Editors report on successful diversity 'Time-Out'

Phillip Taylor
First Amendment Center

10.18.99

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Worried that his staff at the Jackson (Tenn.) Sun weren't in touch with all segments of the 49,000-resident city, executive editor Dick Schneider pondered how he could get reporters and editors out to the people.

So last May, Schneider packed his staff onto a bus, gave them a brown-bag lunch and sent them on a four-hour tour of Jackson. Several community members served as guides as the bus went through the less-covered areas of town.

"A lot of folks are not from here, as they say in the South," Schneider told editors gathered here for the Associated Press Managing Editors convention. "So it was a real eye-opening experience for them."

Schneider prepared the trip for the National Time-Out for Diversity and Accuracy, a program sponsored by APME and the American Society of Newpaper Editors. During one week in May more than 2,000 journalists of more than 150 newspapers and 40 Associated Press bureaus explored whether and how their reporting reflected the diversity of their communities.

Bobbi Bowman, diversity director for ASNE, said organizers wanted to tie the issue of diversity to a basic journalistic value — accuracy. That is, by interviewing more diverse sources and placing more and more minority faces in photographs, the newspaper offers a more accurate portrayal of its community and readers.

While some, like Schneider, sponsored bus trips through neighborhoods for National Time-Out, others created readership panels, conducted audits and explored new coverage methods such as the development of community beats.

Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of news for the San Francisco Examiner, said the creation of beats to cover issues involving Asian-Americans and gays and lesbians meant a new look for the newspaper's front page and section fronts.

David Yarnold, executive editor of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, noted that some critics fault editors for creating specific beats to cover minority groups. Some, Yarnold said, believe that "because it's somebody's job to cover gays and lesbians, that means it will not be somebody else's job."

But Rosenhause said the omission of such groups in other stories leaves those stories incomplete. She said she would send the story back to the reporter with the question, "Where's the rest of the story?"

"You can't write a story on North California politics or politics in the San Francisco Bay area without talking about the influence of Asian-Americans and gays and lesbians," she said. "You're not a good reporter if you are not talking to them."

To get those sources, reporters and editors must do more than get out into the various communities — they must be in the community, says Larry Burrough, deputy editor of the Orange County Register in California.

Burrough explained that the Register recently embarked on an effort to provide each of its reporters a laptop computer. The reporters could then file stories while they were out of the newsroom.

"At first there was resistance, because people like to eat lunch together and have a beer together after work," he said. "But the staff can do that. They just have to work differently."