Ensuring Newsroom Diversity
By: Damian Radcliffe
Tags: Media, Journalism, Freelancing, Diversity, Community

Ensuring Newsroom Diversity

Supporting journalists of color, using the right freelancers and appreciating specialization

The Seattle Times newsroom. Image via Glassdoor

This is an extract from “Shifting Practices for a Stronger Tomorrow: Local Journalism in the Pacific Northwest” (2019), published by the University of Oregon / Agora Journalism Center. Read the Executive Summary, a list of five emerging themes covered in the report, tips for managing resources, and serving underserved communities.

Diversifying newsrooms goes beyond hiring demographics. It means editors and executives coming together to create inclusive work environments that foster new conversations and learning. It may also mean working with people from outside professional journalism to use their skills, and experience, to help tell great stories.

1. Promoting inclusiveness and supporting journalists of color

Editorial director for The Seattle Globalist, Venice Buhain shares ideas during the Local Journalism Roundtable. Image via the Agora Journalism Center and Erika Berardi

Venice Buhain, editorial director for The Seattle Globalist, (Seattle, Washington), said she believes in an inclusive work environment that creates opportunities for journalists from diverse backgrounds, and that there is a hunger for information about underserved communities.

Buhain heads an apprenticeship program whose applicants don’t have to be in school or have published work to apply. “We don’t limit it to our traditional news person,” Buhain said. “We look for people who might have not seen themselves as a journalist or a subject of a journalist.”

2017 The Seattle Globalist Youth Apprentices. Image via The Seattle Globalist

The program aims to bring diverse voices into storytelling and train them in journalism. Successful alumni include Vice Indonesia contributor Alia Marsha and Esmy Jimenez, who now reports on immigration issues for KUOW.

“Mentored by professional Seattle-based journalists and writers,” their website notes, “apprentices will receive in-depth training in effective reporting, writing, interviewing, photography, video and radio.”

Apprentices have had the opportunity to cover a wide array of stories including a Seattle office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activism vigil, and Portraits of Resilience.

Buhain said including voices of color is important in the newsroom, but so is supporting them.

The Seattle Globalist relies on a lot of freelancers, most of whom are people of color from marginalized groups. They often explore the communities they come from, Buhain said.

However, while that can give them the inside track on specific issues, this brings challenges with it too. “We’ve had people come through our program and say it’s really hard to cover this sort of thing,” Buhain said. “And it is hard because for them it [is] like talking to their family. There’s a big emotional component.”

As a result of covering stories that you are often close to, Buhain said that it’s important for newsrooms to teach journalists resilience, an idea echoed by many others around the table.

Newsrooms should not just support journalists of color by recruiting them. They also need to find ways to let them know the newsroom is theirs and a place where they belong. Moreover, it’s also incumbent on editors to ensure that these journalists do not get pigeon-holed. For the sake of their mental health, and to help them become better journalists, they must cover a wide variety of stories, and not just about minority issues and communities.

2. The value of freelancers

Freelance reporter and president of SPJ Oregon Amanda Waldroupe during the Local Journalism Roundtable. Image via the Agora Journalism Center and Erika Berardi.

In an era of budget cuts and reduced resources, the role of freelancers can be a tricky one for many newsrooms to negotiate. On the one hand, freelance budgets may be among the first to be cut. On the other, some outlets rely more on freelancers, seeing this as a potential workaround to hiring (or being unable to hire) more staffers.

Against this complicated backdrop, freelance journalists can, nonetheless, be an untapped resource for enhancing newsroom diversity. Making an effort to broaden the range of freelancers you work with, and the stories newsrooms commission them to cover, is one way to bring different voices into your coverage.

The founder and chief content officer for Statehood Media, Kevin Max, said his organization has been successful in utilizing freelancers. According to Max, “50 to 65 percent of our work is from freelancers… They provide necessary perspectives and fill coverage needs.”

Freelance journalists can also be valuable assets in diversifying a newsroom because they may have more specialist knowledge and skills than in-house reporters. They may work to a different rhythm too; although their understanding of the inner machinations of a specific newsroom will be different from those who are inside it 24/7.

Amanda Waldroupe, a freelance reporter with bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Oregonian, said one of the drawbacks of working in a newsroom is the overwhelming pressure to share content on social media which drives traffic to stories. Waldroupe said that as a freelancer, “I spend the majority of my day writing and reporting, and that’s not something that I feel happens in newsrooms today.”

3. Appreciating specialization

Journalists increasingly need to be able to shoot video, take pictures, fly drones, code, scrape data, host engagement events, or provide solutions angles in their reporting. These are all specializations that can play a key role in diversifying a newsroom — bringing different skills and insights to the table — and creating distinctive, high-quality news and information.

Freelance journalists, as well as staffers, need to have (and develop) these skills. Given the pace of change across the communications landscape, newsrooms should encourage, and provide training, for both in-house journalists and freelancers in order to ensure that they continue to expand their knowledge and reporting capabilities.

As Kevin Max reminded us, specializations matter. “We’ve always needed people that are specialists in different areas,” he said. And that’s not likely to change any time soon.