Getting It Right: Covering A Community That’s Not Your Own

What are the challenges journalists face when covering communities that are not their own?

This can be tricky territory. Sometimes there is a language barrier, and even if that’s not an issue, you may lack access hindering deeper reporting. Depending on the community you may have to cover issues around race and culture or sensitive topics that can offend readers and harm your communities’ subjects if you’re not careful. You may need new techniques or resources that you wouldn’t typically have to use, such as developing a diverse source list and rethinking how to best use interpreters.

Developing a diverse source list is crucial because it’s the key to fair and accurate reporting. Finding sources can be the hard part especially when we’re used to reporting on communities we relate to and possibly already have relationships with. But still, there are a number of ways to get more diverse sources. One quick tip in case you’ve never heard of it before is using The Rainbow Source Book from The Society of Professional Journalists. You can use the database to get in contact with experts from a wide array of news topics including ones that are underrepresented in the news. Take your pick.

If you’re thinking about the best ways to work with an interpreter remember they’re different from translators. Translators translate written texts. Interpreters translate spoken speech. Like journalism, interpreting is a profession that requires years to master properly and there are certain things you should be aware of when working with one. You have to prepare an interpreter for an interview just like you prepare yourself. Provide them with background information beforehand, spend time with them going over your questions, and know that even with an interpreter, working with language barriers won’t be easy. Here are the challenges journalists face when working with interpreters — and tips for dealing with them from Poynter.

Rong Xiaoqing of Sing Tao Daily and Aleksandra Slabisz of Nowy Dziennik suggested a few techniques of their own in CUNY Social Journalism’s community engagement class. What I took most away from their suggestions is that when covering a community that’s not your own, an important early step in planning your outreach is identifying characteristics and needs of your community. This helped me to brainstorm on the best ways to better understand unfamiliar communities and develop a plan to report on them. How can we find out what those needs are before we actually visit these communities ourselves? I wanted to share a few of my ideas:

- Diverse communities are often active online. Go beyond normal networks. While I’m sure most of us have already taken to social media such as Twitter or Facebook, there are other tools that can be of more assistance. For example, I used forums such as Roosh V in my current investigation on Peter Liang’s conviction to see how Asian Americans feel about it. I’ve struggled with getting in contact with members of the Asian American community because it’s a community that’s not my own. But thanks to reading the forums, I learned about a social network called Weibo (a Chinese microblogging site) and was able to use an app called Surround App to translate the mostly Chinese content into English and see what the Chinese American community here in New York thinks. There’s more out there than Twitter and Facebook and you’d be surprised at how useful the lesser known social networks can be. side note: Wiebo is actually a very large social network in China. Since Twitter is banned in China, Weibo is an alternative that citizens use. But being outside of this community, I wouldn’t have known that.

• Analyze news items. As journalism students I know we already do this, but I think we should start taking a different approach when we do read news items on our communities. We should be thinking about what hasn’t been covered in the news items we read. A lot of our communities are already underrepresented. I think sometimes we fall into a habit of seeing something in the news and continuing that reporting on our own. We should be thinking about how we can add something new to the coverage of our communities by seeing what the gaps currently are.

Questions:

1) Can you provide another suggestion to covering a community that’s not your own?

2) What efforts should a reporter make to reflect the diversity of issues, topics, and people in their news coverage?

3) How do people think about advocacy and objectivity in the context of their work with their community?