From diversity to inclusion: How KUOW and IA created “community of belonging” for a source and content diversity audit

In 2021, KUOW and Impact Architects partnered to conduct a retroactive source and content audit. The work focused on the Seattle, WA National Public Radio affiliate’s 2020 on-air and podcast content. As we worked with KUOW early on in the audit process to define and customize the methodology, we heard the KUOW team’s strong desire to move beyond census race and ethnicity categories in order to dig deeper into which communities across Seattle were being included in coverage and where they were missing important community stories.

To meet this goal, we developed a “community of belonging” category, which included populations with a significant presence (>1%) in the Seattle area: Caribbean, Central or South American, Chinese, Filipino, Horn of Africa, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, South Asian, and Southeast Asian. We were able to code 17% of sources overall with respect to community of belonging. And while this exercise resulted in interesting findings, just as important is the fact that it surfaced new ways for the KUOW team to think about reporting, going forward.

• Work to include sources’ self-identification in stories, including community of belonging.
• Seek out sources from various communities of belonging to include in all coverage areas, including economics and business, religion, labor, and racial justice.

The report shares many other findings from the KUOW audit, some of which include:

• Health was either the primary or secondary topic for about a quarter of all records.
• Women comprised 55% of all source records, a figure that was consistent across all but one programming area.
• While KUOW includes Black sources at a rate that is about six percentage points higher than population estimates in Seattle and King County, two-thirds of these sources are found in either arts/culture/sports topics or racial justice topics.
• KUOW includes Native sources at a rate that exceeds local population estimates.
• KUOW’s sourcing for Hispanic/Latinx sources is well below local population estimates.

While setting a general baseline for coverage areas, source gender, race and ethnicity, and profession are without a doubt valuable for any newsroom, the richness of our work with KUOW was born out of listening closely to their questions and tailoring a unique methodology that will support their ongoing work toward being an anti-racist newsroom.

IA and KUOW will partner again in 2022 to conduct a similar audit of 2021 content in order to track change over time.

The full report is available here.