Last Updated: August 13, 1999
Printer-friendly version
Time Out
We stood in the parking lot — right next to the Conrail main line —
and talked. I was explaining what our newsroom had done the day before
as part of the National Time Out for Diversity and Accuracy.
The African-American woman on the other end of the conversation seemed
genuinely fascinated with the process.
We’d been walking out to our cars after attending a community group’s
board meeting.
That was a good half-hour ago.
I can’t even remember how we ended up talking about the Time Out, but
we did. And did. And did.
I told her one of our findings was that our engagement, wedding and
anniversary submissions didn’t seem to accurately reflect our community.
She agreed — and even said she’d ask around to see if there was a reason.
It was finally time to go. The talk was a very nice way to cap our Time
Out efforts.
We didn’t do much the day before that parking lot talk. We took a week’s
worth of local stories and did an audit using the Maynard Institute’s forms
for individual stories and images.
But we learned a bunch and had a lot of fun doing the audit.
In the past two-plus years, we’ve made a lot of changes to The Elkhart
Truth — a independent 28,000 circulation daily about two hours east of
Chicago. One of those changes has been improving diversity in our building
and in our paper.
We hear that from people in the community. The woman in the parking
lot said she’d noticed improvements of including more minorities in mainstream
coverage.
But after the audit it was clear there’s a lot more to be done.
Our main findings?
-
Too many people in our newsroom still saw diversity as a racial issue.
-
The day before our audit, one person asked me, “When is that racial diversity
meeting?” Using the Maynard forms clearly drove home the issues of gender,
age and class.
-
Most sources were men. More women were shown in photos, which led one reporter
to say, “That’s because women do all the work.”
-
In business and government stories, we talk to too many suits and not the
people who actually do the work. Around here, those suits are almost always
white men.
-
One reporter realized she should consider diversity when interviewing people
at community festivals. We talked about how we tend to interview people
like ourselves. That’s an area where we’ve made some improvement, but it
really sunk in with the whole staff this time.
-
We were pleased to find the number of minorities shown on our pages is
close to the last census percentages. We were concerned, though, that if
you removed one story about a reading program those numbers fell off.
What are we going to do with what we’ve learned?
-
We’ll specifically recognize diversity efforts in our internal newsletter.
-
We’ll redesign our “maestro” story forms. Now we have a list of different
graphics and info boxes to remind reporters to use them. We’re going to
add questions that remind all of us to look for ways to increase diversity.
-
We’ll redesign our daily story budget forms to build in a diversity checklist.
-
We’ll get to get pro-active about wedding and other forms and take them
to bridal shops that serve minority communities and work with shop owners
to help us improve.
-
We’ll review our guidelines on suspect descriptions in police stories.
-
We’ll hold this type of audit once a year to make sure we keep our awareness
sharp.
Greenberg is managing editor of The Elkhart (Ind.) Truth.
