We're headed in right direction
It's often easy to think that we have a long way to go to diversify newsrooms and news coverage in this country. Well, that's probably because we really do have a long way to go.
But we're often headed in the right direction.
That's the thought that occurred to me after I recently finishing judging the public service category for newspapers for the 2006 Sigma Delta Chi awards. I had the large-newspaper category.
The thing that impressed me about many of the entries is that the papers handled diversity the correct way -- where relevant, they photographed a broad range of sources, quoted a broad range and, overall, the stories clearly reflected the diversity in their circulation area.
Granted, a number of topics naturally involved minority subjects: mental illness, poverty, debt collection, recovery from natural disaster, diabetes. But other topics did not: stock-options, court records.
This probably reflects several factors: Large newspapers, with larger staffs, have more people of different ethnic, economic and social backgrounds to help brainstorm, report, edit and present stories. That helps. There is probably a great liklihood that journalists on those staffs have been through diversity training or had a solid grounding in it while in journalism school. And readers of big-city metros have been more willing to complain, in some cases publicly, about news coverage that doesn't reflect our diverse society.
Anyway, there's some good news on the diversity front. I'd rather not name the newspapers and the stories until the SDX winners are announced. At that time, I'll give a shout-out in this space to some of the entries that reflect this diversity.