Engaged Journalism Exchange: Challenging Whiteness in the Newsroom

As news outlets across the U.S. and beyond grapple with a legacy of structural racism in journalism, this Engaged Journalism Exchange — held March 29, 2021 — explored some efforts to push journalists to assess and monitor diversity and inclusion in their coverage and their newsrooms.

Watch the video recording of the event here.

We heard from a team of researchers and journalists who worked on the recent audit of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and from journalists at Wisconsin Public Radio who have undertaken a source demographic survey where sources self-identify race/ethnicity, gender, and zip code.

We also heard about a Seattle Times Slack channel that encourages staff to speak up about sensitive issues around race, gender, and inclusion that come up in the process of working on stories.

We then discussed how to learn from such efforts, processes for shifting editorial and engagement practices, and challenging assumptions that privilege white audiences.

We will host a series of these discussions in the lead up to our AEJMC preconference on August 3rd.

About Engaged Journalism Exchange

Engaged Journalism Exchanges are organized by Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University, and Jacob Nelson, an assistant professor at Arizona State University. They are sponsored by Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University.