For as long as The Daily Tar Heel newsroom has existed, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been paltry or ignored entirely. We’re trying to change that.
We recognize that our newsroom has a long way to go before it will reflect the community and be a space where anyone can succeed, but we’re committed to taking the steps to get there.
During the 2020-2021 school year, we took some of these first steps by implementing a coverage tracker to emphasize diversity in sourcing, as well as launching Elevate, a section geared toward uplifting minority voices that are often excluded from the DTH, and hiring our first DEI officers.
The DTH is a resource for the campus and the community, and we must improve to serve that mission.
Recruiting and retaining staffers from marginalized communities is one of our biggest priorities in our diversity, equity and inclusivity efforts. We value the diverse perspectives that come from having writers and editors from all types of backgrounds on our staff.
We have begun reaching out to different organizations on campus to encourage others to join our staff. One way we hope to show that our newsroom is committed to uplifting these journalists is through the Sharif Durhams Leadership Program, which provides professional development with the intent to help these students move into positions of leadership in our newsroom.
Another way we hope to make our newsroom more appealing to all writers is ensuring they know we have space for them to write about issues that are important to them. Our special section Elevate is how this has manifested. It began as a project by the Sharif Durhams cohort, but has grown to print twice a month. Beginning in the 2021-2022 school year, there will be a new editor position specifically for Elevate.
In order to help facilitate our diversity, equity and inclusivity recruitment initiatives, we will add a diversity committee to support the DEI officer beginning in the 2021-2022 school year. This committee will include representatives from each desk.
We understand to earn the trust of our community, we must put in ongoing work to help ensure our newsroom and reporting is inclusive. With that in mind, we are organizing multiple workshops that will occur over the course of the year.
These workshops are not a one-and-done training. We provide tools and information that editors and staffers can utilize to make sure they are aware of any implicit bias in their behavior and reporting.
This training provides a space for staffers and editors to have an open dialogue about inclusive journalism, emotional labor and mistakes the paper has made regarding marginalized communities in the past and the present.
We know by having these conversations openly in our newsroom, we can begin to understand others' perspectives and better our reporting.
In addition to workshops, we have also implemented an internal coverage tracker that allows us to continue the dialogue one-on-one with staffers, while also monitoring how well we are fulfilling our mission to provide coverage for all communities.
The coverage tracker allows us to get a snapshot of whether we are thinking broadly about the types of stories we are producing. This helps us see whether we are excluding groups from our coverage, and where we can fill in those gaps.
Additionally, the tracker helps us determine whether the sources we are using in our stories are diverse. Are the people we are reaching out to for comment the best sources for the stories, and are we considering as many perspectives in the story as possible.
The coverage tracker is meant to be a tool to facilitate dialogue between staffers and their editors, and not meant to put any pressure on staffers to feel as though they must fulfill a quota. Our primary goal is to ensure our reporting is reflective of the communities we cover.
Diversity, equity and inclusivity issues are dynamic, and it is important to always be ready to hear new points of views and allow for change. An important way to achieve this is to make sure we are always evaluating our own policies on a regular basis to make sure our newsroom is accessible and inclusive.
During the summer of 2020, the leadership in our newsroom met with our co-diversity, equity and inclusion officers to reassess our social media policies. The changes we made gave staffers the freedom to speak their truth online without fearing repercussions from the newsroom.
We want to continue to evaluate our own priorities and policies, so current and future staffers know we are listening to their concerns and making changes accordingly.
The DTH has historically had a fragmented relationship with marginalized communities that has affected our newsroom staff and the communities we serve.
We've seen these errors play out through lack of research, sensitivity and context in past stories over the course of DTH's history as a whole. In truth, some of the editorial and newsroom-wide decisions we've made in the past have bruised our relationship with marginalized groups, and led to mistrust.
But we also feel it is important to acknowledge these errors as a way to move forward. This semester, our newsroom conducted a mandatory workshop that reflected on past mistakes the DTH has made as a way to hold our newsroom accountable. We plan to continue these conversations internally so that we can reckon with our past as an institution.
Being able to build and nurture our relationship with marginalized groups at UNC and around the communities that we serve is as essential as including these communities in our news coverage.
We plan to reach out to campus organizations that serve underrepresented groups during our newsroom's recruitment process and throughout the school year and hold conversations with campus and community groups to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
Our newsroom will also work closely with reporters working on beats related to equity and race to ensure we maintain and cultivate our relationship with the communities we serve.
A large part of mending our relationships with marginalized communities also includes being transparent with our readers.
Our newsroom will implement transparency boxes underneath stories on our website and select print content that will explain how staffers reported on a particular piece. We also hope to use our digital and print products to further elaborate on our newsroom workflow.
The Sharif Durhams Leadership Program serves as a talent and leadership development course for DTH students from underrepresented groups.
The program aims to help students from marginalized groups build equity, inclusion and opportunities at the DTH, as well as connect them to professional opportunities.
Approximately 10 staffers were admitted to the program when it launched during the 2019-20 school year. The program grew to 24 students for the 2020-2021 school year.
Although first-year staffers have not been allowed into the program in previous years, staffers from all classes were admitted into the program to help build community during the pandemic.
We hope to use this program to uplift staffers from marginalized groups.
