Best Practices: Internal

What successes have you had in changing your newsroom structure or other internal practices so that you achieve a greater degree of accuracy and authenticity in your news pages?

Most who responded indicated they had improved internal structures or processes in their newsrooms to improve their diversity efforts. Newsrooms have changed hiring practices, held community forums, established advisory boards, instituted mandatory diversity training, incorporated diversity into evaluations and critiques and conducted audits. Many demonstrated a heightened effort to improve diversity hiring and greater commitment to reach young and potential journalists in colleges and high schools through scholarships, internships and other programs.

We do a daily critique of the newspaper, and part of that critique counts the number of stories on each section front that include mainstreaming people of color. We have had a number of training sessions on how to achieve diversity and mainstreaming in our content. A diversity committee in our newsroom critiqued the newspaper from time to time and offered constructive feedback. We assembled a group of readers and community leaders to tell us how we could do better with reflecting their various constituencies. We often have black, Hispanic and Asian-American community leaders in to talk to the editorial board about issues specific to those groups. Diversity is a standing standard on the performance evaluations for all newsroom professional staff.
-- Wanda Lloyd, managing editor/features, administration and planning, The Greenville (S.C.) News

Ongoing relationships with strong sources of minority journalists, i.e., historically black universities, have provided us with a source of journalists who can help us more accurately represent our communities.
-- Kathy Spurlock, executive editor, The (Monroe, La.) News-Star

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Going beyond official sources; reaching out to minority touchstones, such as churches, beauty parlors, funeral homes, community-help groups to say, 'We want your news.'" -- Eloise DeHaan, special projects editor, The (Allentown, Pa.) Morning Call

1. All reporters and editors have as a performance goal to either attend or organize two to three 'listening groups.' These are sessions in the community that might include neighbors of a particular area or groups of people. 2. We practice public journalism... making sure our stories are not always a conflict model, but pull in voices from everywhere. 3. We post the covers of each section on the wall in our budget conference room to view and monitor how diverse our sections are. 4. Our editors understand the importance of diversity in our newsroom and make strong efforts to ensure the newsroom staff is diverse.
-- Joanne Mamenta, managing editor, Bradenton (Fla.) Herald

Have reporters assigned to 'community' beats, including African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic and gays and lesbians; as the result of a series of content audits, we have become very conscious of images in the paper and make rigorous efforts to have photos, especially A-1 and covers, reflect the diversity of our community; we've had the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in to run a Total Community Coverage program; we undertook a yearlong project in 1998, called The New City, to chart the dramatic reshaping in demographics, economics, race, politics of San Francisco; as part of the project, we offered a bus tour of The New City. It was taken by more than half our staff; we've formed a management/staff diversity committee that meets at least once a month to talk about coverage and hiring.
-- Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor/news, San Francisco Examiner

Conducted extensive, scientific market research about Hispanics, our fastest-growing minority group. Launched Impacto!, a weekly 11/2-page package of news for and about the Hispanic community. Held 'town hall' meetings in minority communities to explain our practices, tell how to get in touch with us. Created a minority source guide. Held brown-bag lunches for staffers in which representatives of minority groups helped us learn more about their cultures and what was going on in their communities. Sponsored in-house Spanish lessons. Placed an emphasis not just on hiring and promoting minorities, but also on including them in task forces that tackle major projects. Published a special section called 'A Whole New World,' which dramatically showed readers how diverse our community was becoming. Established the only full-time newspaper bureau in San Juan.
-- Dana Eagles, managing editor, The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel

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We are instituting a weekly 'raffle' to reward people for good work reflecting the diversity of the community. Employees nominate other employees and the raffle 'prize' is a nice lunch, lunch with the publisher, movie tickets, etc. Everyone who is nominated gets a coupon for the company cafeteria.
-- Susan Windemuth, senior editor, The Modesto (Calif.) Bee

Our diversity committee, as mentioned above, helps us critique the newspaper and suggests ideas from a wide range of perspectives. Mainstreaming and diversity are issues considered in performance evaluations. We make certain minority candidates are part of our hiring pool for every position. We use the National Diversity Job Bank, the various minority association job listings, Gannett's newswatch and our local recruiting efforts to help ensure this.
-- Dennis M. Lyons, executive editor, The (Lansdale, Pa.) Reporter

We have on a number of occasions created reader advisory boards.
-- Bob Zaltsberg, editor, (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times

Diversity is consistently stressed by Gannett in ongoing evaluations of the paper. The executive editor and line editors consistently insist on diversity in coverage. Attention to diversity is included in annual and ongoing performance evaluations. Minority staffers are recruited. Several retired staffers have been retained as part-timers, both to keep their expertise available to the paper and to note that they have ties to an older segment of our readership familiar with their bylines.
-- Bob Woessner, training editor, (Green Bay, Wis.) Press-Gazette

Project 2020 is a paper-wide project with a crucial goal: to build a new generation of readers and customers that reflects the diversity of our marketplace. When we looked out at 2020, we saw that 40 percent of Long Islanders would be people of color. Our vision of the future requires action today, and every part of the paper is involved, from circulation and marketing to public affairs and editorial.
-- Charlotte Hall, managing editor, (Long Island, N.Y.) Newsday

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We looked at our staff makeup in relation to census data.
-- James B. Gittens, editorial editor, (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) Citizens' Voice

We recently expanded the scope of the (Accuracy) Committee to include diversity. One of the initiatives the committee implemented was ensuring that we devoted a component of our story planning meetings to diversity concerns.
-- Stan Wischnowski, acting managing editor, (Rochester, N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle

We are continuing our diversity audit. During the National Time-Out Week, we audited all our section fronts for the period March 14-28. We are continuing the audit to include the inside sports and region sections. We are also in the midst of work on a major series of stories about race. We have had several forums with the community about the topic of race, including one with blacks and one with high school students of all races.
-- Maria T. Hileman assistant managing editor, The (New London, Conn.) Day

The Newsroom Diversity Committee appointed a Content Analysis Sub-Committee; minority leaders meet quarterly with our publisher and senior editors to talk about their concerns; all staff evaluations now include a diversity category.
-- Bob Ray Sanders, vice president and associate editor, Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram

One small change that we have made is to focus on changing the way we call for comment. For example, we're trying to get away from only calling tribal members for comment in an Indian-related story or only calling a local minister for comment in a church-related story. We're making more of an effort to call a tribal member when we're looking for 'person on the street' comment on the NATO bombing, for example, or get a senior citizen's comments on school violence.
-- Jeanne M. DePaul, feature sections editor, Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune

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Photo by Judy Griesedieck, Star Tribune
As a member of a (Minneapolis) Star Tribune staff panel, business reporter Dee Depass, right, explains her views while discussing diversity issues. At left is graphic artist Mark Boswell.

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Outside speakers who go beyond "Diversity 101"

Revised evaluation forms for editors to assess hiring and content.

Diversity is a key factor in incentive compensation for managers.

Send out accuracy surveys to sources.

Daily newspaper critiques with supervising editors.

Regular community forums, brown bag lunch discussions, town hall meetings.

Newsroom diversity committee/monthly meetings on diversity.

More feedback from newsroom managers for good efforts.

Distributed tips and contact sheets to the public.

Inviting readers to be guest columnists.

Talk about your mistakes.

In-house experts and community members can lead diversity workshops on coverage, word usage and source development.

Identify successes (and failures) in daily newspaper critiques.

Set up formal sessions and informal meetings with different people in your community - just to listen.

Develop stronger ties with college and high school campuses.

Learn about the Harwood community mapping project and work to "map"the communities you cover.

Reorganize into teams, which can work together to develop broader sources and a more comprehensive approach to covering communities.

A newsroom-wide training program that emphasizes getting beneath the surface of the community to reach hidden communities has reached about half the staff. It has begun to shape the nature of conversations about our work. The idea of framing diversity as an issue of accuracy is included in that training.

-- Mark Coast, journalism initiative editor, The (Phoenix)Arizona Republic

We publish a daily hits-and-misses report, and diversity is one of the things we look at in daily coverage. In evaluating reporters and assigning editors, we look at how well they incorporate diversity into their work. And we are always, always looking to make the newsroom more diverse when we hire.
-- Mark Baldwin, managing editor, (Elmira, N.Y.) Star-Gazette

Following our Race Awareness Pilot Program in 1990, where a small group of reporters, one assistant city editor and a photo editor explored ways to increase the degree to which people of color were represented in the newspaper, we created a diversity checklist. The checklist is a series of questions for beat reporters and editors to continually gauge their writing for diversity.
-- Carole Carmichael, assistant managing editor, The Seattle Times

We created two-year minority residencies; we've expanded our summer internships and insisted that a majority be minority kids. We have a full-time recruitment director who attends virtually every job fair in the country and takes trips to specific universities to recruit and get out The Oregonian's name. That's allowed us to recruit at schools as far away as FAMU, for example.
-- Peter Bhatia, executive editor, The (Portland) Oregonian

We provide staff members with a Q&A sheet on diversity and have held two training sessions in the past 12 months. We also have put together a Credibility Survey that we randomly send to sources we have used in our stories. The Credibility Survey will allow us to create a database to track trends and better respond to basic problems in our coverage.
-- Bill Church, managing editor, (Richmond, Ind.) Palladium-Item

We rotate staff members through the 'reader representative position' for one week at a time. The program gives readers more access to the paper - and exposes all the staff to reader comments. The comments are shared by e-mail with all news staffers, company department heads and the publisher and are logged in a database that can be accessed by all staffers.
-- Suki Dardarian, senior editor, The (Tacoma, Wash.) News Tribune

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