go out of your way because there's a very diverse pool of talented reporters and talented mid-career reporters," Smith says. BuzzFeed is the rare media outlet where diversity on staff matches that of the US population.

NPR

"One of the things that has happened at NPR over the last few years that any organization can implement is simple attention to the hiring pool," Keith Woods, the vice president for newsroom training and diversity, says. More and more, he'll find hiring managers "pushing back on the idea that it's okay to go forward when there are no women or people of color." Still, the number of minorities at NPR has remained flat. In an interview with NPR's public editor, Christopher Turpin, the editorial director, noted that NPR has "done a very bad job" recruiting Latinxs, who make up only 6 percent of newsroom employees.

MSNBC

In 2015, when executives aimed to dampen MSNBC's reputation for liberalism, several shows hosted by people of color were cancelled. Some outside critics mourned their loss. "Diversity always presents challenges and opportunities," Yvette Miley, the senior vice president of NBC News and MSNBC, says. "The problem sometimes becomes when we think diversity is a fixed point on a map-it is not. Diversity is demographics that are constantly changing and you always have to evolve your newsroom in front of the camera and behind the scenes."

Fox News

Kevin Lord, the executive vice president for human resources at Fox News, says that the company's recruitment process "ensures hiring managers have a diverse slate" of candidates and uses what's called "competency-based interviewing" in an effort to weed out unconscious bias. During daytime programming, Harris Faulkner is the only African-American woman employed as an anchor for two hours of news on any of the major networks, Lord points out. But no person of color hosts a show during weekday primetime-the period when ratings are highest and networks put forth name-brand talent.

CNN

"There's no confusion that diversity equals great business," Ramon Escobar, CNN's vice president of diversity and inclusion, talent recruitment, and development, says. As with its two other major competitors, however, minority representation among on-air talent stands at about half its rate in the general population. The network's lack of diversity has been a flashpoint. In August, Soledad O'Brien, a former CNN host, replied on Twitter to a story about lack of diversity in the White House: "walk me through the senior black staff at @CNNPolitics or @cnn." There are no people of color among the network's senior leaders. "We have put a lot of people in place now that we're developing as the next generation of anchors," Escobar says.

The New Yorker

"The difficulty with The New Yorker pre-internet was that you really needed people who could immediately write 5,000 to 10,000-word pieces," David Remnick, the editor, says. "That takes a long time to cultivate." According to the magazine's tally, over the past five years, nearly half of the annual contracts it has offered-many of which are primarily for writing published online-have been to people of color. "The web has probably allowed us to hire, or at least publish, new people a little bit more quickly," Remnick says. "It has a lot of short-form possibilities where people can grow, develop."

Slate

In 2014, soon after being named editor-in-chief of Slate, Julia Turner sat down with a group of staffers to talk about diversity. Among people of color, all said they had found their jobs through posted listings; the white staffers had all been told about openings by a friend. "It was eye-opening," she recalls. Turner, who in October announced she would be departing for a new position at the Los Angeles Times, presided over a sharp jump in the percentage of minorities during her three years at the helm.
Correction: This piece previously misidentified the venue in which Christopher Turpin made his comments.
Gabriel Arana a contributing editor at The American Prospect. His work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Salon, The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

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In 1979, the American Society of News Editors pledged that, by the year 2000, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in newsrooms would match that of the population at large. Noting that this was "the right thing to do" and in the "industry's economic self-interest," ASNE stressed the particular importance of lifting people of color into management.

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A more diverse student newsroom will make your publication stronger. Here's how to get started.

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A more diverse student newsroom will make your publication stronger. Here's how to get started.

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"Your journalism can’t be complete if your newsroom doesn’t represent the community you’re covering."

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Looking at your own newsroom's makeup will help you realize where your coverage is lacking and how you can improve.
The Lead is a weekly newsletter that provides resources and connections for student journalists in both college and high school. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning.
Your journalism can't be complete if your newsroom doesn't represent the community you're covering. Recent protests over racial injustice have put the journalism industry's lack of diversity under a microscope, but it's not a new issue. In 1979, the American Society of News Editors (now the News Leaders Association) acknowledged that newspapers needed to do better in representing the populations they serve, and in 2018, the Columbia Journalism Review found that not much progress had been made since then.

Student newsrooms are a pipeline into the industry, but there are unique factors that limit the accessibility of student journalism. Unpaid internships are only realistic for students from privileged backgrounds, and working at a student paper for little to no pay is a considerable hardship for students supporting themselves through college. Past missteps may have harmed relationships with marginalized communities or created grudges against your publication.

Looking inward at your own newsroom's makeup will help you realize where your coverage is lacking and how you can improve.

Public examples of this introspection are (disappointingly) hard to find in professional journalism, but there are some exceptional student examples: The Daily Northwestern has published a diversity report each year since 2018, based on an internal staff survey. The Minnesota Daily created a Content Diversity Board and spent a year tracking its coverage. Verde Magazine at Palo Alto High School analyzed its sourcing in a 2018 diversity audit.

And for professional newsrooms, ProPublica's annual report clearly lays out the ways the newsroom is investing in recruiting and retaining journalists from underrepresented communities. The New York Times also publishes an annual report with staff demographics and plans for progress.

Here are some steps you can take to apply these examples to your own publication.

First, have a conversation with editors and staff about the importance of diversity and why you might like to conduct an audit. Set specific goals. Do you want to examine your internal staff diversity, or the sources used in your stories, or the representation in your visual journalism? There's not a one-size-fits-all approach, and you should tailor the "diversity report" to the needs of your newsroom.

Next, identify a small group to analyze results and create a report. Limiting the raw data and responses to a small group will help students feel more comfortable submitting personal information. If you have someone with data analysis skills, that will help immensely in pulling trends out of the raw data.

Build a survey for your staff with demographic information and open-ended questions. Consider separating these two parts into separate forms to build in further anonymity. Depending on the size of your staff, examining staff makeup in sections or departments can be revealing. Is your sports staff almost entirely male? Are all of your opinion writers White?

Factors to consider including on a demographic survey:

Race

Gender

Sexuality

First-generation students

Financial aid status

Residence (in-state, out-of-state, international)

Major/department of study

Potential open-ended questions:

How could the newsroom's coverage be more inclusive?

How would you describe the newsroom culture?

What stories on campus are we missing?

Find your school's demographic data, which most colleges and universities should have available online. This will help you compare your staff information to your school at large and examine how closely the representation matches, not just in race/ethnicity, but in gender, in-state/out-of-state residence, and other factors. Also consider comparing your staff's demographics to your city/town/community at large.

Gather outside feedback from student and faculty leaders. Talk with them about what your newsroom can do better and where you've gone wrong in the past. Showing a willingness to learn and improve can go a long way toward building future relationships.

Find a concrete, quantitative way to track diversity in your coverage. The Minnesota Daily's incredibly thorough "coverage tracker" examines sources, visuals, corrections, and keywords across each section's stories. It's an excellent template other newsrooms can follow.

After gathering this information, think about how you can improve and communicate those steps to readers. Be honest and reflective. "Our predominantly white, cis, straight, abled staff can hurt our coverage," The Daily Northwestern wrote. "Across desks, Daily staffers were hesitant to cover communities they did not belong to."

"The Content Diversity Board was created in recognition that living up to this responsibility will require tough, in-depth conversations about the role of news in the lives of marginalized communities," The Minnesota Daily wrote. "Our work lies in pushing for institutional improvement and challenging the norms of how news has always been told."

The first year will be a baseline if you haven't collected this data before. Encourage future newsroom leaders to continue this practice so they can compare year to year, which will yield more information on changes and improvements.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is! But taking these steps will make your journalism stronger and more representative of your community. Student newsrooms can be leaders in this area and can push their future employers to be more transparent in releasing information publicly.

I'm looking for student contributors to guest write for The Lead! No one knows student journalism better than student journalists, and I want to hear how you've solved problems, innovated or tackled complex subjects at your student publication. All students will be paid for their writing, thanks to The Lead's partnership with The Poynter Institute.

A few things to consider: What has your publication tried that's new and different (even if it didn't work as expected)? How has your reporting affected your school or community? What lessons could other student newsrooms learn from your experience?

Much of the work highlighted in The Lead has been from large public universities. I want to continue to broaden the scope, so I'm especially interested in hearing from student journalists at liberal arts colleges, community colleges and high schools.

Send pitches to blatchfordtaylor@gmail.com. No need to send a full draft - I'm looking for a paragraph explaining your idea. (To get an idea of what topics The Lead has covered in the past 71 issues, take a look at the full newsletter archives.)

Worried about communicating securely with a source, or want to ensure sensitive conversations stay private? Try Signal, a free messaging app many investigative journalists swear by because it uses end-to-end encryption for secure communication. Download the app or use it on your desktop - here's a guide from the Freedom of the Press Foundation to get you started.

What's your favorite tool that other student journalists should know about? Email me and I might feature it in a future issue.

Systemic change in newsrooms takes time. What can you do right now to make your journalism more inclusive? Here are five concrete suggestions from journalists of color at The Philadelphia Inquirer, who took a "sick and tired" day two weeks ago after the newspaper published a column with the headline "Buildings Matter, Too." Auditing your own sources, learning about the racial history of your beat and broadening your social media news sources are good starting points.

💌 Most recent newsletter: Student journalist resources for covering protests safely and sensitively

📣 I want to hear from you. What would you like to see in the newsletter? Have a cool project to share? Email blatchfordtaylor@gmail.com.
Taylor Blatchford is a journalist at The Seattle Times who independently writes The Lead, a newsletter for student journalists. She can be reached at blatchfordtaylor@gmail.com or on Twitter @blatchfordtr.

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A more diverse student newsroom will make your publication stronger. Here's how to get started. - Poynter

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Looking at your own newsroom's makeup will help you realize where your coverage is lacking and how you can improve. The Lead is a weekly newsletter that provides resources and connections for student journalists in both college and high school. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning.

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"For the most part, journalism has decided that the coronavirus and the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, in Minneapolis, are two distinct stories. That’s fiction. Floyd’s murder, under the knees of a white police officer—and the demonstrations in response—occurred as part of a cascade of events."

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A narrative, by its nature, is a contained thing. Some bits get trimmed out in the interest of coherence. Some get cut for time or space. Always, a storyteller makes choices, choices that are informed by her worldview, to collect material in support of a thesis, a plot. But life, by contrast, is a mess.

For the most part, journalism has decided that the coronavirus and the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, in Minneapolis, are two distinct stories. That's fiction. Floyd's murder, under the knees of a white police officer-and the demonstrations in response-occurred as part of a cascade of events. There is the history of systemic racism in America, police brutality, and protest. There is the spread of covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and its economic effects. Floyd had worked as a security guard, alternately at a Salvation Army and a club called Conga Latin Bistro, which closed amid the mass shutdown of bars and restaurants. On Memorial Day, he walked into a corner store for a pack of cigarettes; he was arrested for allegedly trying to pay with a fake twenty-dollar bill. His punishment was death. An autopsy report later showed that Floyd had been infected by the coronavirus before he was killed. His last words were the same as those of so many Black Americans: "I can't breathe."

Donald Trump, too, is part of the story. As people began pouring into the streets-first in Minneapolis, then across the country and all over the world-the president of the United States suggested that they should be shot. Trump's comment-cribbed from Walter Headley, a former police chief in Miami who in December 1967 promised that racial uprisings would be met with violence-came not long after he'd expressed support for those who stormed their state capitols in opposition to measures intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has observed that covid-19 disproportionately harms racial and ethnic minorities.

The web of connections is intricate and vast. In recent days, many journalists-and those following the news-have used the word overwhelming to describe this moment. Yet it's important to acknowledge that the situation did not arise suddenly. To properly contextualize our reporting, we must look at how we got here, turning back at least as far as the beginning of the calendar year.

JANUARY

On New Year's Eve, Chinese health authorities identified a cluster of pneumonia cases in people who had been to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Within a week, it was confirmed that these people were sick from something associated with a novel coronavirus, which became known as 2019-nCoV. The general public remained mostly unaware of the outbreak, however, until January 20, when President Xi Jinping issued a statement promising to "resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic." By that time, the coronavirus had traveled across the world. The same day, a thirty-five-year-old man in Snohomish County, Washington, became the first confirmed case of infection in the United States. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, spoke out with increasing boldness about the need to broadcast information, in spite of China's strict policies on censorship; he was among hundreds of people who were reprimanded or detained for "spreading rumors" about the virus. Soon, Li died of complications of covid-19. Most of the world was slow to appreciate the seriousness of his warnings; some outlets covered the story mainly through the lens of stereotypes.

FEBRUARY

On February 23, a twenty-five-year-old Black man named Ahmaud Arbery went for a jog. He was in Brunswick, Georgia, where the afternoon sun was out, making shadows of the leaves of the trees. Behind him, in a pickup truck, were Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit district attorney, and his son Travis. They were white; they were armed. They called the local police to report Arbery. "What is he doing?" the dispatcher asked. The answer: "He's running down the street." While the conversation continued-and the dispatcher promised to send an officer out-Travis McMichael stepped out of the truck and fired shots at Arbery, who died at the scene. The McMichaels told police that they believed Arbery had been breaking in to a home; they referred to a rash of recent burglaries. According to the Brunswick News , however, there had been just one: a gun stolen from an unlocked car outside Travis's place. The story was not reported for weeks, until local media got hold of the police report. It would be months before Arbery's name entered the national news.

Meanwhile, more reports of the coronavirus were appearing outside Asia. February 14 brought the first covid-19 death beyond the continent's borders; the deceased was an eighty-year-old Chinese tourist in France. Ten days later, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted to its worst close in two years. Within a week, Americans learned of the first coronavirus-related death in the United States-a man in his fifties, in Washington State. Yet the story, when it received coverage at all from American outlets, was still largely focused on China: on the Xi administration's of the spread of covid-19, on the impact on US-China trade, and on conspiracy theories related to the origins of the virus. On February 22, the Global Times -a tabloid published by the People's Daily , a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece-suggested that the coronavirus did not originate in the Huanan market. Rumors circulated that the virus was a biochemical weapon developed by the US military. On February 23, around the time Arbery's body lay on the ground, Trump told the press , "President Xi loves the people of China, he loves his country, and he's doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation." As for the US, Trump said, "We have it very much under control."

MARCH

Over the course of March, in the eyes of the American press, the coronavirus story went from being a distant concern to an immediate crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated covid-19 as a pandemic and, on March 13, declared that Europe had become the epicenter, reporting more cases and deaths there than in the rest of the world combined. Several states-including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maryland-announced plans to close schools. The same day, an emergency room technician named Breonna Taylor was shot eight times, to her death, by police officers who had used a battering ram to enter her apartment. Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old African-American woman, had been asleep; the officers had executed a "no knock" warrant. What the cops were looking for wasn't there. The story did not make headlines in mainstream national publications.

Coverage of the public health crisis, however, was gaining traction. On March 15, twenty-nine more states-including New York, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Hawai'i-closed schools. The CDC released guidelines recommending that no events with more than fifty people be held; the next day, Trump told Americans to avoid gathering in groups of more than ten and to stop going to restaurants and bars. Wall Street took a nosedive.

On March 18, the United States closed its borders to all "nonessential traffic" and suspended refugee admissions. Trump signed a coronavirus aid bill into law. Not in the news: Monika Diamond, a thirty-four-year-old transgender Black woman, who was killed in Charlotte. Diamond was active in the local LGBTQ and nightlife community and was the co-CEO of the International Mother of the Year Pageantry System, which honors LGBTQ mothers.

On March 20, the market tanked again. The US faced its worst economic week since the 2008 financial crisis. Days later, American coronavirus cases topped fifty thousand; the number of deaths passed a thousand. By the end of the month, US cases surpassed the total in China. On March 28, the covid-19 death toll reached two thousand. The same day, local New York media reported , a thirty-three-year-old transgender woman known as Lexi of the House of Ebony was fatally stabbed. She was a sex worker in Harlem who liked to read poetry.

APRIL

The month of April brought devastating job losses. Week after week, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits broke records. By month's end, thirty million people-about 18 percent of the workforce-were jobless. That did not count anyone who worked on a freelance basis, who would not be eligible to file, or anyone undocumented who didn't qualify for unemployment insurance. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black workers saw greater losses in employment than white workers did-more than one in six Black workers lost their jobs between February and April, per a recent report -and, as of April, under half the Black population was employed. The hardest-hit group was Black women: between February and April, 18.8 percent lost their jobs.

The effect of the coronavirus on income-especially in the Black community and among Latinos-compounded existing inequality in American households: Black and brown people tend to have lower wages, fewer earners in a family, and less generational wealth. Many of those deemed "essential workers" felt they had no choice but to report for duty; fewer than one in five Black workers could do their job from home. These factors contributed to the results of a report released in April by the CDC, which found that African Americans had been diagnosed with covid-19 at disproportionately high rates . Coverage of this data often omitted mention of Black patients' employment or housing stability, focusing instead on the fact that people of color reside in "large urban cities."

EARLY MAY

On May 5, the WHO revealed that a case of covid-19 had appeared in France in December of last year. The sickness, as it turned out, had been with us all for longer than we'd realized. The same day, a lawyer working for the family of Ahmaud Arbery released a video that appeared to depict his murder.

On May 6, celebrities-including Ava DuVernay, LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift-shared the Arbery footage on social media, driving major press attention and more clicks.

Joe Biden-the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, whose campaign had gone fully digital- during a virtual roundtable with African-American leaders that Arbery was "lynched before our very eyes." Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mej i a, a man who had fled violence in El Salvador and was now being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, became the first person in federal immigration detention to die of coronavirus-related illness. He was fifty-seven. That evening, a twenty-one-year-old man named Desjean Reed, who went by Sean, was driving in his Toyota Corolla on the north side of Indianapolis. Kendale Adams, the deputy chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, spotted Reed, began to chase him, and radioed for reinforcement. Reed streamed on Facebook Live, in view of some twenty-five hundred people . "You gotta look," he told them, pointing his phone's camera toward the cop car behind him. As he drove on, he said, "I'm not going to jail today." Then he pulled over, and appeared to get out of the car. By that point, four thousand people were tuned in. They could hear muffled sounds and pops of gunshots; the camera's lens turned skyward. Sixteen thousand viewers now. A man's voice could be heard, apparently from among a group of officers at the scene: "I think it's going to be a closed casket, homie."

By this time, on May 7, the Arbery video had gone viral. Pressure was mounting that something be done. Ahead of a coronavirus press briefing, Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, a Republican, made note of the case. "Earlier this week, I watched the video depicting Mr. Arbery's last moments of life," he . "I can tell you it's absolutely horrific and Georgians deserve answers." Within two hours of Kemp's comment, the McMichaels were on charges of murder and aggravated assault. More than two months after Arbery was killed, the story finally made national news.

The next day, May 8, would have been Arbery's twenty-sixth birthday. Many of the same people who circulated the footage of his murder on social media now organized a virtual protest, using the hashtag #RunWithMaud. Participants were encouraged to go 2.23 miles, in honor of the date of Arbery's death. While word went around, the US Labor Department that the country's unemployment rate had leaped to its highest level since the Great Depression; 20.5 million people had lost their jobs. Later in the day, as runners documented their tributes to Arbery, another suspect came under investigation: William "Roddie" Bryan, a neighbor of the McMichaels', and the man who filmed the killing. When asked at a news conference if the case would be considered a hate crime, Vic Reynolds, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, pointed out that Georgia has no hate-crimes law. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained another video of Arbery's death, from a source outside the GBI; it appeared to be from a home security camera about a block away. As social media reacted, with grief and anger, Black journalists and others commented on the problems inherent in disseminating videos of marginalized people dying. The arguments, which had been made before, over the years of numerous extrajudicial killings in the digital media age, went roughly like this: On the one hand, the images are striking and inspire non-Black viewers to respond. On the other, the images become ubiquitous and traumatic to Black people , who never needed to watch a clip to become aware of racist brutality.

MID-MAY

The number of Americans who had succumbed to covid-19 neared an astonishing hundred thousand. Grief blanketed the country. Some mourned with their families, others alone; many felt at a loss for a collective experience through which to express their despair. George Floyd, who was forty-six, had recently found himself out of a job as a bouncer at Conga Latin Bistro, a restaurant and club in north Minneapolis. Originally from Houston's Third Ward, he was known as "Big Floyd." At 6 ′ 6 ″ he towered over everyone; his height seemed a measure of his spirit. Before moving to Minnesota, Floyd had been an active member of the Third Ward's Chrisitian community , coordinating ministry outreach with the Resurrection House, a local church. It was warm the day he died: on May 25, Minneapolis hit , a prelude to summer. Floyd entered a grocery store called Cup Foods on 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, on the city's south side, around 8pm. He wanted a pack of cigarettes. He handed a twenty-dollar bill to the cashier, who suspected it was counterfeit and called the police. Two officers responded, and they identified Floyd, who was by then sitting in a parked car across the street. Soon, more cops arrived. Surveillance video shows the officers handcuffing Floyd and leading him to the side of a nearby building, where an officer named Derek Chauvin, a white man, pinned Floyd's neck to the ground with his knee. The whole of Chauvin's body weight pressed into Floyd's airway, for nearly nine minutes. The other officers-Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao-stood watch as Floyd gasped for air. He cried out for his mother. "I can't breathe," he managed to say. Bystanders shot video, pleading with Chauvin to get off Floyd's neck. But it was too late. Floyd lost consciousness; his body went limp. Even still, Chauvin's knee remained lodged on his neck. By the time fire and medical personnel arrived, they found Floyd with no pulse. He was pronounced dead at 9:25pm at Hennepin County Medical Center. A video shot by a bystander depicting his death went viral. It was later reported that Floyd and Chauvin had once worked security shifts at the same nightclub.

Early the next morning, the Minneapolis Police Department released a statement : Floyd had died of a "medical incident" while in police custody. It did not mention that Chauvin's knee had been on Floyd's neck. But the Hennepin County medical examiner's office ruled the death a homicide; later, a private autopsy conducted at the behest of Floyd's family would reach the same conclusion, implicating Chauvin and the two officers who helped pin Floyd down. On the morning of May 26, Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, held a press conference in which he condemned the behavior of the officers involved. "For five minutes, we watched as a white officer pressed his knee into the neck of a Black man. For five minutes," he told reporters. "When you hear someone calling for help, you are supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic human sense." The four officers implicated in Floyd's death were placed on paid administrative leave, then fired. Protesters began to gather near where Floyd had been killed. They brought signs that read "I Can't Breathe"-a chilling echo of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man killed in 2014 by a white police officer who put him in a chokehold. Thousands marched from Cup Foods to the Third Precinct-the city's largest, and the headquarters of patrol officers and the community crime prevention team. The tension was palpable; the city had not yet released the names of the officers responsible for murdering Floyd. People threw water bottles; police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

By Wednesday, the names of the cops-and their disciplinary records-were released and reported in the press. Chauvin's was especially damning: he had been implicated in multiple shootings-"officer involved," in cop-speak. Thao had been sued for "use of force" in 2017. Reuters called Floyd's killing "racially charged." That night, protesters again gathered near Cup Foods and marched to the Third Precinct; police again attacked them, using rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades. Several stores were looted; an Autozone, a Wendy's, and an apartment building were set on fire. National media snapped up the images and began to frame coverage of the demonstrations around , setting up a dichotomy in which protesters were classified into good guys and bad. Headlines and chyrons used words like chaos and rage and rampage to describe the civil unrest, particularly in Minnesota, where there are wide gulfs between Black and white residents when it comes to wealth and health. The owner of a pawnshop shot and killed a man he thought was attempting to burglarize his store.

As the media turned its sights on Minneapolis and the response to Floyd's death, another Black victim of police brutality received less notice. Tony McDade, a thirty-eight-year-old trans man, was shot by an officer in Tallahassee, Florida. He'd been attacked by a group of men, McDade said in a video posted to Facebook, and was prepared to defend himself. He also predicted a confrontation with cops ("I am killing and going to be killed because I will not go back into federal prison"), which may have suggested that he had so-called police-assisted suicide in mind. reported that McDade marked the third "officer involved" fatal shooting in Tallahassee in two months, and the eleventh reported death that year of a trans or gender-nonconforming person.

On Thursday, protesters in Minneapolis took to the streets for a third consecutive night. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, signed an executive order declaring a "state of peacetime emergency" and militarized the city, activating the National Guard. Around 10pm, protesters entered the Third Precinct. Local media reported that explosives were thought to be in the area; the building was evacuated. Soon, it was set ablaze . Clouds of gray smoke wafted upward. Within minutes, the Minnesota National Guard tweeted that it had activated five hundred troops at Mayor Frey's request. Press reports led with flames .

The next morning, the previous night's damage came into clear view: hundreds of fires had burned around the city overnight. Just after 5am, Omar Jimenez, a journalist for CNN, was there, reporting live, as protesters continued to mill around. Police in riot gear approached him. Jimenez, who is Black, was surrounded by a camera crew and producers, who repeatedly told the officers that he was a member of the press. The journalists asked where they should move. The cops arrested Jimenez while the camera kept rolling-and ignored him when he asked why he was being arrested. Soon, his entire crew was handcuffed and led away. An officer picked up the camera, apparently unaware it was still on. CNN hosts in the studio watched, aghast. Nearby, a white CNN reporter was also approached by police but allowed to stay.

In the early morning hours of May 29, Donald Trump logged on to Twitter . Having watched the coverage of Minneapolis, he labeled protesters "thugs." He added, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," invoking Walter Headley , the former police chief in Miami who had used those words during a news conference in 1967. Headley's quote was later considered to have been a contributing factor to an uprising that broke out in Liberty City , a Black neighborhood, the following August. Twitter, for the first time in its history, blocked a sitting president's tweet for violating its code of conduct ; Trump's message had broken a rule against glorifying violence. Meanwhile, for the first time since at least the seventies, the White House announced that it would not release summertime economic projections . The country was in a hole; the Trump administration hoped that Americans would place our attention elsewhere.

WEEKEND OF MAY 29

Four days after Floyd was killed, protests sprang up across the country. Police swarmed. They continued shooting rubber bullets into crowds; citizens, including journalists, were hit; the images were posted to social media. The wounds were swollen and red and bleeding. Police continued spraying tear gas; in a video posted to Twitter, a tank rolls down a residential street in Minneapolis as officers follow, yelling at residents standing on their own front porches and firing paint canisters at them . The canisters pop like bullets. News outlets used passive language to describe police violence, active voice to describe those participating in protests. The New York Times shared a story about journalists injured while covering the unrest: "Protesters struck a journalist with his own microphone," the article said, whereas "a reporter was hit by a pepper ball" shot by police. Stories and chyrons flashed the words and with little context-and virtually no discussion of unrest as a legitimate form of protest in American history or its strategic use to thin out police forces, rerouting them to prevent them from brutalizing activists. Some stories presented acts of civil disobedience as aberrations-as if a sudden current of violence had bubbled to the surface-and implied that allegedly violent protesters had provoked police aggression. The Chicago Tribune put this phrase on its front page: "Protests give rise to chaos." The press also largely failed to frame the protests-including vandalism and fires-as a late act in a long drama. These actions came in response not just to the deaths of Floyd, Taylor, Arbery, and McDade, but to the never-ending list of Black people killed by police over many decades: Philando Castile, Alton B. Sterling, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, and Garner, to name a few of the most recent examples.

At least twenty-five cities in sixteen states imposed curfews as a means of quelling the uprisings. In Los Angeles and Atlanta, the National Guard was On May 30, the Pentagon put military police at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Drum, New York, on alert for potential deployment to Minneapolis. The Minnesota National Guard authorized more than ten thousand troops to descend on the city. Police and elected officials began to disseminate a narrative to explain the property damage across the country, a familiar communications strategy meant to obscure legitimate social unrest: "Outside agitators," they said, were responsible for causing chaos. On social media, accounts circulated offering conflicting, anecdotal reports of white protesters and undercover cops antagonizing uniformed officers and damaging property at the expense of Black organizers. In Saint Paul, police claimed that vehicles with no license plates carried "tools to wreak havoc." The drivers, police said in a tweet, fled on foot. On Saturday, Governor Walz that 80 percent of the people arrested on protest-related charges were from out of state, describing their behavior as "domestic terrorism" motivated by "ideological extremism." Mayor Frey echoed this claim. "They are coming in largely from outside the city, from outside the region, to prey on everything that we have built for the last several decades," he said. Other mayors made similar arguments, which were picked up in press reports. By the end of the weekend, however, journalists had reviewed arrest logs and found that, in Minneapolis, most people arrested had local addresses. Slate received well-deserved praise for its headline "Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide."

The Atlantic published an article acknowledging that mass protest amid the pandemic could set off a new wave of infections. "There's little doubt that these protests will translate into increased risk of transmission for covid-19," Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard, . Nevertheless, she supported the demonstrations. "Structural racism has been a public-health crisis for much longer than the pandemic has." Days after his killing, an autopsy report revealed that Floyd had coronavirus. It turned out that his cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."

NOW

The days are filled with mourning, the nights with shouts. As of this writing, police have arrested more than nine thousand people. A woman in Austin fell to the ground, having been struck in the abdomen by rubber bullets. "My baby!" she -she was pregnant. Some protesters have been killed. "At least five deaths have occurred amid unrest, while other deaths have taken place nearby but their ties to protests are uncertain," the New York Times . "Several people have died nationwide in the protests," per the Washington Post . "Skirmishes continued into the early morning hours as cops continued to disperse the crowd while people drove around city streets squealing their tires and hanging out windows," according to the Detroit News . Not every life lost on the streets has been at the hands of cops-in Detroit, for example, a twenty-one-year-old man was sitting in his parked Dodge Caliber, in the vicinity of that city's demonstrations, when he was shot and killed by a guy about his age . In Omaha, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, James Scurlock, was shot and killed while protesting by a local bar owner, who was white; the Omaha World-Herald has since reported that the shooter, Jake Gardner, will not be charged with a crime.

To a large degree, characterizations of the events, on television and in print, have suggested a chaotic flurry of outrage, with attacks flying in all directions. Water bottles lobbed in the air are, somehow, rendered the equivalent of a police van plowing through an assembly of bodies. In describing the death of David McAtee, a fifty-three-year-old Black man, in Louisville, the , "It was not immediately clear if Mr. McAtee had been killed by the police or someone in the crowd, the authorities said." But it was clear. According to , the local chief of police "said in a statement that someone shot at police and officers and soldiers 'returned fire,' killing McAtee." In New York, local media reported on police officers taking a knee alongside protesters. The highest-ranking officer to do so, Terence Monahan, told the ABC affiliate, "We hugged to show there's solidarity"; online, the story's called it a "moving show of support." But stories like this didn't mention the moments that turned uglier-when, according to activists on the ground , the same cops photographed kneeling came back hours later to beat people up. Elsewhere in the city, an officer was filmed by a protester : he'd pulled out what appeared to be his gun, and was waving it at the crowd. On Tuesday night, while armed police forces trapped a large group of protesters on the Manhattan Bridge, their colleagues took another life, in Brooklyn. Monahan , "An illegal gun was recovered at the scene." ABC , "The incident is not related to any of the protests or riots." Wasn't it, though?

Too often, the aggression of police officers-sometimes backed by members of the National Guard-has been shrouded by journalists' use of passive language or depictions of mass disarray. For generations, cops have been offered the benefit of the doubt in the press; historically, people in marginalized communities have viewed major news outlets as institutions of white supremacy . This time around, we saw the gravity of the story get pulled toward the methods of protest: looting, confrontation, outsiders (possibly) bussed in to stir up trouble. A skirmish doesn't kill, though; people do-people with tear gas and trucks and guns. And isn't that what the demonstrations are about? That is: seeing violence for what it is, and recognizing those who caused it. Seeing the harm of policing Black communities instead of investing in them. The press, if doing its job right, should be exposing these things, too.

In the first days of June, we saw a glimpse of what it's like when reporters cover abuses of power truthfully and plainly. On Monday, at the White House, Trump gave a speech in which he called himself "your president of law and order" and demanded that governors deploy National Guard units to "dominate the streets." He then walked across Washington's Lafayette Square, making his way over to St. John's Church, a lovely, pale-yellow Episcopal edifice just off the park. Clergy of the church, which is known for its dedication to social justice, had been speaking with protesters; on a recent night, a fire had started in the basement as demonstrations took place nearby. To clear a path for the president, US Park Police and National Guard troops shoved an assembly of peaceful gatherers, and hit them with tear gas. Then Trump posed for a painfully awkward picture, holding a Bible in his hand like an auction paddle, his eyes squinting, his mouth in a grumpy frown. "Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op," NPR reported . CNN's : "Peaceful protesters near White House gassed, shot with rubber bullets so Trump can have church photo-op." In New York magazine: "Peaceful Protesters Gassed So Trump Can Do a Sacrilegious Bible Photo Op." HuffPost went with something simple: "FASCIST PHOTO OP." In outlets all over, the coverage was striking for its directness, as if emerging from tight lips that had for too long failed to open.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story misidentified the name of Cup Foods.
Betsy Morais and Alexandria Neason are on the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review. Morais is the managing editor; Neason (@alexandrianeas) is CJR's staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow.

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A narrative, by its nature, is a contained thing. Some bits get trimmed out in the interest of coherence. Some get cut for time or space. Always, a storyteller makes choices, choices that are informed by her worldview, to collect material in support of a thesis, a plot.

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Why Journalists are Walking Out of Newsrooms in Protest

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Why Journalists are Walking Out of Newsrooms in Protest

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6/4/20: Why JOC at NYT and The Philadelphia Inquirer called out "sick and tired" of their papers' insensitive coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement

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On Thursday, employees at two major newspapers-The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer-took the day off in protest of the way their newsrooms have chosen to cover the inflamed racial justice protests currently taking place.

And with media unions ramping up debate about newsroom diversity, approaches to editorial decisions and even divestment from police unions within their labor networks, it's likely that more newsrooms will see internal protests, too.

At The New York Times, over two dozen backend employees working on product engineering and publishing tools decided to collectively call in sick on Thursday. The move was part of overall outrage across departments regarding the op-ed published Wednesday by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas in which Cotton urges that the military be called in to disperse Black Lives Matter protests.

In the op-ed, Cotton refers to the protests opposing police killings of unarmed Black Americans as an "orgy of violence" committed by "bands of miscreants," "nihilist criminals" and "cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa ... [with] anarchic purposes." The senator has also previously referred to the Southern Poverty Law Center as a " political hate group" because it lists organizations he aligns with on its hate map alongside white supremacist groups, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim organizations, and more.

In response to Cotton's op-ed, the newspaper's union issued a rapid response.

"[Cotton's editorial] undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our Black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence," reads the statement from The NewsGuild of New York. "Invariably, invoking state violence disproportionately hurts Black and brown people. It also jeopardizes our journalists' ability to work in the field safely and effectively."

Several New York Times staffers-including Opinion section editors who apparently were unaware of the piece before it was published- tweeted statements shortly after 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday saying the op-ed put staff, and all Black people and protesters, in danger.

Adweek spoke with several New York Times staffers who asked to remain anonymous.

One New York Times employee told Adweek that the staff was meeting with its union on Thursday to discuss a wider company walkout in protest. And a letter to the newspaper's publishers and leadership, signed by over 500 employees and published by Slate on Thursday, said Cotton's op-ed is full of inaccuracies that were not fact-checked, is a dangerous call for violence against the American people and asked for several remedies including adding more comment moderators to the paper's Community team.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, journalists of color and their allies walked off the job (albeit virtually) on Thursday after sending an open letter to leadership. The staff protest was sparked by a column published Monday about the protests and damage to stores with the headline "Buildings Matter, Too"-a riff on the Black Lives Matter movement that struck many staffers as blithe and offensive.

"It's no coincidence that communities hurt by systemic racism only see journalists in their neighborhoods when people are shot or buildings burn down," reads the open letter from Philadelphia Inquirer reporters. "It takes commitment to correct and improve that relationship. It is an insult to our work, our communities, and our neighbors to see that trust destroyed-and makes us that much more likely to face threats and aggression. The carelessness of our leadership makes it harder to do our jobs, and at worst puts our lives at risk."

The tensions inside newsrooms are likely exacerbated by the pressure journalists are under to cover the protests even though doing so can put reporters in danger both in terms of exposure during the Covid-19 pandemic and in terms of police violence that has already seen reporters arrested, hit with batons and injured by flash-bang grenades on camera.

Continue Reading

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Why Journalists Are Walking Out of Newsrooms in Protest

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On Thursday, employees at two major newspapers-The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer-took the day off in protest of the way their newsrooms have chosen to cover the inflamed racial justice protests currently taking place.

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Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism's Financial Crisis

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Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism's Financial Crisis

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Why journalists of color are disproportionately affected by budget cuts

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New numbers from the American Society of News Editors show that the progress of women and minorities in media has halted.

The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) recently released its annual study of newsroom diversity. The results only confirmed what many who have lived through the industry's deep recession have already experienced: a steady decline in minority journalists and stagnation in prior progress. Despite claims by news organizations that they value and promote diversity, the numbers in this year's study show 90 percent of newsroom supervisors from participating news organizations were white.

At a time when non-whites make up roughly 37 percent of the U.S. population, the percentage of minorities in the newsroom has fallen to 12.37 percent from its 13.73 percent high in 2006. According to last year's 2012 ASNE study, overall newsroom employment at daily newspapers dropped 2.4 percent in 2011, but the picture looked much worse -- down 5.7 percent -- for minorities.*

This means that fewer minorities are getting the opportunity to work in news, and news organizations are losing their ability to empower, represent, and -- especially in cases where language ability is crucial -- even to report on minority populations in their communities.

Why have minorities been disproportionately hit by the state of the media industry? Two dozen industry leaders I talked to in recent months point to a series of mostly cost-saving decisions at papers across the country that had unintended consequences.

One piece of this puzzle is layoff policies and union contracts that often rewarded seniority and pushed the most recent hires to leave first. Many journalists of color have the least protected jobs because they're the least senior employees, says Doris Truong, a Washington Post editor and acting president of Unity, an umbrella group of minority journalist organizations.

At the same time, minorities were disproportionately likely to take buyouts offered as incentives to trim newspaper payrolls, notes Keith Woods, vice president for diversity in news and operations at NPR and former dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute. "When our industry looks as it has over the last 10 years, like it might not survive, people leave -- and the most vulnerable people are the ones most inclined to get out because they've got families to support, bills to pay," he says.

At papers like The Washington Post, which has had five rounds of buyouts since 2003, "You could see the writing on the wall: you take the buyout today, or face the layoff tomorrow," Woods says.

Any attempts that might otherwise be made to remedy the problem have taken a backseat to economic concerns. Newspaper advertising revenues are less than half of what they were in 2006, and papers once accustomed to healthy profit margins struggle to stay afloat. Journalist Sally Lehrman, a professor at Santa Clara University, says she has heard a news executive say that "wondering about diverse voices and perspectives is a bit like wondering about the fate of Mrs. Gardner's rose garden after a tornado has decimated the entire village."

The result is that Dori Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, says she has watched journalists of color leave newsrooms at an alarming rate, even as the audience consuming news has grown more diverse. "The news media and the nation are moving in two different directions," she says. "News media is getting whiter as the country is getting browner." Journalists of color "feel their voice is not heard, their story ideas are not validated, and they don't see room for advancement."

With notable exceptions, minority journalists remain even more under-represented in leadership positions across newspapers and the broadcast news industry than in the newsroom in general. Particularly in broadcast, "the higher you get, the whiter it gets," says Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism and American studies & ethnicity at the University of Southern California. The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)'s 2012 diversity study reports that 86 percent of television news directors and 91.3 percent of radio news directors are Caucasian.

Study of television managers by Bob Papper for the Radio Television Digital News Association (2012).

Study of radio managers by Bob Papper for the Radio Television Digital News Association (2012).(2012).

Benet Wilson, who chairs the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) digital task force, believes the issue of minority representation is exacerbated by a loss of diversity leaders. As senior diversity champions have left newsrooms, she explains, the minorities who stay have felt they have no voice at the top.

There's "a loss of management, a loss of older reporters, a loss of diversity champions -- people who had the title officially or unofficially," says Wilson, who left Aviation Week in 2011 and now works for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

The consequences have been less diversity advocacy around issues of training, media partnerships and community coverage, she says. "You've got to cut somewhere, and you cut where there is the least amount of squawking. There's no one left to say, 'you can't do this.' The stone starts rolling down the hill, and you can't stop it."

Diversity efforts, Woods adds, generally "resided in an individual who left, got reassigned, retired, or who was laid off." In other cases, diversity was part of a specific outreach initiative that ended with the loss of a grant or project.

Minority journalist conferences, once a key source of revenue for diversity projects and a major recruiting tool for newspapers, have plummeted in attendance. Luther Jackson, former executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, remembers strong partnerships between newspapers and minority journalist associations starting in the 1980s, which began to taper off in 2001.

The Business Case

The problem, fundamentally, has been reconciling diversity with newsroom business models. "Most media companies look at diversity as a cost center," says Paul Cheung, President of the Asian American Journalists Association. "They see it as something nice to do." Few, he says, actually connect the dots and make it into a business case.

Cheung believes this has contributed to the industry's financial losses. Diversity is not just "a nice thing to have--it's crucial for a company's survival in the future," he says. "More than 50 percent of Americans by 2050 will be non-Caucasian."

Why does it matter, from the business perspective, if newsrooms don't reflect society at large? Because publications need readers. Robert Hernandez, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, attributes a decline in reader engagement to the fact that so many people don't see themselves reflected in coverage. "When I left The Seattle Times, I was the last Spanish speaker on staff," he says. "There would be crime stories-- and I'm the web guy-- and they called me over to translate interviews in Spanish."

Radio, Television, and Online News

The broadcasting industry has faced similar challenges. The Radio and Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) reports that in the last 22 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 10.4 percent, while the minority workforce in television news is up only 3.7 percent, and the minority workforce in radio is up 0.9 percent.

"Broadcast was kind of a leading edge of major social changes taking place in the country," says Bob Papper, who has overseen the RTDNA study for 19 years. "What television stations learned over time is if you want to appeal to the audience in your market, you need to look like your audience." Broadcast diversity figures have held relatively steady over the last few years as radio has seen much lower figures.

But overall, Papper says, "the minority population in this country is growing about 3/10 th of a percent a year. If you hold steady, then every year you're falling behind."

On the positive side, the digital landscape has opened up new channels for a wide variety of people to produce and consume news. "There are now so many websites and community sites that let you get closer to subjects that interest you," says Jim Brady, Editor-in-Chief at Digital First Media and President of the Online News Association. "Everyone has an opportunity to zone in on their interests in a way that didn't exist when 200 news organizations drove the conversation."

While established newspapers once had the power to serve as gatekeepers, now anyone who can pay for a data plan and WordPress account can write about an area of interest, he says.

Mark Luckie, Manager of Journalism and News at Twitter, says with social media "it's less about who you are but 'are you bringing value to the conversation?'"

Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer at Columbia University, says African Americans and Indonesians often play the biggest roles in setting trends on Twitter.

With the rise of smartphones in many communities, everyone has a newsgathering tool in their pocket, Brady says, and mobile has brought down cost needed to give oneself a digital presence. Pew studies suggest that mobile penetration is indeed increasing, particularly in Hispanic and African American communities.

But many are skeptical about diversity in web 2.0 culture. "Online news gives everyone a chance to work in news, but the issue is how do you get paid?" asks Doris Truong, president of Unity, an umbrella organization of minority journalists.

"Very few people have had access or desire to have training as a reporter, journalist, critical thinker," says Danyel Smith, a writer, editor, and Knight Fellow at Stanford University. "Just because there's Tumblr, WordPress, and Twitter in terms of instant publishing, doesn't mean these populations are much better served to the degree they can and should be."

The idea that the Internet has made the news more diverse "is a bit of a trap," agrees Lehrman, the Santa Clara University professor. While journalists once felt responsible for creating diverse public spaces and forums, today, she contends, journalists sometimes assume people create them for themselves and don't attempt proper civic debate.

"Digital tools increasingly narrow the scope of information you have access to unless you deliberately push it open," says Lehrman.

Search engines, for instance, have changed news consumption patterns in ways that can filter out these more diverse outlets. Customized news, she says, "is a force against this kind of digital diversity." Google's algorithms, in her view, work against broadening the spectrum of voices people access and hear daily.

In some ways, Internet news "allows us to dig deeper into our silos and become less informed about communities outside our own," says Maynard.

The staff behind new online publications has also caused many diversity champions to pause. "The online pioneers looked very much like the traditional Old White Boy's club," says Juana Summers, a Politico reporter and member of the board of directors at the Online News Association.

"It gets back to the networks by which people get funding and attention for projects. They're historically a lot stronger, in journalism and venture capital, among white men," says Lehrman. "If you went to a few ONA conferences, initially, it was like a sea of white faces."

ONA has devoted considerable efforts to diversifying its panels and leadership in the last year as a result.

"I think part of it is that with online news, there is so much opportunity but it takes a whole lot of risk," says Summers. Minorities, particularly those with less financial security, may find it very hard to jump into a web startup than traditional companies with 401ks. "I'm dealing with students a lot, women who are often new to the field and that may prove a barrier to entry," she says.

Summers, 24, understands the hesitation on a personal level. "As someone who grew up in a lower-middle class family, paycheck to paycheck, it was a very hard risk to take to take a chance at a startup, knowing I might not have a job in three to six months. I'm black, from a single parent family. That's a tough sell to make," she recalls.

Unpaid internships compound diversity concerns by reserving entry-level journalism positions to financially advantaged youth who can afford to work for free.

Woods says the roots of inequality in digital journalism are different from those in traditional media. "Back when we began fighting for change, the foe was malevolent exclusion. It was a society that segregated and separated and believed in superiority and inferiority," he says. "When dotcom news organizations popped up, what you had was a bunch of people using their savings, retirement plans, or investments of their own money, who got together with friends who also had money and created organizations because damned if they'd be driven out of the business."

In short, he says, "I do not believe it has the [same] roots in exclusion our industry's history would have, but the result looks exactly the same."

In terms of digital skills, minorities may also lose out due to training issues. People who have more established job and are better connected within the political hierarchy of the news organization have more access to training.

"When I started as a journalist, I started on a typewriter," Wilson recalls. "You need to network and be in with the people revolutionizing." In this sense, she says, minorities are sometimes at a disadvantage. "My newsroom went digital in 2006, and until I got laid off I was waiting for that training."

In some cases, especially with relatively young institutions, the question of diversity in digital newsrooms may have simply not come up. "When I talk to people about diversity in the news, it's often seen as an old idea," says Lehrman.

Just how fast digital newsrooms are making diversity a priority can be almost impossible to measure. Professor Adam Maksl, who analyses data for the ASNE diversity study, believes the institution of journalism should be more diverse. "What's difficult is we don't know what the institution of journalism is anymore," he says. With online news, Maksl explains, there is no list of all the online news sources, or even a clear definition of what constitutes an online news organization.

But despite these challenges, dedicated diversity leaders are still working to try to insert diversity back into the agenda at newsrooms across the country, digital or otherwise.

"The news media is not only failing to serve the communities but the country at large when they fail to reflect what's going on in communities of color," says Maynard. This lack of diversity in newsroom employment shapes news coverage regardless of the medium. Looking at news today, she says, "African Americans are in stories about crime, sports, entertainment. Latinos in immigration. Native Americans and Asian Americans apparently don't contribute to the fabric of our lives."

For Woods, "when you fail to pursue the most diverse news staff, you fail to open up the possibilities created when you bring a broader range of life experience, insight, understanding, curiosity-- all the things that go into creating story ideas and coverage plans, and all the things that bring us news."
* This sentence has been edited for clarity.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism's Financial Crisis

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New numbers from the American Society of News Editors show that the progress of women and minorities in media has halted. The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) recently released its annual study of newsroom diversity. The results only confirmed what many who have lived through the industry's deep recession have already experienced: a steady decline in minority journalists and stagnation in prior progress.

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Diversify Your Workplace. There Are No Excuses

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Diversify Your Workplace. There Are No Excuses

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Barriers in recruitment, retention, promotion, and content diversification and how to take them down

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Guidelines to improving newsroom diversity (Twitter: @tanzinavega)

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On Sunday, the New York Times public editor Liz Spayd wrote a column that cut deep to the bone about the lack of racial and ethnic diversity and the "newsroom's blinding whiteness."

She described the team that covered the 2016 presidential election as having "less diversity than you'll find in Donald Trump's cabinet thus far," and notedthat, of the 20 reporters who covered the presidential campaign, just two were black. None were Asian or Latino. The six reporters assigned to cover the White House are also white.

At a time when so many people are questioning the validity of their media coverage, having people with a range of perspectives and backgrounds reporting the news is critical. The election of Donald Trump as president revealed just how deeply divided our country is when it comes to race and yet in the next few decades, people of color will become the majority of Americans. Still, very few feel adequately represented by the media.

Of course, workplace diversity isn't just an issue in newsrooms. It's something most every major industry -- from Silicon Valley to Wall Street -- struggles with.

Spayd noted that the department with the most ethnic and racial diversity at The Times were the administrative staff, or "The news assistants, who mostly do administrative jobs and get paid the least," she wrote.

I should know.

While pursuing my graduate degree in digital journalism, I began working at The Times as a news assistant on the metro desk. Over the course of eight years there, I moved up the ranks from assisting editors and reporters on the metro desk with administrative tasks to covering homicides and fires as a freelance breaking news reporter, to working on multimedia content as a staff digital producer to covering digital media for the business news desk as a staff reporter .

Related: What about the black working class?

In 2013, I pitched an idea to Jill Abramson, then the executive editor at The Times, to cover race and ethnicity. The beat had a good run and lasted about a year until theeditors decided to rethink the way they were covering race, halted the beat, and reassigned me to the Metro Desk. My audience, who were diverse and outspoken, criticized The Times for the move. I was humbled by their support and have since moved on to coverrace and inequality for CNN. In my first piece on this beat, I wrote about why newsrooms are so white.

And yet...

As an industry, we've made some progress, but not nearly enough to where newsrooms look like the diversity of the places we cover. And while we are in a moment of reflection about how we could have collectively done better covering white working class and rural white Americans, many of our newsrooms are still lacking diversity of thought, race, gender, ethnicity, class and disability.

My experiencesat The Times were some of the most exciting, challenging and proud moments in my career. Few things can compare to being on the front page of the paper of record. And while the paper has reimagined its coverage on race and has attempted to add more diverse staff, particularly on the magazine (Wesley Morris' piece on black male sexuality is one of the best pieces I've read this year), I wasn't surprised to see Spayd's column.

But The Times is not alone. So here are some things we can do to foster diversity and inclusion in newsrooms.

1. Stop reacting to your lack of diversity in fits and starts and make it a part of your core mission as an organization. This is where many of the issues around diversity begin. A column like Spayd's is written, a beat killed, a diversity report is released and suddenly hiring managers and editors are scrambling to find "diverse" talent. Diversity is important, not for its own sake, but because it makes a better product. I can't imagine any organization that wouldn't want that.

2. Diversity is not a trend, it's an imperative to make sure your coverage is better, more nuanced and more accurate. Having a diverse staff should be as important as having reporters who cover key issues like health care, crime or the environment. It takes time to develop an area of expertise. Reporters spend years working the phones, establishing relationships with sources, cultivating contacts and doing research. Diversity initiatives should be no different.

3. Develop the people you already have by investing in them, giving them high profile projects and supporting them. Often, diversity hiring happens at the entry level, with veteran reporters who have years of institutional support taking the lead on big projects. This is where a lot of diverse talent is lost. People don't want to work where they can't grow. And limiting who gets access to high profile assignments perpetuates the diversity problem. If you don't get the big assignment, you can't be in the runningfora Pulitzer, a Peabody or a Polk award.

Related: Will tracking pay really prevent discrimination?

4. Stop thinking there is a certain number of people of color or women you need to hire and thinking you have "enough." Often, diversity hiring is seen as a zero sum game, a "one and done" process. Hiring managers: if you wouldn't question how many whites or how many men you hire, why do it for diverse talent?

5. Stop telling people you are on a mission to be more diverse so that's why you are reaching out to them. Diverse talent should also be seen as qualified talent. They shouldn't feel as though they are filling a quota before they are even hired. No one wants to be a token "diversity hire" because what happens when diversity is not important anymore?

6. Groom diverse talent to be able to grow into senior management, editors and other leadership roles. One of the biggest barriers to newsroom diversity is climbing the steep ladder to the top. You can have all the diverse staffing you want, but the leadership also has to be inclusive.

7. Newsroom diversity should be intersectional. Hire outside of obvious silos. A more holistic approach includes making sure your newsroom considers class, gender identity, raceand geographic region in its hiring decisions. You can be white and poor, black and wealthy, a Latino from Arkansas who doesn't speak Spanish, etc.

8. Don't forget about class diversity. (See point 7). Make sure your newsroom doesn't just hire people who went to the same elite schools. Poor and working class people often can't afford to take on unpaid internships or pay forA-list schools. Stop looking down on people because of what they sound like or look like. They, too, are your audience. They, too, can vote with their clicks. They, too, consume media.

Related: Working while brown: What discrimination looks like now

9. Stop focusing so much on hiring "stars," the one coveted voice. Develop your own stars. Don't misunderstandthis point. I love seeing women, people of color and other diverse voices gain the long overdue recognition they deserve. But as Spayd says in her column "while big names are rightfully celebrated, they can give the appearance of more diversity than there really is."Stars become stars because they were supported and cultivated. They didn't fall out of the sky. As the media tries to establish more trust with its audience, it needs to bring more, not fewer, voices to the table.

10. Pay attention to how you treat different staff members and confront your own internal biases. Implicit biases are pervasive in many organizations, not just media. Newsrooms should do more training on how to root those out so that editors and managers understand their biases. You can take this implicit bias test to discover your own.

What are some of your ideas on how newsrooms can be more diverse and inclusive? Tweet me @tanzinavega and let's continue the conversation.

CNNMoney (New York) First published December 19, 2016: 9:42 AM ET

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She described the team that covered the 2016 presidential election as having "less diversity than you'll find in Donald Trump's cabinet thus far," and notedthat, of the 20 reporters who covered the presidential campaign, just two were black. None were Asian or Latino. The six reporters assigned to cover the White House are also white.

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Dear newsroom managers, journalists of color can't do all the work

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Dear newsroom managers, journalists of color can't do all the work

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"We’re ready to do the work. We’ve been doing the work. But we need you to step up your allyship."

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Dear newsroom managers, journalists of color can't do all the work - Poynter

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We're ready to do the work. We've been doing the work. But we need you to step up your allyship.

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She's Asian and female. But she's not me.

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She's Asian and female. But she's not me.

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Microaggressions in the newsroom, written by AAJA President Michelle Ye Hee Lee (Twitter: @myhlee)

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Washington Post (Washington Post)

About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.

We're both Korean American, 5-foot-8, and our last name is Lee. That's about all we have in common.

Christine and I worked for affiliate news companies in Phoenix on the same floor. She worked the early-morning shift, from 3:30 a.m. to noon, as a TV reporter. I worked the day shift for the newspaper.

One day, a human resources representative pulled Christine aside. The person told her they noticed she was in the office until 7 p.m. every day and requested she stop working double shifts.

That reporter they saw in the newsroom was me.

Amy, a Taiwanese American reporter, wrote a heart-wrenching front-page story about a girl with a rare disease that caused her skin to deteriorate upon touch.

A colleague came over to my desk, where I had hung a makeshift sign next to my name plate - "NOT AMY" - because we were mistaken for each other so often. He said: "That was an amazing story today, and it wasn't even on your beat. How did you find that girl?"

"I didn't," I told him. "The other Asian reporter did. It's on her beat."

While on assignment together recently, my Chinese American reporter friend Sally was sitting near me. A source that I had spent months trying to get to know walked by her and greeted her with my name.

She wasn't me.

In every news job I've had, I have been confused with another Asian woman reporter - a steady undercurrent in my career. I'm hardly alone in experiencing this, and it's certainly not just Asians who are confused for each other. There is some science behind people's failure to grasp cross-racial identification.

'It makes me feel invisible': When people can't tell their coworkers of color apart

If you just cringed, chuckled or rolled your eyes, I've been there. These instances are rarely intentional, and can be more embarrassing for the person who made the error than for me. Sometimes it's genuinely funny. Other times, it's just awkward.

It took me years to realize that it also stings.

Whether the person acted without malice, the effect is the same: It erases my body of work for someone else's, simply because their ancestors were born on the same continent as mine. It tells me that my place in journalism - and that of the other Asian reporter they confused me for - is dispensable, interchangeable and indistinguishable. That no matter what I do in my career, I am but an Asian who may or may not have ever worked in journalism at all.

Sometimes, I'm gaslighted into thinking maybe I actually am the person they think I am. Those moments infuriate me the most.

Strangers approach me to compliment me for speaking at events I don't remember attending. I thank them, figuring my memory has failed me, and so as not to litigate a kind gesture.

Then I realize later they confused me with another Asian reporter, which fills me with guilt. Should I have pried for details about the event I allegedly attended, then corrected them? That would have been rude, I'm sure. But that other reporter probably worked hard to prepare and rehearse her speech. Why did I thank them for the compliment?

I recently met a new source by phone. He told me we had spoken a few years ago. "Oh, I don't remember that for some reason, but it's nice to connect again," I said, feeling awful that I may have forgotten meeting him.

But as he described our alleged first encounter, it occurred to me that he was confusing me with an Asian reporter who left The Post three years ago.

After we got off the phone, I wondered: Should I have corrected him once I realized it wasn't me? Would that have started our source relationship on an uncomfortable note? Do I now pretend that she is ... me? What if it comes up again in a future conversation?

These instances happen with such frequency that it is impossible for me to quantify.

A successful reporter navigates delicate interactions with other people and emerges with the information she hoped to glean. Preferably, she makes them comfortable enough to take her call again. At the very least, she doesn't make her news organization look unprofessional.

So I take these instances in stride. I keep my sense of humor and never make a big deal about them. I don't know exactly what I'll say if it comes up again with that source, but I won't be a jerk about it.

But what these interactions ultimately do is hurl my otherness at me, reminding me that I have no ownership over the career I have worked for since I was 15 years old. That I don't deserve the dignity of earning credit for my accomplishments or owning up to my failures. That I must shoulder the blame of others' mistakes or somehow share their successes, just because they are Asian and female.

When you peel back the veil of a careless, awkward mistake, you see it for what it truly is: an act of unconscious bias at best, drive-by racism at worst. And it has real consequences for us in the workplace and holds us back in ways we can't control.

Christine was on air starting at 4:30 a.m. every day, ate "dinner" at 1 p.m., and rarely got to spend time with her friends. Yet she was criticized by company officials because they thought she was me.

Amy earned the trust of a family to tell a beautiful story that sparked empathy among so many of her readers. Yet I got credit for her work.

Sally was away from her young son and husband when we were on the same reporting trip. Yet she was treated as if she weren't even there, just because I was.

Judge us each on the merits of our individual careers. That I am an Asian woman in journalism does not make me a substitute for any other Asian woman in journalism. The women I've been confused with are among the most resilient, most talented, smartest and wittiest people I know - each in her own way.

And, just to be clear, none of them is me.

The soft bigotry of having to change your name. Because somehow Tchaikovsky is easier.

From Meghan Markle to Rosario Dawson: How I learned to love my 'ethnic ambiguity'

Asian Americans balance Christianity and culture in rituals honoring their ancestors

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Perspective | She's Asian and female. But she's not me.

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When you peel back the veil of a careless, awkward mistake, you see it for what it truly is: an act of unconscious bias at best, drive-by racism at worst. And it has real consequences for us in the workplace.

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The unspoken (and often overlooked) responsibilities of journalists of color.

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As the sun set in Charlottesville, Virginia, two days after a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman, I ducked out of an event hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I ran past a statue of Robert E. Lee that, the previous day, had sparked protests and counterprotests, and headed to my car. There was plenty to do on the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the hills to my home, in Washington, DC; I had to lay down a few voice notes with my observations about the people I'd met and the fears they'd expressed. I had to check in with my editors at The Atlantic. I had to call my wife and infant son to let them know that I was fine. And I had to find some way to decompress-to find a place to put the emotions that Klan robes, swastikas, and Confederate flags had unearthed.

But first I had to do a few things for my "second job," the collection of unspoken responsibilities involving diversity, inclusion, and development that I've inherited as a journalist of color. In the parking lot, I fired off a series of texts to other black journalists at The Atlantic, with whom I'd attended a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists the day before, in New Orleans. With my car's air conditioning battling against August heat, I conducted an informal debrief on which promising black journalists from the convention might come to work at the magazine. I then reached out to a larger group of writers of color, colleagues, friends, and people I mentor. This was another kind of debrief. Dozens of times, I sent the same question: "You okay?" By the time I got on the road, it was dark.
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It seemed a fitting moment for my second job to come into stark relief: NABJ was founded in 1975 as a collective of people working the same second job. The organization was an effort by black journalists who-with their own elbow grease and, more often than not, their own money-aimed to expand their ranks. They sought to do so even though it was a time when joining a black professional organization might have been dangerous for a career in lily-white newsrooms. These journalists performed their second job while also working as reporters and editors to fearlessly peel back layers of racism and rot at America's core-a job with its own attendant dangers.

At its best, this process means that the power of a lone journalist to effect change in newsrooms, in the course of a lifetime, is mathematically unbounded.

But the second job represented survival. Then, as now, America's newsrooms woefully missed the mark not only when it came to the raw numeric measure of diversity, but also in terms of developing and promoting writers of color. Then, as now, journalists of color had to take a page from the playbook of the Carthaginian general Hannibal: either find a way or make one. Still today, they are usually uncompensated for this work, and much of it takes place, by necessity, in the shadows. There are informal coffees, meetups, and Slack channels. This remains the case even as diversity has become a corporate buzzword that employers sense they must embrace. Why should the "second job" still be required?

Personally, I have a flat spot right in the front of my head from trying to break down walls my entire career, forcing diversity of thought and opinion into newsrooms and onto the air." That was how Gwen Ifill, a revered PBS NewsHour anchor who died in 2016, once encapsulated her life's work. The league of women and people of color who were directly or indirectly inspired by her leadership is a who's who of journalist superstars. Shortly after Ifill's death, Kenya Downs, a NewsHour reporter, reflected in an open letter on what she owed her predecessor: "I promise to uphold your legacy by being a hand or a model for some other woman who one day may see me, or may see a woman who looks like me or like you, and know that she can too." There are active and passive elements, Downs noted, to the roles played by unofficial ambassadors to marginalized communities. Visibility is itself important. For many of us, that means being seen doing work that addresses that very marginalization. But visibility also means assuming the pressures of being a kind of public face for everything our outlets do that remotely relates to race, gender, or sexual identity-good or bad. Active outreach, recruiting, networking, peer counseling, and even in-office conflict management are often daily duties, too. Flat spots, indeed.

Second jobs beget second jobs. Downs wrote about the way in which Ifill not only connected networks of marginalized journalists, but also reached through time, expanding those connections exponentially. Recruiting and mentoring two promising candidates means that those two can recruit four; then we get eight, and so on. At its best, this process means that the power of a lone journalist to effect change in newsrooms, in the course of a lifetime, is mathematically unbounded.

But if newsrooms do not build viable pipelines to support those recruits, the result can be a bottleneck of frustration. Too often, young job candidates of color who have demonstrated initiative and talent are denied a chance to work alongside peers with shinier credentials. Too often, those who make it through the front doors of newsrooms find the paths to advancement closed. Journalists of color tend to earn less than their white colleagues-as several studies commissioned by unions at the largest newspapers in the country indicate-even as newsroom managers take credit for their diversity-bolstering hires. And, factoring in the unpaid demands of work as unofficial diversity and inclusion liaisons, minority journalists might actually be working twice as hard for half as much money. The tragedy of the second job is that, most of the time, the people whose careers are propelled forward by the labor and assistance of other journalists of color find themselves trying to break down the same walls as their mentors. In theory, the second job should one day create the conditions in which journalists of color don't have to do it. In reality, the necessity never ends.

Of course, there's an easy way to fix all of this. Outlets should hire more people of different ethnic backgrounds, aspire beyond "representativeness"-a low bar-and make genuine attempts to cater to communities of color. Outlets should pay their journalists wages on par with their white, male colleagues for their work, and they should provide ample mentoring and opportunities for advancement. Contrary to popular belief, these things are not at all difficult-in fact, the presses and news stations run by and for communities of color have managed to do it throughout their histories without too much fuss.

Further, savvy editors can supercharge the second job, providing formal support structures for journalists of color who choose-and the element of choice is critical-to bring their extracurricular talents to bear in the name of advancing the outlet and its journalism. My place of employment, The Atlantic, after responding to feedback from a handful of black journalists who were exhausted from their efforts during last year's NABJ convention, has begun a concrete process to turn recommendations and informal mentoring into an official pipeline. After two New York Times writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ron Nixon, cofounded the Ida B. Wells Society, to train and support aspiring investigative journalists, the Times signed on as a partner with the group. These efforts are a start for translating moral support into material support. There are more distant frontiers that aren't beyond reach, such as directly compensating journalists for their efforts to diversify their workplace or mentor others.

Today, as journalists find themselves without guaranteed protection from discriminatory policies, and attacks on the free press-including those from the highest levels of government-have become more common, communities of color are particularly at risk. I find my own second job as urgent as ever. I read clips and identify rising stars. I reach out to those reporters. I mentor more students than I probably have time for-several times a week, I distribute how-to guides for pitching and send feedback on resumes-and I continue to check in with colleagues, as I did a year ago in Charlottesville. The second job is fulfilling because we are building something. We are building structures of resilience that are broad and deep, designed to weather any coming storm. All of journalism has been constructed at least partially on support structures, and all of journalism chooses to ignore the second jobs that built them at its own peril.
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Vann R. Newkirk II is a politics writer for The Atlantic, where he covers a wide range of topics including civil rights, the environment, and policy. He is a recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors's 2018 ASME Next Award for outstanding achievement by magazine journalists under the age of 30. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland.

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As the sun set in Charlottesville, Virginia, two days after a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman, I ducked out of an event hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I ran past a statue of Robert E.

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Why don't newsroom diversity initiatives work? Blame journalism culture.

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Why don't newsroom diversity initiatives work? Blame journalism culture.

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"White skin needs to get in the game to make diversity a reality"

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The Kerner Commission tried 51 years ago. ASNE has been trying for 41 years. Corporations have tried initiatives on and off for decades. And Monday, the Knight Foundation and the Maynard Institute announced the latest attempt to attempt to help America's journalism institutions diversify their staffs.

The $1.2 million donation could have funded 10 to 15 journalists, but literally throwing bodies at journalism's diversity problem hasn't worked. I'm going to be cautiously optimistic that the newly announced Equity and Inclusion Transformation Program could accomplish the goal that many programs haven't been able to: transform newsroom culture. Or better yet, reset journalism's perception of race.

The problem isn't hiring or nurturing "diverse" journalists - it's journalism's approach to diversity, which points at "them," at "others." To people who aren't straight white men.

White skin needs to get in the game to make diversity a reality.

As outlined in scores of case studies, especially Pamela Newkirk's 2000 book "Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media," the quest for newsroom diversity began after 1968 Kerner Report dissected years of rioting in black communities. The report concluded that the news media had failed "to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States and, as a related matter, to meet the Negro's legitimate expectations in journalism. By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions."

Hiring African Americans to integrate white newsrooms started with a not-so-rhetorical question that renowned writer and NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois had heard half-century before: How does it feel to be a problem?

The recently announced Maynard program is designed to put the onus on news executives to rethink how they perceive diversity.

"It's always been put on us to solve the issue," LaSharah Bunting, Knight's director of journalism, said in the news release. (Like me, Bunting is an African American woman and, also like me, a former New York Times editor.) "This puts responsibility on the institution."

But we need to go a step further. For true change, we must put the responsibility on the cultural institution we call journalism, not just its individuals or organizations.

Like all white patriarchal institutions in America, journalism has seen itself outside of and superior to race - and also by extension, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion and able-bodiedness.

But as writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: "Race is the child of racism, not the father."

Executives might see the need for more journalists who aren't white males in their newsrooms, but our profession has failed to identify factors beyond privileged networking that put us in this position.

It's another knock against objectivity. That longstanding yet flawed journalistic tenet, which many of us consider impossible to achieve, has also stacked the deck against journalists who are not cis white males. It's bad enough that newsroom culture often casts diversity hires as unworthy outsiders. In the name of objectivity, these hires are implicitly told to check their identity at the cubicle - until it's needed to appease a community or snare an interview.

In my dissertation about black columnists at "mainstream" newspapers, finished in 2014, I challenged Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach's thoughts about "diverse" journalists included their seminal book " The Elements of Journalism ":

"Whatever adjective attaches itself to them as journalists - Buddhists, African American, disabled, gay, Hispanic, Jewish, WASP, or even liberal or conservative - it becomes descriptive but not limiting. They are journalists who are also Buddhist, African American, conservative - not Buddhist first and journalist second. When that happens, racial, ethnic, religious, class and ideological backgrounds inform their work, but do not dictate it."

Back then as I was studying this issue, I wondered if their stance meant that being white was a non-issue but "diverse" journalists possessed extra layers that could call their objectivity into question. I now admit I had overlooked WASP among their litany of identities, though I still wonder if a practicing profession, even one as altruistic as journalism, ever overrides who you are 24/7.

A lot has changed in five years. Journalism has been forced to see whiteness as newsworthy. As The New York Times wrote on Sunday: "Aggrieved white men over the last several months have turned to mass murder in service of hatred against immigrants, Jews and others they perceive as threats to the white race."

Last week, I emailed Rosenstiel and Kovach to clarify their position on identity and journalism, given the Trump administration and the rancor over the Democratic debate moderation. Both were gracious enough to reply. With Kovach concurring, Rosenstiel wrote that they said that a person's background isn't irrelevant to journalism. But there are rules that apply to all journalists, including white males.

"There is no implication that if you are an African American journalist or Hispanic or Jewish or Buddhist that you deny that or blot it out," Rosenstiel wrote. "Just the opposite. It informs your journalism. It becomes descriptive, as we say, not limiting. An African American journalist doesn't cover only African American matters. Nor does she deny her ethnicity. It should make her a better journalist. Just as her gender does. But she wouldn't put it ahead of her job. Her knowledge helps her do it better."

Understood. I was the black sports journalist who eschewed basketball for tennis years before the Williams sisters were on the scene.

But I still believe many newsrooms place the burden on that diverse journalist - and not white males - to prove her loyalty. In "Within the Veil," Newkirk pointed out that some newsrooms were reluctant to send black journalists to cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Did any editors pause before sending a white man to cover Timothy McVeigh?

I wholeheartedly believe in journalism's mission to seek truth and tell it fairly and dimensionally. And brave journalists of all stripes have done so in producing extraordinary reporting on oppressed people in this country and around the world.

But I also believe that journalism, like the other cultural institutions it covers, can turn the spotlight on itself to change for the better. It starts by acknowledging the white patriarchal perspective has been the default approach to hiring journalists of color, then scrutinizing them. We all have identities, but power dynamics often decide whether they are problems.

Transforming newsrooms could mean embracing this notion: assumptions about whiteness are as much a part of the problem of diversity as they are part of the solution.

If the new Maynard project achieved that one goal, then maybe newsrooms might start learning how to fish instead of begging for them before throwing them back.
Kathleen McElroy is director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is the G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism.

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Why don't newsroom diversity initiatives work? Blame journalism culture. - Poynter

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The Kerner Commission tried 51 years ago. ASNE has been trying for 41 years. Corporations have tried initiatives on and off for decades. And Monday, the Knight Foundation and the Maynard Institute announced the latest attempt to attempt to help America's journalism institutions diversify their staffs.

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Why diversity matters, and navigating the industry as a journalist of color (JOC) (Twitter: @jelani9)

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Five years ago, I came across an article in The New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the neighborhood where robberies took place. But there was a notable wrinkle: Confronted by armed antagonists, the article sighed, many people refused to surrender their belongings, even when they had only a few dollars on them. The article tsk-tsked at community members for tempting fate. A criminologist offered a suggestion that it was "nuts for the victim to refuse." A few dollars, readers were told, are not worth one's life.

The article stuck with me in part because I'd once lived nearby that area and understood the realities of crime there. But I also was struck by the ways in which the efforts of a journalist, an editor, an expert, and even neighborhood residents seemed only to further a narrative of liberal condescension, missing crucial facts about life in this place.

Here's what I knew: People who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about. The few dollars in their pockets may represent their only way to get to work; surrendering cash is not only an immediate loss but also one that jeopardizes a future paycheck. More crucially, people who are known to be easily victimized likely will become frequent targets, a reality that may make their neighborhood virtually unlivable. What to the journalist seemed inscrutable was, to many residents, reasonable.
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It was not lost on me that the journalist who wrote the story was white and that the neighborhood was largely black and Latinx. The article represented not simply a case of a journalist missing a story. The story, to me, spoke to the problem of what happens when the demographics of the Times -and American newspapers in general-look nothing like the demographics of the communities they cover. The people who are most likely to appear in these kinds of stories are the least likely to have a say in how those stories are told.

Conversations around diversity in media have tended to focus on cozy niceties. "Diversity" is often partnered with the word "inclusion" in our racial vocabulary. Since the conflicts of the 1960s, it has been increasingly apparent that our political, educational, and media institutions should not appear to be monochromatically white. But appearance is not the real problem. A democratic media is.

A half-century ago, members of the Kerner Commission-an advisory board formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to a series of race riots-spelled out the role of a mostly white media in failing to cover the cause of unrest. It called on news outlets across the country to diversify. In the decades since, including "diverse" perspectives in media and elsewhere has become broadly acceptable-eight out of 10 Americans view ethnic diversity as "at least somewhat important" in the workplace.

Yet 50 years after Kerner, we still see chronic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in print and broadcast media. In 2017, only 16.6 percent of journalists at daily newspapers were people of color; in the US population, more than 37 percent of people are nonwhite. According to a 2015 poll, more than three-quarters of the guests on Sunday morning shows were white. There is currently only one person of color, CNN's Don Lemon, hosting a weeknight primetime show on the three biggest cable news networks. This underrepresentation of minorities is a more polite way of saying that there is an overrepresentation of white people in media-79 percent of people working in the publishing industry are white. Two years ago, the dearth of people of color at the Oscars generated the satirical #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. A #NewsroomSoWhite hashtag would now be equally fitting.

There is something awkward about this kind of racial census taking-journalism is difficult and our media outlets, we like to think, are staffed by people who have the skills to get the job done. This is often the case. But it leaves a question unasked: How many people who have the skills to do this work never even get the opportunity to try?

I came to journalism through alternative newspapers in the Washington, DC, area. I contributed to The Hilltop, Howard University's student paper, and wrote for a small black-owned weekly, where I learned the fundamentals of writing on deadline. My first job at a majority-white publication was at the Washington City Paper, in 1996. David Carr, who would go on to become a crucial voice in media criticism at the Times before his death, in 2015, arrived at the City Paper from its sister publication, The Twin Cities Reader. The City Paper traditionally had chilly relations with much of the city's majority black population. In addition to the lack of minority representation on staff, the paper's critical coverage of the mayoralty of Marion Barry was often read as thinly veiled racial condescension.

Carr, with characteristic insouciance, set out to diversify the staff. He started a paid internship program and put out feelers for writers who might be interested in working at the paper. His first class of interns included me; Holly Bass, now a writer and playwright; Neil Drumming, currently a producer with This American Life; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who would go on to win a National Book Award. Carr did not pat himself on the back for his recruitment style. (To my knowledge, he never even spoke of it outside of an article he wrote explaining the importance of newspaper and magazine internship programs at a point when many outlets were eliminating them.) But equally important was the fact that he did not hire any of us in pursuit of a vague, frankly condescending ideal of "inclusion." He explained in straightforward terms that he worried that there were specific stories missing from his newspaper. He wanted a better publication and believed our work would help him build one. And we did.

What happens when the demographics of the Times- and American newspapers in general-look nothing like the demographics of the communities they serve?

Years later, in 2013, I attended the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association and participated in a panel on media diversity. My session was scheduled to immediately follow a panel, always well-attended, on best-selling magazine issues. The theory was that the huge lead-in would generate a spillover crowd for the diversity panel. Instead, people streamed out of the room, leaving just a handful of outlets lefttodiscussthedisappointingnumber ofpeopleofcolorintheindustry. Afterward, I talked to people from magazines in Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Washington, and Los Angeles-places with large black populations-and learned that none of them had any black writers on staff; the only black journalist at Atlanta's regional magazine had left a year or so earlier. Not only were outlets overwhelmingly white, it seemed, based on the lousy showing at the conference, that few people were concerned about inequality.

The implications of the media's representation problem could not be more clear. As race emerged as a central theme of the 2016 elections, crucial decisions about coverage were being made in institutions employing few of the people Donald Trump maligned. Euphemisms appeared when unblinking assessments of racism and religious bigotry were warranted. A persistent theme of "economic anxiety" was cited to explain away an animosity that was clearly connected to much darker objections. As a corollary to this, the work of journalists like Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Jamelle Bouie-which pointed to the centrality of racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters-came under attack. (Subsequent studies have validated their contentions.) Debates over the role of race in political coverage remain deeply predictable and dispiriting-as in the story of crime in the Bronx, where white journalists dominate, the most familiar and comfortable narratives hold sway.

There's another reason why diversity matters. The media exists in a climate of unprecedented hostility. The relationship between the White House and the press, frequently rocky, has devolved into a circumstance in which the president of the United States has referred to us as the "enemy of the people." Trump's attacks are facilitated by the fact that, in the past two decades, trust in the media has plummeted. This is a crisis of democracy, since the press's role as a guardian of democracy is founded upon the trust of the public. But at least some portion of that distrust is a product of people who rarely see themselves or their stories depicted in the media they consume. A great deal must be done to rebuild public trust. But it can begin by including the voices of all Americans. The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people.
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Jelani Cobb is the director of Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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Five years ago, I came across an article in The New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the [...]

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Five decades after Kerner Report, representation remains an issue in media

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Five decades after Kerner Report, representation remains an issue in media

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History and current state of newsroom diversity.

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America's alarming disunion is evident any time you turn on the news or read the paper. But a recent survey commissioned by the Ford Foundation indicates that our disconnect goes beyond our political disagreements-that our division may be exacerbated by the makeup of our media.

The survey's primary goal was to analyze coverage of race in American news media, and to understand how different segments of the population perceive that coverage. We learned that perceptions differ widely between communities. When asked how African Americans are portrayed in the media, for example, 62 percent of African-American respondents answered that coverage is more negative than reality, while only 46 percent of white respondents believed that to be the case. When asked whether "the media makes race relations seem worse than they are," 59 percent of white respondents agreed, compared to 37 percent of African-American respondents.
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In other words, people who are underrepresented in the media have a very different view of its coverage than people who are overrepresented. And there are consequences. Both African-American and Hispanic respondents believed white communities are portrayed more positively than reality-while only a little over a quarter of white people surveyed agreed.

These results make sense, given what we know about American newsrooms. According to a 2017 survey conducted by the American Society of News Editors, a mere one out of six American newsroom employees are racial minorities-a minor decline from 2016. Meanwhile, data from the Radio Television Digital News Association reveals that the percentage of people of color in this country has increased by more than 12 percent over the past 27 years, yet during that time, American television news only became 6.6 percent more diverse-and radio less than 1 percent more so.

But Americans aren't divided on all fronts. In every racial group surveyed-including half of white respondents-most people believed that hiring more minorities would improve the quality of news.
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Of course, the problem of representation in media is hardly limited to racial minorities. There are many other groups that look to journalism to hold up the mirror to society, and don't see themselves or their experiences reflected. When rural or working-class communities do not see or hear their struggles reflected in elite East Coast media, it's easy to understand why they might dismiss the press as biased. It doesn't help that local journalism-which covers the issues closest to people's lives-has been consistently suffocated by economic pressures.

What's more, we cannot afford to presume that the gap between what communities see in the media and what they experience is closing-or that it will get better by itself. In fact, this week marks the 50th anniversary of perhaps one of the clearest and most famous warnings that our media was worsening our cultural divisions-and that persistent and pervasive inequality had permeated the press and our society.

In February of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report -which detailed an extensive and daunting list of inequalities and inequities that led to civil unrest in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Newark. "Our nation is moving toward two societies," the blue-ribbon panel concluded. "One black, one white-separate and unequal."

Among its findings, the commission highlighted how the lack of adequate representation among the people assigning, reporting, and editing media coverage might drive "the underlying problems of race relations." White readers were not informed about the problems facing black communities and remained unaware of their struggle. The commission suggested that greater representation might ameliorate this problem and provide more equal coverage.

In every racial group surveyed, most people believed that hiring more minorities would improve the quality of news.

This recommendation came alongside others that addressed unjust police practices, unemployment, underemployment, and inadequate housing. Sadly, these recommendations went largely ignored. The issue of media representation was one point in a broader constellation of institutions necessary to preserve democracy. Even though some improvements were attempted after the Kerner Report, progress in many of these areas has largely stalled, if not reversed.

As a nation, we must recommit ourselves to the lessons of the Kerner Report, and to building a media that reflects the whole of America-not one that divides and only reinforces one side or another. We must advocate for the hiring and promotion of journalists who represent the full American experience, and also for the creation of and support for local journalism that holds the powerful to account.

As news viewers, listeners, readers, and consumers, we must push media companies to be more transparent about the makeup of their staffs, and work to hold them accountable on issues of diversity, inclusion, and harassment. And we must also recognize the ways in which a healthy, thriving, independent media is necessary for the survival of our democracy, and do our best to preserve both.

We cannot allow another 50 years to pass before addressing the inequalities that eat away at our media, and America as a whole. Together, we must ensure that the people who understand the problems facing all communities have a voice in solving them, and news platforms that reflect their views. In the meantime, we, collectively, will keep speaking truth to power-until the powerful in media and Washington start telling more of our truth.
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Darren Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.

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Five decades after Kerner Report, representation remains an issue in media

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America's alarming disunion is evident any time you turn on the news or read the paper. But a recent survey commissioned by the Ford Foundation indicates that our disconnect goes beyond our political disagreements-that our division may be exacerbated by the makeup of our media.