Does Your Coverage Reflect Your Community? A June 2005 report for the Knight Foundation by Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig, using data from the Census Bureau and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, can show you how the diversity of your newsroom compares to the diversity of your community and to peer newsrooms. A newsroom lacking in diversity needs to be especially aware of the need to make special efforts to reflect the community’s diversity in news coverage, photography and feature stories. Diversity in content is not simply a matter of political correctness or altruism. In an increasingly diverse culture where news organizations are competing with many other attractions for reader attention, diversity is a matter of economic sense. It’s a rare newspaper that has as strong a reach in print or online with the minorities and women in its community as it does with whites and men. Reflecting the lives of minority readers and women better is one of your best opportunities to grow readership. Diversity also is a matter of accuracy. If your newspaper or your online edition gives readers a view of a community that’s whiter, older, more male, better educated, less evangelical or more married than your community truly is, you aren’t reflecting your community accurately. Know the facts Don’t presume that your newspaper reflects your community simply because your intentions are good and you are confident that you’re not racist, sexist or biased in some other way. Check your content and learn whether you truly reflect your community. The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education offers “Reality Checks” software to help you conduct an audit of your content, so you will know how well the stories and images in your paper reflect the variety of groups in your community. Using Reality Checks, you measure your content along five “fault lines” identified by the Maynard Institute: race/ethnicity, gender, geography, class and age. You might consider measuring the content along other lines that may be important in your community and that might reflect some imbalances in your coverage: sexual orientation, religion, disability, immigration status, marital status, family type. Journalists don’t think of stories in terms of “positive” and “negative.” But readers do, especially readers who think the newspaper doesn’t reflect their community as they see it. Ask some readers to help you decide which stories are positive or negative in a given day or week. (They might be pleased and surprised to find that you aren’t as negative as you thought.) Look at the demographics of the people in the positive and negative stories. Are you more likely to write negative stories about certain groups? Maybe those negative stories were all valid news stories. But perhaps they come to you more easily and you need to make a more concerted effort to be sure you get the positive stories about those segments of the community, too. Check the types of stories and photos that reflect coverage of different minorities. If minorities are disproportionately successful in sports or entertainment in your community, heavy coverage in those areas could mask imbalances in other areas. Address your imbalances If your staff doesn’t reflect the diversity of your community, that will affect your coverage unless you take meaningful steps to offset your blind areas. If you think your good intentions are enough, try another kind of content audit: Go through a couple days’ worth of your paper and identify the source of the story idea or assignment. How many came from the lives, observations and acquaintances of editors and staff members versus beat coverage, tips from sources and so on? Whatever percentage comes from the personal circles of editors and staff members is a share of coverage that will reflect the imbalances in the makeup of your editors and staff members, unless you all have extraordinarily diverse families and circles of acquaintances. So you need to take steps to increase your contact in reporting efforts with people of racial, age, ethnic, religious or other groups that are not well represented on your staff. Diversify your recruiting efforts. Recruiting is not just the top editors’ job. Connections with staff members frequently are the first contacts that recruits have with future employers. Staff members should alert editors with recruiting responsibilities to prospects they encounter who might diversify the staff. Diversifying your news staff is a long-term proposition, though, that will depend on vacancies and your ability recruit qualified journalists from underrepresented groups to fill those vacancies (and retain the ones already on staff). In the meantime, you need to work on diversifying coverage. Use the diversity you have. Your newsroom is rare if every segment of your community is represented in the news meetings where you make decisions on play and news coverage. Seek out the views of staff members and even community members who are not represented in those meetings. This serves multiple purposes:
Seek diverse viewpoints in multiple areas. Don’t seek diverse viewpoints only along the obvious lines of race and ethnicity, though those are important. If your leadership team is lacking in Muslims, evangelicals, young adults, gays, mothers of young children or any other group, seek the views of staff members or community members who can add insight and sensitivity to your considerations. Just as you should have an African American in the room when you are making decisions about coverage of the black community, you shouldn’t make decisions about a story about MySpace without someone in the room who has a MySpace page. Diversify your sources Sometimes efforts to diversify sources turn into quotas or other heavy-handed efforts that don’t reflect the truth any better than the imbalance they seek to correct. Make accuracy the guiding motive behind your diversity efforts. In many communities, the power structure is whiter and older and more male than the community as a whole. Coverage that reflects the community power structure is going to reflect that demographic imbalance. But it won’t give readers an accurate, complete picture of what is happening in the community. Move beyond the typical journalism approach that treats “real people” as a prop to be thrown into stories almost gratuitously for a dash of color in a story that remains dull. Recognize and respect the expertise that life in your community develops and seek to bring that expertise to your stories. Transportation stories do need the expertise of traffic engineers, city council members, Transportation Security Administration officials, airline officials and the airport manager. But the real experts in transportation stories are commuters and travelers. And commuters and travelers reflect your community better than those official experts. Education stories need the expertise of superintendents, board members and academic experts. But the real experts are the teachers, students and parents who deal with education issues day in and day out. Learn who the real experts are on your beat or the beats your reporters cover. Value the insight of real experts and make the effort to connect with them, and your coverage will start to reflect the diversity of your community (and grow more interesting and insightful). Broaden your search for sources. Sometimes reporters seek sources for a story by asking their colleagues if they know of anyone dealing with a particular situation, perhaps sending an e-mail to the staff. Because most of us know people who share many of our own demographic characteristics, this is likely a story that will reflect the same imbalances as your staff. Seek your help not from your staff, but from an organization or agency in the community that deals with the community as a whole or with a segment of the community that is underrepresented on your staff and in the paper. Is diversity a story? If the power structure of the agencies you cover is like most newsrooms, your sources will tend to be whiter, older and more male than the community at large. Consider whether the diversity of the agency is a story. Connect with minorities seeking to diversify the organization. If they really have to work harder in order to succeed, they will be valuable sources on more topics than diversity. ‘Mainstream’ your diversity efforts Too many efforts to diversify news coverage don’t move beyond stories and photos about crime, social services, domestic violence programs or youth programs that deal disproportionately with the groups that are underrepresented in your staff and in your news coverage. This certainly is part of the effort. If crime in your community involves minorities disproportionately, then crime coverage is going to cover minorities disproportionately (be sure that you cover them as victims as well as suspects). But you need to cover minorities in daily life, too. Include a minority accountant in your tax story, a minority congregation in your story about a religious holiday, a minority chef on your food page, minority models in a fashion spread. Firsts are news, but … As minorities, women and other groups underrepresented in the power structure break into leadership positions, these breakthroughs are notable and newsworthy. If Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama or Bill Richardson becomes our first female, African American or Hispanic president (or vice president), that will be a big story. Tony Dungy becoming the first black coach to win the Super Bowl (particularly in a sport with such a high percentage of black athletes) was newsworthy. And you will have other significant firsts in your community. But move beyond the shallow reporting of the breakthrough. Make sure you’re reporting on these people on their way up. Make sure you note obstacles to success that rising people from underrepresented groups face in your community. Watch for stereotypes. Many stereotypes have a basis in truth. But they still can be shallow or even offensive. Some coverage will have to reflect stereotypes. But beware of them. Consider whether you gravitated toward that source or that image because of the familiarity of the stereotype. Ask how well your story represents the issue or event you are covering. Discuss it with some staff members or community members from the group being covered. Stories that reflect stereotypes often are accurate stories, but they are shallow stories. Other resources to help with diversity issues Maynard Institute for Journalism Education: http://www.maynardije.org Poynter’s diversity tip sheets: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=31886&sid=5 Freedom Forum’s diversity resources: http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=12803 The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ diversity resources, including the newsroom employment census: http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=1 The analysis of newsroom diversity by Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig for the Knight Foundation (with links to reports for individual newsrooms): http://powerreporting.com/knight/
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