How to Reach Diverse Communities

The latest census figures make it clear: The demographics of the country are changing. At the same time, local television news is losing viewers, and newspapers are struggling to hold onto readers. Although no clear link has been scientifically proven, a relationship seems apparent.

One remedy for newsrooms might be to get in closer touch with the diverse communities they are supposed to cover.

Journalists believe they understand two things well: 1) What is news and 2) What’s happening in their local community. The truth is, though, neither of these is a sure thing. Ideas of what news is and is not change from journalist to journalist, newsroom to newsroom and even from city to city.

No matter what set of news values were learned in J-school, the bottom line for most journalists is that news really is what they say it is. If they can sell a story to their editor or executive producer, it will be published or broadcast.

The problem is that even though we might agree within our newsrooms on what should and should not be covered, there’s one group left out of the process – the very communities we purport to cover.

The new census tells us that our communities are changing rapidly. It’s time for journalists to make sure they know who is out there and to include in their coverage the lives and stories of all the people.

Not all that long ago, I left the news business to begin studying news. I noticed that local news looked similar across the U.S. A missing element was a strong sense of what made each community unique. Often, that meant there were few stories about communities of color.

Other researchers who had analyzed local and network newscasts discovered that news coverage of people of color was sorely lacking. I wanted to know why, so I spent a summer in two newsrooms in Albuquerque and Honolulu, where minority communities were large.

In these two states, I assumed there would be, at the very least, an economic imperative to offer more coverage of minority communities.

I found exactly the opposite: Both stations cared little about people of color or the stories that could be important to them. Minorities were seen most often in crime stories or when there was a local festival.

Why? The people in management positions were predictably white. And too often, to whites, news that involves communities of color doesn’t seem to matter since it doesn’t jibe with an Anglo manager’s life experience. So, these stories don’t get chosen for each day’s newscasts. But that’s not all…

In interviews with minority community leaders – legislators, clergy, business owners – they said reporters had little interest in their communities and little knowledge of them.

Worse, reporters had no idea about regional history so their stories lacked crucial context. Although my research focused on TV news, those I interviewed were extremely critical of newspaper coverage as well.

Cities are filled with hundreds of thousands of people of color who have important stories to tell. Here are some suggestions for how to find and tell those stories.

Seek Out New Sources

You can’t gather news from people you don’t know. We still rely on too many of the same old sources. And when we do write stories about minority communities, we have one or two designated spokespeople we interview repeatedly, as if one African-American can speak for all others.

A community organizer in New Mexico said this about newsrooms:

“They need to have, I think, some system of outreach. They need to have some kind of a staff person, or a reporter, however they want to set it up, to go out and just meet with people. Sit down with organizations in the city and ask: ‘What are you doing, what’s interesting, what kind of issues would you like to have covered?’ They should be tourists.”

Immerse Yourself

You can’t cover your community if you don’t know the community. Think about where you live. Too often news people live in the suburbs, often the white suburbs, in self-imposed racial and economic isolation. We need either to move or systematically reach out to people not in our usual spheres.

Where do you buy groceries, get your hair cut, eat out, spend your day off, play, relax, worship? If the answers are within a few blocks from work or home, you probably never encounter people much different from yourself.

If you don’t know any people who live in ethnic communities, how can you find and report news about them? If you don’t know anything about the food, the culture, the music, the economy, the daily lives of these communities, it’s impossible to write stories that accurately reflect what’s going on in these large segments of our markets.

Learn the History of Your Community

Often, reporters and news managers did not grow up in the area where they now work. That means they may know nothing of the local history, and their stories may lack the necessary context to assure fair and complete coverage. Newsrooms could invite local historians to teach local history. Bus tours of neighborhoods could be hosted by community organizers.