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 . 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. 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 .
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 . 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.