How to: Creating a more diverse and inclusive newsroom

By Caroline Chen, East Chapel Hill High (’22)

When the Pirate’s Hook at Riverside High first began publishing in Spanish in 2014, there were few native Spanish speakers in the newspaper class.

Newspaper adviser Bryan Christopher went out into the school and reached out to other teachers and students, in order to find Spanish-speaking writers who might be a good fit, he recalled.

Six years later, Spanish-language reporting and writing at Riverside High is strong.

“Now, in the last couple years, kids are showing up at my door on the first day of school,” Christopher said. “That are interested in translating, that I didn’t even know were a, bilingual and b, planning on taking the (newspaper) class.”

The implementation of Spanish-language coverage helped the Pirate’s Hook reach more students, gain more staff and write different stories than before.

As America goes through a period of self-reckoning in the weeks following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other Black Americans, newsrooms and journalists are reckoning with how to make their newsrooms and their coverage more inclusive.

The importance of media in shaping public opinion and consequently, policies, cannot be overlooked. By sharing stories, journalists foster deeper thought and understanding among all members of society.

The need for improvement is evident from upheavals in leadership at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer to self-reflections within high school publications. Here are some ways student journalists can work to improve diversity and inclusion in their newsrooms.

Creating a more diverse staff

One way to facilitate a more inclusive range of voices and stories is by starting with a diverse group of writers and editors.

“Students are lazy and typically interview their friends,” said Melanie Huynh-Duc, newspaper adviser at Northwest Guilford High. “So there’s a whole group of kids who are likely to not be represented, even though that’s our goal every year, to feature as many voices from the student body as possible. That would certainly be easier if we had more diverse students on staff.”

Isaiah Lucas, UNC (‘22), and a sports writer for The Daily Tar Heel agreed that diversity in staff can lead to more diverse coverage.

“I think it’s important for perspectives,” said Lucas. “For one thing, everyone comes from a different place. It’s always good to learn about others. Diversity also helps you to learn things about yourself, introduce yourself and others to different ways to talk about things, or to learn about what to talk about, or to change your opinion or stance on a certain topic.”

As a Black journalist, Lucas thinks that there is a good amount of diversity at UNC, whether it be in the classroom, in events or at the Daily Tar Heel. However, he still acknowledges that journalism is “definitely a field where we’re not as represented.”

“The (sports) scene itself is interesting, because most of the athletes, most of your star athletes in the main sports, are Black, but it’s not Black people that get to interview them and tell their stories,” said Lucas. “So I think there are times where athletes can’t feel as open as they want to be on certain issues, because there’s a gap in relation between subject and interviewer.”

At Riverside, Christopher has helped make the Pirate’s Hook more diverse by recruiting young writers from his freshman English classes into the journalism track.

“Students of all races and ethnicities have the right dispositions to be good journalists,” Christopher said. “It’s my job to find them in the school and recruit them to the newspaper. I meet a lot of talented students as freshmen that I can try to put into the newspaper pipeline.”

Journalism is an elective class, which means that advisers and schools must actively promote the journalism class across student groups.

“It should be a microcosm of the school itself,” said Huynh-Duc. “So, if the school is racially diverse, then the paper should be racially diverse, and diversity comes in all different levels.”

Talking to a variety of sources

Suzannah Claire Perry, UNC (‘23), writes for The Daily Tar Heel. In June she has been covering Black Lives Matter protests in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

“It’s very easy, as a reporter, to go in your comfort zone, and talk to people who look like you. That could be college students, people who look like you racially, or who have a similar socioeconomic status to you,” Perry said. “But, good reporting talks to people who the issues really affect.”

On June 12, Perry covered a protest in downtown Chapel Hill, where she interviewed protest organizers, speakers and local politicians.

“If you’re not interviewing the people that these issues affect, you’ve got to consider the value of what you’re putting out,” Perry said. “Because, how much of an understanding can you really push out to your audience, if you yourself don’t have very much understanding of what these experiences and problems are like.”

Christopher says Riverside’s Pirate’s Hook has a diverse staff of students and is generally representative of the student body as a whole, so a wide range of topics is usually covered. He has suggestions for how to promote diversity of coverage even with a less diverse staff.

“(Students) just have to work really hard to make themselves accessible to the entire student body, not just their friends,” Christopher said. “But kids who look and sound different than they do, and who do different things than they do, before, during and after school. They need to round out their understanding of the school community by talking to kids who live slightly different lives.”

He has a list of various classes and groups of students that he can direct journalists to.

“If it’s a senior student, I’ll just send them to a freshman classroom, and see what the freshmen are talking about and what they want to know. I can send my students to an English as a Second Language class with a lot of international students from all over the world,” Christopher said. “And so we can still create diverse coverage, but they just have to do more legwork on the front end.”

Creating more diverse coverage

Journalists should provide coverage of content relevant to all readers, in order to provide a well-rounded picture of the world.

If the range of coverage is too limited, readers may lose interest in a publication. Isaiah Lucas recalled his experience in high school, where the yearbook staff was predominantly white before he joined with two other Black girls.

“So when content was put out, it was hard for Black kids to relate to it if it didn’t necessarily translate to them,” Lucas said.

Perry agrees.

“(Lack of diversity) can lead to the erasure of stories of different communities that we could and should be covering. And when you don’t cover those communities, why would they want to trust you? Like, who wants to read the news about someone else?” Perry said. “With this general lack of diversity, you’re missing coverage, you’re missing insight. You’re also missing readers.”

She says the first step towards finding a wider topic range for many journalists is to listen and pay attention to the world around them. That’s how she learned about and reported on UNC cutting meal plans for students living in Ram’s Village Apartments, a story that mostly affected people of color.

“You have to be able to listen. Listen to social media discourse. Subscribe to the NAACP Listserv. Follow these accounts,” Perry said. “You have to make an effort to actively be listening to these other voices, and also letting people know that you want to listen to their voice.”

Oftentimes, it is difficult to recognize a lack of diversity in content. So, many publications and groups, from the Daily Tar Heel and the New York Times, have begun to actively seek training and ways to audit their own work.

The Maynard Institute is one organization that promotes diversity and inclusion in newsrooms “using a three-pronged approach: training media managers, journalists and correspondents from communities of color; creating content to demonstrate nuanced coverage; and keeping media accountable through its Watchdog program.”

Expanding the audience

At Riverside, a third of the student body is Latino and many students speak Spanish at home. To reach that audience, the school newspaper began publishing in Spanish six years ago.

“I think word of mouth and just the reputation has helped kids gravitate towards the program,” Christopher said. “I don’t have to work nearly as hard anymore to make sure I have good translators on staff.”

Christopher encourages other newspapers to take such initiatives, daunting as they may seem at first.

“Because so few schools are producing bilingual content, it’s easy to think that it’s not super valuable,” Christopher said. “ As schools and communities across North Carolina and the country continue to become more diverse, the need for it will become more clear, and the publications that are doing it well, will just be steps ahead.”

Haylieh Palma, East Mecklenburg High (‘21), writes for the school newspaper, the Eagle. She began a column in the past year which was also published in Spanish, in which she discussed issues including underrepresentation and lack of academic support.

“I always noticed that the Hispanic community, at my school specifically, wasn’t well represented,” Palma said. “Sometimes high school can be very, very difficult for some people, especially if you just don’t feel included into your student body. I really just wanted someone, anyone, to pick up the newspaper and be like, hey, it’s in Spanish, and I can read it.”