Selecting Sources

Thinking about specific beats (city hall, cops, courts, social services, etc.) do you make choices about sources or emphasis that lead you to portray the community less than accurately?

More than half the respondents said they believe they make choices about sources or emphasis that leads them to portray the community less than accurately. Of those, most said their newsrooms rely too heavily on official and institutional sources.

We are very 'official source' oriented, which often has us chasing stories that have limited 'insider' appeal.
-- Bob Zaltsberg, editor, (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times

We cover a lot of local government issues, and we are good at spot news, but both things tend to skew our coverage.
-- Rebecca Collier, managing editor, The (Fishers, Ind.) Daily Ledger

Many times we choose sources who are savvy to the workings of a newspaper. We quote those who know to call a reporter back immediately when they say they are on deadline. We also rely heavily upon experts and often leave out those who will be impacted. When taxes go up, we talk to the town manager and the assessor's office, not people who need to change their lives to afford an extra 4 percent on their taxes.
-- Jessica Tomlinson, community coordinator, Portland (Maine) Press Herald

Don't want to say yes or no. But our traditional gatekeeper reporting system may not reflect a changing community as well as it should. This is something that will be discussed in greater detail.
-- Bob Woessner, training editor, (Green Bay, Wis.) Press-Gazette

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This varies greatly from beat to beat and reporter to reporter. One of the most striking and relevant manifestations newsroom-wide, though, is that government agencies, as opposed to social groups and organizations, overwhelmingly dominate our field of resources for stories. This limits (and filters) our exposure to the 'grassroots' makeup of our communities.
-- Jim Slusher, assistant managing editor for training and staff development, The (Arlington Heights, Ill.) Daily Herald

We are too official-driven, which means we quote a lot of white men in their 50s.
-- Eileen Lehnert, managing editor, Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot

We tend toward politics and institutional coverage rather than looking at neighborhood impact of government decisions.
-- Janet Weaver, managing editor, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune

We don't get complaints about over-covering one group or another on these beats. Our problem is that we focus on the agency beats to the exclusion of writing about grassroots news from the neighborhoods.
-- Larry Olmstead, managing editor, The Miami Herald

Most answers in the affirmative involved the institutional nature of their reporting.
Too much reporting from the top down. There needs to be more quoting of the rank and file and looking for the community people who will be affected.
-- Laurie Williams, city editor, Tri-City (Wash.) Herald

In the wake of the sessions, we are looking anew at routinely running mug shots with crime-related stories. Many people inside and outside the newspaper say that practice leaves the impression that more black men are committing crimes than is reflected in the statistics.
-- Sherrie Marshall, news content editor, and Kent Gardner, administrative editor, (Minneapolis) Star Tribune

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By the appearance of the same sources in multiple stories. Sources tend to be familiar 'safe' contacts rather than reflective of all aspects of society.
-- Greg Clark, managing editor, (Redding, Calif.) Record Searchlight

In the past 24 years, our minority population has gone from nearly 0 percent to about 12 percent because of an influx of Hmong from Laos and Thailand. We've failed to find a true beat that finds a way to cover a community that's still struggling with assimilation.
-- Rich Jackson, assistant managing editor, The Wausau (Wis.) Daily Herald

Crime coverage is sporadic and reactionary, leaving a warped view of our area.
-- Carolyn Kingcade, senior editor for readership, St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch

Obviously, no newspaper is perfect, but we continue to seek out stories from all of the areas we cover. During our Time-Out discussion, we sought to identify the different communities in our larger community that we consider our coverage area and to evaluate how well our news coverage reflects those communities. We recognized that we have not ever dismissed the importance of achieving that ideal coverage. We see it as something we are striving for, not something we can achieve.
-- Mike Stedham, director of civic journalism, The Anniston (Ala.) Star

We know from what's in - and more important, perhaps, what's not in the paper. In a city that is now majority minority, we know that stories are not accurately portraying the community if they do not include Asian and Hispanic names. The problem is compounded in terms of photos that go with stories. If the images show mostly white males, they are inaccurately portraying our community.
-- Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor/news, San Francisco Examiner

Discussion determined that reporters have always made an effort to get all sides of the issue and talk to all sources.
Our biggest problem is we act out of routine (or laziness) too often, going to the same old sources. That makes for a predictable or boring newspaper. And that doesn't help in terms of cultivating a variety of news sources.
-- Charles Broadwell, editor, Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer-Times

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-- Jeanne M. DePaul, feature sections editor, Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune

Yes, we've been guilty of not getting a complete picture of the community, partly because we were not in contact with enough diverse sources. As stated before, this is a flaw we've known about for some time, and we're trying desperately to correct.
-- Bob Ray Sanders, vice president and associate editor, Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram

Our most common problem is going back to the same sources too often. Reporters get in a rut, thinking that one person represents a group. Residents point out specific problems from time to time, sometimes on the phone or in writing, but often in person. We watch for all this and address it with regular reviews of our performance.
-- Melinda Meers, managing editor, (Melbourne) Florida Today

The challenge for us is to broaden our coverage areas -- especially poor, rural communities with large Native Hawaiian populations -- that are under-represented within the political structure and to ensure that our coverage does not focus exclusively on the negative -- poor test scores, poverty.
-- Jim Kelly, assistant managing editor, The Honolulu Advertiser

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Photo by Judy Griesedieck, Star Tribune
Reporter Kim Taylor listens intently to a discussion of diversity issues during a panel discussion at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. Taylor covers the Hmong, Somali and African-American communities on her beat as an International Communities reporter.

We don't talk enough about our choices to say that we actively know what we're doing.

-- Carolina Garcia, managing editor, San Antonio (Texas) News-Express

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Photo by David Finch, The Record
Diem Ngo, right, of the Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation in Stockton, Calif., makes a point about diversity coverage issues in The Record, while Cleveland Gordon of the San Joaquin County Juvenile Justice/Delinquency Prevention Commission looks on. The two joined a panel of six readers of The (Stockton) Record who told the newsroom staff during a Time-Out session what they thought of the paper's diversity coverage.

Audit results sparked a revelation among reporters that the more they seek out real people affected by the issues raised in traditional reporting, the more reflective of the community their sources became. Many previously assumed that since Stockton is so diverse, their story sources naturally reflected the community's diversity without much effort. The audit proved them wrong.

-- Jim Gold, editor in chief, The (Stockton, Calif.) Record

Photo by David Finch, The Record
Reporter Rob Nelson, Metro Editor Paul Feist, reporter Daniel Yee, Assistant City Editor Patty Gurerra and reporter Jennifer Morita listen to a reader panel discuss The (Stockton, Calif.) Record's diversity coverage during a Time-Out meeting.

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Selecting Sources