How KPCC/LAist made its style guide more inclusive to build trust — in and out of the newsroom
Media organizations have a responsibility to speak clearly and thoughtfully.
In the KPCC/LAist newsroom, we believe it’s important to bridge the gaps between journalists and the communities they serve. When newsrooms use language that is inherently dismissive toward a person or group of people, those chasms widen. This is why our newsroom, supported by the community engagement team, updated our style guide and why we’re sharing this process with you.
Style guides aren’t exactly an exciting topic, but they inform a lot of what journalists do. We took a closer look at our existing style guides (for LAist.com and 89.3 KPCC) to see how they measured up with our commitment to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion for staff and communities. We found that they did not fully align with the organization’s values and lacked necessary nuance. It was time for an overhaul.
For decades, newsrooms have played a role in normalizing harmful stereotypes and charged words because these words are often codified in style guides or simply not addressed. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, newsrooms across the country began to take a closer look at language. It’s one step of many that newsrooms need to take in order to repair relationships.
Words can inform how a person feels recognized (or not) by someone who speaks about them. Journalists — who are tasked with connecting people across communities through storytelling — have a responsibility to wield this power carefully. Yet, executing this duty well can be a challenge. Terms like “riot,” “the homeless,” and “inmates” are still commonly used. I found myself asking questions like What are we actually saying with these words? Who decides the meaning? And — most importantly — How are these words perceived by the communities journalists serve? Intentional and thought-provoking conversations about these questions are well overdue.
I am pleased to share with you Dialogue; it’s an initiative to make a single KPCC/LAist style guide that is not only more inclusive but also accessible to readers and their feedback. The first installation: An updated guide that covers six categories with 28 entries of specific guidance for areas like gender-neutral language, protests, LGBTQ+ people, crime reporting, and ways to avoid othering or presuming communities have a single shared experience. The list is long and a reminder of the many ways we can either invite people into our reporting or signal the opposite. This work was also designed to provide consistent and accessible guidance for KPCC/LAist journalists — regardless of when they joined the organization — to produce content in line with the organization’s commitment to supporting DEI. To chart this path, we followed a four-step process:
- Identify areas for inclusive language and resources relevant to KPCC/LAist coverage area
- Update the style guide with written guidance
- Invite and incorporate feedback from the content leadership and staff
- Create a public-facing style guide that invites audience input
Full disclosure: Completing this part of the style guide took months with some starts and stops due to staffing changes. It involved hundreds of hours of work from members of the engagement team and meetings with staff. This is a living document that will continue to evolve based on feedback from staff and the audiences we serve. When updates do happen, they will be available publicly and via Slack for employees.
Step 1: Identify areas for inclusive language and resources relevant to KPCC/LAist coverage area
We have a responsibility to speak clearly and thoughtfully as a media organization. One of our team’s guiding principles was that even though people can have an emotional history with a word, KPCC/LAist doesn’t share that experience because it is, first and foremost, a company. This means some of the style guide revisions may differ from the language we personally use.
What words work for one person might not resonate with another. To help us decide what areas we needed to focus on, we often leaned on style guides from journalism associations like the Trans Journalists Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. We also compiled resources to guide this work, including thought-provoking opinion pieces, university research, Associated Press Stylebook entries, and journalism think-tank articles (e.g. NiemanLab and Poynter).
We looked to language that is progressively being used (or avoided) by the respective communities it would apply to. Some of the topics were already being actively discussed in our newsroom, too. Was it acceptable to describe last summer’s protests in Los Angeles as violent? How do you write someone’s pronouns? How should we refer to people who are currently incarcerated? The team incorporated topics like these into the beginning stages because it was clear that some staff needed them addressed at an organizational level.
Step 2: Update the style guide with written guidance
Overhauling so much of our existing style guides required structure, especially when you consider our commitment to being inclusive and transparent in the process. To facilitate an informed conversation with content leadership, the team wrote proposed guidance based on the newsroom conversations and the resources mentioned above. We explained the goal of the guidance and directions for its use (in many cases, guidance is specific to digital and on-air). This gave leadership something to interact with in a few different ways. They could strike out or add sections as needed, understand and assess the reasoning behind the revision, and jump in with questions. The streamlined process took place remotely over the course of about a month.
Step 3: Invite and incorporate feedback from the content leadership and staff
This initiative centers participation. Everyone in content had the opportunity to contribute to the guide before it would be publicly available on LAist.com. The entries were shared first with content leadership, and their revisions were included ahead of sharing it with content staff.
As I mentioned earlier, style guides aren’t that exciting. To keep people engaged, we kept lines of communication open through emails, meetings, and online access. We leveraged the online survey software Typeform to have a central place for staff to share their thoughts on the guide and reached out to colleagues who’d been identified as potential advisory group members. We also held four office hour meetings over a week that were open to ask questions, start a conversation about an entry, or use it as a quiet space to review the guide on Typeform. Roughly 20 people — including leadership team members, hosts, and reporters — participated with the guide in these ways or reached out personally with suggestions.
A key part of this work is transparency. After we closed the internal survey participation, we shared general themes about the feedback and how we had incorporated the changes. In cases where people had differing opinions on a topic, we worked to address the concerns while weighing the need for someone’s area of coverage to use (or not use) the language in question. (For example, a criminal justice reporter would have more experience with crime reporting language than somebody covering a different beat.) In general, people were on board with Dialogue’s direction and expressed gratitude for the invitation to collaborate.
Step 4: Create a public-facing style guide that invites audience input
From the start of the project, we knew the public-facing guide would need to be easy to navigate. The last thing we wanted was for the web page to feel like mindlessly flipping through a dictionary. With some coding skills from Melissa DeMund, LAist’s web developer, people visiting the site can quickly see sections relevant to their interests and bounce around at will.
By collaborating with the communities we serve and our colleagues, we want to demonstrate the door is open to listening, with intention, to a diverse range of perspectives. For KPCC/LAist, the style guide is a living document that may be updated based on people’s feedback, which they can share at the bottom of each category on Typeform. It can even spark new story content and events centered on inclusive language and who, society says, can use a given word.
Most importantly, this project is essential in building trust with our communities. The question, How are these words perceived by the communities journalists serve? deserves a rich and researched response that demonstrates a commitment to strengthening relationships. This is one way people visiting LAist.com or tuning into 89.3 KPCC can learn about our language and hold us accountable.
