When reporter Inara Verzemnieks heads out on her beat rounds, she avoids agency offices, courts and classrooms in favor of coffeehouses, video game arcades, school hallways and the Internet.

She’s not looking for stories about teens getting into the latest craze or getting into mischief or getting into Stanford. The Oregonian already gets those stories from good reporting on traditional beats such as crime and education, from news releases of local organizations or from national surveys about young people.

Instead Verzemnieks tries to find out why just about every teen-ager she sees carries a crowded daybook and a cell phone, whether most kids really think the prom is a big deal, what the Napster phenomenon looks like from the inside and whether adult assumptions about teen sex match with teen-age reality.

Verzemnieks’ beat is young people, primarily high school-age kids. She produces stories on news as well as features covers on “the vast middle of kids, the ones who are not normally on our radar screen.”

“I go where kids are doing things that interest them, where they’re engaged,” Verzemnieks said. “I listen for the side conversations, the casual conversations. That’s what you need to connect with.”

The video arcade, for example, may be “just a backdrop for other things that are happening. Are they really using video games as a way to create community?”

Rethinking what’s news and reaching out for a broader range of sources is one way newspapers are trying to go beyond the usual suspects of news coverage: the white, male, economically comfortable, official or recognizably authoritative voices that dominate the news and editorial pages.

These efforts acknowledge that journalists’ choices about what stories to do and what sources to quote determine the reality that dominates the newspaper.

PUBLIC VIEW A 1998 survey for ASNE of 3,000 Americans found the public widely believes newspapers and other media are biased: 78 percent agree there is bias in the news media. 78 percent believe powerful people can get stories into the paper — or keep them out. 78 percent say it’s pretty easy to spot when the personal biases or preconceived notions of a reporter show up in a news story. 77 percent say newspapers pay lots more attention to their own agenda or point of view.3

“We’ve raised the standard of news so high that people don’t see themselves in the paper every day,” said Jonathan Volzke, a city editor for The Orange County Register.

The idea that people no longer see people with experiences and perspectives like theirs in newspapers is a key element of public perceptions that media are unfair.

In 1998, 50 percent of Americans surveyed believed the press was “out of touch with mainstream Americans.”1

Anecdotal evidence suggests many people believe the press pays inordinate attention to people and issues it believes are important or interesting and unfairly excludes many others in the process.

The Freedom Forum’s Free Press/Fair Press project of 1998-2000 highlighted similar findings.

“The press does not reflect the entire community fully and fairly,” said Robert H. Giles, who led the project as a Freedom Forum senior vice president.2

Newspapers repeat the same refrains; they have trouble learning new verses.

Young people tend to appear on Page One only when there is a school shooting or a survey reports their sexual habits. African-Americans typically turn up on the front page when they are playing sports or voicing concerns about discrimination. People who struggle financially are lost in a journalistic avalanche of rosy economic reports. Political conservatives and Christian fundamentalists are relegated with simplistic labels to the fringes of the political or social spectrum.

In newsrooms, long-standing attitudes and practices often prop up these incomplete portrayals.

Culturally, journalists are drawn toward the dramatic event or anecdote. They disdain the ordinary. They learn early to communicate thoughts in a shorthand that leads them to ill-chosen labels. They approach and frame stories in ways that oversimplify complicated debates. And, at the root, journalists let a too-small circle of sources shape what the newspaper presents every day.

Many journalists recognize the problem.

“I think people realize the press has its own agenda — a middle-class, white suburban or hip urban, college-educated, somewhat liberal vision of how the world can be,” one newspaper editor wrote in response to a national newsroom survey for the credibility project.4

But other journalists answer perceptions of bias by defending their intentions or dismissing the complainers as biased themselves. Newsrooms can move past those quick reactions by looking closely at the way they decide what’s news, report it and present it in the newspaper every day.

“A lot of it,” said Dennis Foley, ombudsman at The Orange County Register, “is reflexive habit,” not conscious bias.

Getting Started

“It’s the life of the community, not the life of a handful of experts.” Doug Floyd The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.

To get beyond the usual suspects, it’s important to:

Look at the big picture

It’s not enough to assess the fairness of stories one at a time. Look at patterns of coverage over time. Devote time to figuring out who is missing. Make that a part of the daily discussion of the quality of the newspaper.

Learn more about your community

Allow reporters and photographers time to explore and understand communities and groups. Give as much attention to what citizens say about themselves as to official assessments or trend surveys. Don’t settle for “person on the street” sound bites; insist on depth. Place a higher value in the newsroom on the daily contributions that define the tone and character of the newspaper.

Challenge craft practices

Some practices — anecdotal leads, labeling, heavy reliance on institutional sources — make coverage look unfair to people whose perspectives are marginalized in the process. It’s important to question in each case whether a traditional practice serves the journalistic value of fairness or whether it is just habit.

Redefine missions and beats

Improvement may require experimentation and patience. It may be necessary to revise newsroom missions and redefine some beats in ways that are well outside traditional newsroom thinking and practice.

Moving From Philosophy to Practice

LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE

In spring 1998, The Oregonian thought it was doing a pretty good job of covering young people: a dozen reporters and editors devoted to covering education and family services, several pages of prep sports every week, a crime team poised to jump on any significant school violence or youth misbehavior.

“We tend to remember coverage in terms of episodes. We don’t think of it as something that occurs over time. I think a content audit can give us a better idea of how readers see our coverage.” Erna Smith Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

But complaints from readers — many of them parents of teen-agers — persisted. The newspaper, they said, was not being fair. It paid far more attention to sports and misdeeds than it did to all the good things kids were doing.

Complaints like that are difficult for journalists to reconcile with what they see in the paper. For every complaint about negativity, the newsroom can point to one story or another that highlighted a positive effort.

It’s hard for journalists, who tend to focus on one story at a time, to analyze the impression their work creates over the long haul.

A content review can help.

“We tend to remember coverage in terms of episodes. We don’t think of it as something that occurs over time,” said Erna Smith, interim director of programs at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, Calif. “I think a content audit can give us a better idea of how readers see our coverage.”

Critics may be right

The Oregonian analyzed how it portrayed young people in 1999. The newspaper found out its readers were right.

Staff members analyzed the main sections of the newspaper for one month, focusing on how often people ages 12 to 22 appeared in or were quoted in the newspaper and on the themes of the coverage.

About 7 percent of the 10,000 stories and photos reviewed touched on, mentioned or quoted youth.

Themes of those stories:

• Sports — 46 percent
• Public policy — 18 percent
• Crime — 17 percent
• Achievement, nonacademic — 6 percent
• Culture — 3 percent
• Ordinary life — 3 percent
• Personal adversity — 2 percent
• School news — 2 percent
• Demographics and trends — 2 percent
• Academic achievement — 1 percent

The review concluded that the newsroom needed to develop meaningful sources among young people with a primary goal of improving fairness across the newspaper rather than marketing a segment to young people. The review played a crucial role in demonstrating the problem for the newsroom and in reshaping the newspaper’s coverage.

“The analysis told us that when we pay attention — on the front page and the covers — you know you’re in a culturally diverse city and the newspaper reflects that. When you get into the body of the paper, the diversity falls off. We’re not paying as much attention.” Carolina Garcia San Antonio Express- News

Based on the review and comments from young people and other experts, editors concluded that the newspaper needed to make more of an effort to find direct sources among young people and to let their views have as much influence as those of officialdom in framing stories.

Content audit help available

An ASNE report, “Covering the Community,” devotes a section to content audits. The report includes tips on designing and conducting newspaper analysis with an eye to expanding racial, cultural and gender diversity.

The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education has developed a “Reality Checks Content Analysis Kit” for newspapers. “Reality Checks” recommends journalists look at the race, gender, class, age, geography and occupation of sources and people pictured in the newspaper.

The San Antonio Express-News hired the Maynard Institute in 2000 to coordinate and analyze an audit performed by a staff committee.

Managing Editor Carolina Garcia said she learned the newspaper was not consistently using a wide range of sources.

“This is a very good way for the newspaper to identify how good of a job it does in its depth of sources,” Garcia said. “The analysis told us that when we pay attention — on the front page and the covers — you know you’re in a culturally diverse city and the newspaper reflects that. When you get into the body of the paper, the diversity falls off. We’re not paying as much attention.”

Other efforts have looked at coverage of specific groups to gauge how often their members appear in the newspaper and how they typically are portrayed.

The Kansas City Star conducts a quarterly diversity content audit looking at coverage of groups such as racial minorities, women, people with disabilities, and gays and lesbians, according to Miriam Pepper, readers’ representative. The Star expanded its diversity audits in 2000 by asking a panel of readers to conduct a similar audit. The newspaper is comparing reader results and staff audit findings.

QUESTIONS

Look at the main news section covers of your newspaper during a two-week period and note:

What types of sources are frequently quoted?

Who appears in photos?

What topics are covered?

Who seems to be missing?

How to do a Content Audit

Examine more than numbers

More resources at this link

“I think the issue is how they’re missing, not that they’re missing. People are pretty much making their way into the newspaper across the board a lot more. I think the issue is the degree to which people are appearing as ordinary people rather than as related to their differentness.” Keith Woods The Poynter Institute

A content analysis involves a lot of counting. But it’s important to look beyond the numbers.

The mere presence of various groups of people may not be enough to give a fair picture, said Keith Woods, who focuses on racial diversity as a member of the ethics faculty at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Woods said newspapers are showing more diversity. But he questions whether people too often are included only because of their race or ethnicity.

“I think the issue is how they’re missing, not that they’re missing,” Woods said. “People are pretty much making their way into the newspaper across the board a lot more. I think the issue is the degree to which people are appearing as ordinary people rather than as related to their differentness.”

Woods cited a recent features cover story in the St. Petersburg Times on a women’s health issue. The woman pictured was African-American. In other times, an African-American woman might have been the main image only if the story was about a problem unique to African-Americans. The change, Woods said, is that more newspapers are using these images in routine settings.

Seek public views

It’s also important to look beyond the newsroom.

Terri Fleming, editor of The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo., said public critiques and content reviews can be a valuable tool.

“Use them often,” she said. “But use them for the undercurrents, not to direct the paper specifically. … Hear the themes. Then think about editing the paper with less myopia.”

The Gazette and the Austin American-Statesman in 1999 solicited help from the public in assessing whether their coverage was fair.

The Texas newspaper organized groups to critique specific stories that might raise concerns about bias and published their comments.

The Gazette asked members of the public to audit the newspaper’s coverage of four groups, African-Americans, Latinos, young people and women. The newspaper published a report from each group and a response by the editor.

For example, the cover of The Gazette’s Our Town section of June 28, 1999, carried a display package reporting the audit on coverage of African-Americans by local citizens who are African-American.

The citizen group, led by the Rev. Alvin Yeary, concluded: “In general, we found most of the references were tied to crime or sports. When The Gazette did branch out to cover the minority community, the newspaper often missed the mark.”5

In a response published in the same package, then-editor Steven A. Smith said the audit “confirmed what we already knew: that The Gazette does a relatively poor job of covering African-Americans and other people of color.”6

LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR COMMUNITY

More resources at this link

It should be this simple: Reporters go out and get to know different communities, they make contact with a wide range of people who know what’s going on and they write about it.

Journalism 101? Think again.

Time, habit and editors keep most reporters on the telephone with sources they know will be available during office hours. There are few opportunities to spend time pounding the pavement, learning a community and developing contacts without the expectation of an immediate story.

Then there is newsroom resistance to the idea that people without titles have expertise. And journalists get comfortable with sources that fit preconceived notions and predetermined niches in the story.

Sometimes reporters confuse the ability to articulate thoughts in short sound bites — something usual-suspect sources have learned to do well — with genuine knowledge that unfolds slowly in an interview. Often reporters want a source to give them a quick pro or con on a proposed solution when the person’s expertise is in describing what it’s like to live with the problem.

Editors, too, may resist giving attention and prominent display to stories that do not appear to be based on the traditional authority of official sources or expert studies. They may not think their reporters can afford the time it takes to develop new sources in diffuse communities.

Developing these types of stories takes more than editors exhorting reporters to “get out more.”

QUESTIONS

What communities (not necessarily geographic) seldom appear in your newspaper?

Why do you think they are missing?

What steps might your newsroom take to learn more?

Try community conversations

“Reporters meet new sources and gain story ideas. Editors have a better under-standing of what’s really going on out there. And the community has a better under-standing of how the newspaper works.” Dennis Foley The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif.

A community conversation is a way to put journalists and the public together.

The Orange County Register asks its reporting teams to organize regular “Community Conversations” about civic issues.

“The point of these conversations is to hear from real people,” said Dennis Foley, ombudsman at The Register. “We’ve held conversations on education, immigration, sports and entertainment. This year we’ve started hiring translators so we can broaden our invitation list to include folks who feel more comfortable speaking Spanish.

“Reporters meet new sources and gain story ideas. Editors have a better understanding of what’s really going on out there. And the community has a better understanding of how the newspaper works.”

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis organizes community conversations as part of a broad effort to connect citizens with civic discussions and bring their voices into the newspaper.

“I see my job as a broker of information between our journalists and our readers,” said Larry Werner, reader involvement editor at the Star Tribune. “I facetiously describe my job as ‘getting us out and getting them in.’”

“It’s too true that news is what the editor (or reporter) had for lunch and that we tend to eat the same things, live in the same neighborhoods, vote for the same politicians. I’m trying to get our journalists to try some new items from the smorgasbord.”

For Werner, part of “getting us out and getting them in” is monthly community conversations in which people from a neighborhood get together with Star Tribune editors and reporters for an informal discussion. Werner writes a report on each session that is published in the newsroom’s electronic newsletter.

Werner also works to connect the public to the political process with the Minnesota Citizens Forum.

QUESTIONS

Where do your staff members typically get story ideas? From whom?

Do sources tend to be officials and other high-profile people?

Where are some places people in your community gather informally and talk about issues that are important to them?

If you don’t know, whom might you ask?

“The mission of the citizens’ forum is to make sure the voices of ordinary citizens are part of our coverage of public issues,” Werner said. “We do this by using our Minnesota Poll to get a read on the issues Minnesotans think are important and to recruit people for discussions of those issues.”

“I see my job as a broker of information between our journalists and our readers. I facetiously describe my job as ‘getting us out and getting them in.’ ” Larry Werner Star Tribune, Minneapolis

The forums begin by bringing citizens together with issues experts. Then citizens meet with decision-makers and politicians. Topics have included education, the rural economy, the American family (a discussion that featured Hillary Rodham Clinton) and other issues raised during presidential and state campaigns.

The forums use video conference links to bring together citizens from around the Twin Cities and Minnesota. They are broadcast on local radio and television, and the newspaper covers them prominently.

Tips for a Community Conversation

Set up shop away from the newsroom

Forums and community conversations help break the ice. But there is no substitute for being there day in and day out. Opening an office in a community can help add dimensions to the coverage.

The Orange County Register’s Hieu Tran Phan has followed a classic path of American journalism: college, newsroom internships, then back to cover the community where he grew up.

“Don’t always go with the idea that you’re going to write a story.” Hieu Tran Phan The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif.

Phan’s beat is Little Saigon, a community where most of Orange County’s 250,000 Vietnamese-American residents live. He divides his time between a small Register office in Little Saigon and the main newsroom about a half-hour away. He has a laptop and a cell phone so he can file from the field.

See Discussion Guide 4

See Discussion Guide 5

Like many reporters who find meaningful news in ordinary places, Phan said getting out and listening is key. One of his best vantage points is sitting on a bench in one of the malls near his office, listening to what people around him are talking about.

“Don’t always go with the idea that you’re going to write a story,” Phan said. “Sometimes the networking doesn’t pay off until a month later or a year later. … As long as you are genuine, they will open up to you sooner or later.”

Phan, his reporting partner Anh Do and Register editors have discovered other ways to increase community contacts. The two reporters alternate a weekly Vietscape column, and they co-host a weekly radio show.

Together, Phan said, the effort is pushing him to develop a broader range of contacts and story ideas.

“We’re only as good as the sources we can tap into,” he said.

Report from neighborhoods

The Tampa Tribune, meanwhile, is one of about a dozen newspapers that have experimented with “Tapping into Civic Life,” a program developed by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, to systematically broaden its source base.

More resources at this link

The program encourages journalists to spend time learning about neighborhoods, finding movers and shakers who do not have official titles or recognition, and interviewing them more effectively.

The Tribune focused on a neighborhood that the city wanted to declare “blighted” to make way for redevelopment.

“The more time we spent out there, the more we learned,” said Steve Kaylor, senior editor/news. “As we talked to people, held conversations, we gained a much more refined view of that neighborhood. As a result, we met so many people, it wasn’t even us going to look for stories, people were calling us.”

“I’ve got some pretty cynical reporters,” Kaylor said. “But, as a result of the stories we got and the concepts that we learned, people don’t question what we’re doing.”7

Time out for Diversity

Internet offers contacts

Ken Sands, an interactive editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., collects citizen contacts on the Internet.

“You can’t pigeonhole people. You don’t want to pigeonhole people.” Ken Sands The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.

Sands has compiled an e-mail contact list of hundreds of people that reporters in the newsroom can use to bring different perspectives to their stories.

“It has been tremendously popular with the reporters who’ve used it. It makes their job easier. It makes their stories better. It makes for better connections with the community,” Sands said.

For example, a reporter was trying to do a story on barking dogs, an increasing source of tension in rural areas that are becoming more suburban. Sands identified people from these areas in his e-mail files and contacted them.

“I sent out e-mails in the morning asking people if they had stories to tell. By the end of the day, I had about a dozen people with enough to fill out her story.

Sands also used e-mail to gather reaction to a debate in a congressional race in the 2000 general election. He asked his contacts watching the debate to send him e-mails that night with their comments.

“I ended up with way more than I could use” in a sidebar, Sands said. “A couple of dozen people responded. They were all across the board.”

Another time, Sands used his e-mail contacts to find patients of a small-town doctor who was accused of overprescribing pain medication.

Where does he find his contacts? He culls the letters to the editor and gathers names and e-mail addresses of people who contact the newsroom.

Sands said the e-mail system is only one way to find new sources. He said it’s important to recognize the limitations of the practice — that only people who go on the Internet will be contacted.

Sands organizes the names by community. But he resists categorizing people.

“If there’s an issue that’s important enough for us to write about in the paper,” he said, “then anybody who’s an engaged person ought to have an opinion on that and their opinion ought to be important to us.”

Sands stresses practical approaches to building better public connections.

“It’s my goal to improve the quality and depth of our news coverage by helping to incorporate some of the principles of civic journalism into our newsroom culture,” Sands said. “I see my role as being a person who comes up with new tools to help reporters do a better job.

“We have a lot of cynical people in our business. Reporters may see interactivity or civic journalism as ‘Let’s hold a meeting or focus groups or take a poll.’ That only goes so far. It doesn’t really help reporters connect,” he said.

Sands is one of three interactive editors at The Spokesman-Review. Two others are based on the editorial page. These editors solicit guest columns and even help people write up their views for publication. They attend community meetings as ambassadors for the newspaper, and they conduct town hall meetings.

Savannah's Neighborhood Newsroom

Open up the editorial pages

Doug Floyd, an interactive editor on the editorial page, said one priority was to bring more local people onto the opinion pages.

More resources at this link

The newspaper historically had strong participation from letter writers. Letter submissions increased during the Persian Gulf War, and editors decided they wanted to encourage the same levels of participation after the war. The newspaper expanded the space available for letters (15 to 17 appear each day, Floyd said) and for articles by people in the community.

“A lot of it for us is just listening and sending out the word that we’re accessible,” Floyd said.

Floyd also solicits views in print on specific issues, and he sometimes hits the streets to recruit writers.

“Sometimes you have to cultivate these things. In the early days, I remember times when I’d go out and walk through the food court or the park and look for people who might have a story to tell,” Floyd said. “It’s the life of the community, not the life of a handful of experts.”

The benefits of Floyd’s activities go well beyond getting a wider range of perspectives on the opinion page. His community contacts broaden the perspective he brings to editorial writing. And he gets a fair number of news tips.

QUESTIONS

Does your staff discuss different ways of looking at a story before the reporting starts?

Who on your staff are the good “devil’s advocates” for discussing different ways to do stories?

How can you involve them in more newsroom discussions?

Do staff members frequently return to the same sources?

How can you help reporters, photographers and editors add new sources (e.g. one new source with every story or one every week)?

How can you help reporters, photographers and editors find and develop sources who are not official or obvious?

CHALLENGE CRAFT PRACTICES

It’s not enough to be scrupulously fair. Be demonstrably scrupulously fair. As the public, rightly or wrongly, seizes on any seeming unfairness in the media, newspaper journalists need to seize opportunities to show the opposite is true.

One place to start is by limiting writing techniques that don’t serve a journalistic purpose, practices such as anecdotal leads that tilt an issue instead of illuminating its impact, labels that seem to readers to betray the writers’ ignorance without bringing clarity to the story, and heavy reliance on official experts to the point of seeming to parrot their line.

``The tendency to personalize one side and not the other gives one side more credibility. I see that a lot.” Jon Newton reader, Portland, Ore.

Here are practices readers mention repeatedly when talking about bias:

Humanizing the story has pitfalls

Arguably overused as a writing device, the anecdotal lead that focuses on the experience of one person also can inadvertently tilt a story to one side. Take stories about government service cutbacks that repeatedly focus on and humanize the impact on those who rely on the services. They’re a significant part of the story, and journalists think this technique can give readers easy access to a complicated problem.

But some citizens believe by humanizing one side while referring to cutback proponents — and taxpayers — in the abstract, the writer tilts the story.

``The tendency to personalize one side and not the other gives one side more credibility. I see that a lot. I see that with welfare reform,’’ Jon Newton of Portland told Oregonian editors in 1997.

``The day welfare reform passes … you can just anticipate they are going to tell the personal, anecdotal story. … Somebody who has just lost their benefits is going to be way big affected by this. The fact that a whole lot of taxpayers are going to be affected in a real small way, that’s a different story. But it’s equally true. It’s not told the same way.’’

Readers appreciate the fairness of publishing different positions on an issue side by side. Editors who package candidate views side by side are likely to find readers appreciative of the effort to be fair.

Attention to other presentation details is important.

For example, Foley, ombudsman with The Orange County Register, fielded a number of complaints that the news coverage was pro-Al Gore in the months just before the 2000 presidential election.

While Foley found no intent of bias when he reviewed back issues, he did find the appearance of bias. Headlines on stories that featured both George W. Bush and Gore usually started “Gore, Bush … ” Inside stories about Gore typically made the top of the page, while the Bush story was secondary.

Labels sometimes fall short

WORKING FAIR Staff members at The Oregonian developed a fairness checklist: Go beyond traditional sources when gathering information. Seek information from people in the middle as well as on the extreme of an issue. After reporting, re-examine which direction a story might take. Ask “Can the opposite be true?” Avoid labels as much as possible. Consider the impact of a story or photograph on those it is written about. Truly reflect a speaker’s intent when using quotes and paraphrasing. Be prepared to tell readers what we don’t know about a story. Avoid overdramatizing or oversimplifying. Know why every fact appears in a story. Make decisions about stories clear to the reader. Recognize that fairness is more than a one-day process.

Labels also get journalists into trouble. They are effective shorthand for tight news columns, but they are poorly chosen often enough to betray ignorance or distance from different segments of the public.

“We’re trying to identify for readers the source of information,” said Deborah Potter, executive director of NewsLab, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that seeks to improve television journalism. “But we are both too shorthanded and too uneven about it.

“We think we’re saving ourselves time and helping people, but we’re planting in them some seeds about our own attitudes.”

Potter said labels often send a signal that the writer sees people being described as “not us.”

Urban & Associates’ research for the Journalism Credibility Project backed up that notion. Christine Urban said socio-economic differences between journalists and the public often are readily apparent to readers and may be a bigger problem for the public than political bias.

“When the public says they perceive a bias toward ‘wealthy people,’ it’s not inconceivable many suspect that some individual journalists make a salary more substantial than their own,” Urban said in her report for ASNE.

“When adjectives like ‘church-going’ or ‘right-wing’ or ‘suburban’ or ‘radical’ appear in print or broadcast news stories, they sense that judgments are being made by folks not very much like themselves.”8

Words such as “blue-collar,” “middle-class” or “inner-city” may mean different things to different people, some of it unflattering. Better to describe specifically what people earn, what their jobs are or what neighborhoods they live in.

Labeling by race also is problematic, especially because labels often are not relevant.

Journalists also sometimes use out-of-date labels when descriptions that subjects prefer are as accurate or more accurate. Potter has noted the use of the word “trailer park” persists even though the homes have been improved, modernized and are called “mobile homes.”

QUESTIONS

Looking at stories in your newspapers, do you find frequent use of broad labels (e.g. conservative, liberal, blue-collar, activist, Gen-Xers)?

Could these stories be more specific? What might be more specific substitutes in each story?

How often does your newspaper use racial labeling?

Is it relevant? Is it specific?

Bias creeps in with sources

See Discussion Guide 6

See Discussion Guide 12

Relying too much on one set of sources also can lead to perceptions of bias.

In 1998, Sarah Kennedy, a University of Missouri graduate student who is now a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times, conducted lengthy interviews and story reviews with 22 readers of The Oregonian who had contacted the newspaper’s public editor to complain that its coverage of education issues was biased.

Kennedy sought to identify elements of stories and headlines that caused the perception. A chief factor was that official school district sources dominated school reports.

“If the news organization’s structure is such that we cover hospitals but not small clinics, major universities but not small universities, or we cover city hall but not the community organizing board, then the structure will dictate who we run into and who we don’t run into.” Keith Woods The Poynter Institute

“Readers think The Oregonian education writers rely too heavily on official spokespeople as sources,” Kennedy concluded. “Readers have the distinct impression that The Oregonian education writers think more money and more taxes are the solution to all of education’s woes and that that bias is clearly evident in news stories.

“Readers recommended that Oregonian writers try to better balance their sources and find new sources. They suggested trying to find independent sources from outside the state with ‘no agendas.’”

Some of the readers Kennedy interviewed also questioned the use of a single “pro” source and a single “con” source in stories about money for schools.

Kennedy said these readers thought “it oversimplified the issue, didn’t show all the shades of gray in between the extremes, did not necessarily represent the viewpoint of the average reader/parent/interested person and tended to stereotype (the tightfisted old codger who is against any and all taxation; the young, well-educated father who wholeheartedly supports all school taxes).”9

Woods, a member of the ethics faculty at The Poynter Institute, said journalists have trouble accepting that people are authoritative when they do not come from the usual venues of expertise.

“It is true we are finding people who know stuff already. A great number of our sources are people who are experts in their fields. If those people happen to be white, it doesn’t diminish their expertise or their value that we look beyond them,” Woods said. But “the experts who are not white, middle-class, institution-centered men are no less experts. … They may offer a different way of looking at things … a window onto a whole different set of reasons. There are lots of reasons purely journalistic for expanding beyond” readily accepted experts.

Racial Identification Guidelines

REDEFINE MISSIONS AND BEATS

Traditional ways of getting information will produce traditional frames of coverage. Expanding vision must involve a whole newsroom, not just a few staff members.

Woods said the limits of individuals in newsrooms are exacerbated by the limits of newsroom structure and practice.

“We have to understand at some level the degree to which who we are and who we understand determines who we trust,” Woods said. “The magnetic pole is always toward people who are more like us.

“If the news organization’s structure is such that we cover hospitals but not small clinics, major universities but not small universities, or we cover city hall but not the community organizing board, then the structure will dictate who we run into and who we don’t run into.

RESOURCES Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists, a handbook for reporters, editors, photographers and other newspaper professionals on how to be fair to the public, by Robert J. Haiman, for The Freedom Forum’s Free Press/Fair Press Project. This booklet summarizes the Free Press/Fair Press Project research in 1998-99, which focused on ways the public often defines journalistic fairness more broadly than journalists do. Contact The Freedom Forum, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22209 or visit the Web site at www.freedomforum.org.

“If the places that you’re going to tend toward are fairly monolithic,” he said, “then your best intentions will continue to turn up the same people.”

Organizations “may be just as inclined to go with the senior white guy as anyone else” when a journalist asks for an expert source.

Top editors must guide and reinforce change in their newsrooms. The work of a few committed reporters and photographers helps, but it is likely to be lost in the shuffle if the newsroom remains focused on traditional news.

When The Oregonian decided to create a youth beat, the reporter was given two major guidelines:

• Story ideas would come from talking to young people directly, and their perspectives should strongly influence how the story is framed. It might make a difference, for example, on whether the newspaper covered stress only through the prism of national statistics on teen suicide or through the prism of teens who cannot keep track of their commitments without a jammed appointment book.
• The reporter would put a priority on stories that would not come to the paper through traditional beats such as education or crime or from press releases from groups organized by adults for youths. That might mean ignoring an adult-sponsored conference on political activism among young people in favor of a story on the less tangible but more significant ways in which young people actually connect with civic life.

Verzemnieks said another important piece was institutional support for the idea that “the everyday things that teen-agers do can be news.”

Start new beats

After hearing concerns in Colorado Springs, The Gazette took several steps to improve coverage. Like many newspapers in the past decade, the newspaper created a minority affairs beat to improve reporting in these communities.

QUESTIONS

Does your newsroom have a written mission?

Does it address fairness and the need for diversity of sources?

What beats might benefit most from a broader range of sources?

What resources would your staff need to develop new sources?

What would those involved learn from this process?

How could this effort show the way to the rest of the newsroom?

“There are truths in the Hispanic community that we have not done a good job of reporting. There are positive stories that are untold,” Editor Terri Fleming said.

“Any time any organization tries to cover a whole community, it has an impossible task. But that task — to cover the community (and communities within) more fully, more truthfully and more authentically — is what we have dedicated ourselves to doing.” Terri Fleming The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

“There are issues undiscussed. As we try to cover the community and understand its breadth and depth, we find our work undone and undone some more.

“This has always been so. Any time any organization tries to cover a whole community, it has an impossible task. But that task — to cover the community (and communities within) more fully, more truthfully and more authentically — is what we have dedicated ourselves to doing.”10

Newsrooms do not necessarily need to create full-time beats to get this kind of coverage. Providing time and encouragement for reporters on traditional beats will help.

Top editors who want broader public connections in their newsrooms need to recognize and actively deal with the inevitable trade-offs.

One is the possibility that experimentation and new learning won’t immediately produce stellar journalism.

Another is that the time reporters and photographers spend developing sources beyond the usual suspects, to be a true priority, will have to come from some other work.

It also is important to look at the overall mission of the newsroom.

The Orange County Register, for example, lists among its top goals: “Offers full diversity of thinking, voices and perspectives” and “Emphasizes the issues that truly affect people’s lives.”

Both implicitly state that relying on the usual official suspects for all the news will not be sufficient.

Goals like these must be reinforced in daily conversations and in rewards such as story play.

It is important, Woods said, to move past the discussion of the short-comings of the newspaper and emphasize successes.

“One of the things that will be valuable is where you can show examples of the good stuff you’re trying to encourage.”

Discussion guides Several guides in Chapter 6 relate to this chapter: Guide 4 — “Shedding fear, prejudice” Guide 5 — “Big John” Guide 6 — “On the verge” Guide 12 — “Heart without a home” Resources Chapter V contains additional resources for this chapter: Contacts and publications ASNE content audit Transmitting values: A guide to fairer journalism Covering race and ethnicity in your community Tapping civic life in Tampa Spokane: The view from the community

NOTES

1. Urban, p. 26.

2. Robert J. Haiman, Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists, The Freedom Forum Free Press/Fair Press Project, 2000, p. 2.

3. Urban, pp. 27, 35

4. Urban, p. 31.

5. Rev. Alvin Yeary et al, “Report: Gazette Misses Mark. Blacks Shown in Stereotypical Light, Group Says,” The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo., June 28, 1999.

6. Steven A. Smith, “The Gazette Errs, But We Don’t Add Editorial Spin,” The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo., June 28, 1999.

7. Tapping Civic Life, p. 32.

8. Urban, p. 23.

9. Sarah Kennedy, Master’s project, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1998, pp. 1, 2.

10. Terri Fleming, “Content Recommendations Are Being Taken Seriously,” The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo., Jan. 31, 2000.