COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY
The word “activism” comes from the root word actus, or Latin for "a doing, a driving force, or an impulse." The image that often comes to mind of an “activist” is the person who rallies others, takes to the streets and calls their representatives, perhaps those who organize a rally. As a journalist, many may believe that my role in staying unbiased and neutral conflicts with “taking a side.” However, I am committed to bringing diversity through telling the stories of others, by amplifying their voices so that more people can see, hear and interact with diverse voices and diverse people. My commitment to diversity begins with my commitment as a reporter on the streets and as an editor in the newsroom. Whether I’m covering the largest #StopAsianHate protest of the nation on a particular weekend or I’m pushing for more diverse multimedia and sourcing in our articles and on our site, my commitment to diversity is undoubtedly one of the most important responsibilities I carry out as a journalist who enacts social change through her storytelling.
Taking to the Streets: Pulse of the People
Social Justice Coverage: Pulse of the People is a social justice repeater that Harker Journalism newspaper editors started in 2018. While covering my first protest, the annual Women’s March in San Francisco, as a sophomore, I had the opportunity to interview San Francisco’s mayor London Breed (read the full article here). I wanted to know what her goals to support women in the city of San Francisco was, and how she wanted to create a more gender-balanced political system where men so often take the center stage. I interviewed student protesters from my local schools, discovering how they wanted to make a difference as the youth population. I interviewed women of color, women who belonged to the LGBTQ+ community, allies, even children. I found that covering protests gave me a chance to find so many different perspectives, allowed me to practice empathy and gave me a chance to amplify the voices of those around me in order to engender change. I took that experience and mindset into my responsibilities in leadership, pushing for the social justice beat.
Introducing Holocaust Coverage: ‘Never forget, never again’
International Holocaust Remembrance Day occurs each year on January 27. After taking the Literature of the Holocaust course in my junior year, I began to reflect on the effects of Holocaust education and antisemitism today. After looking through our site for inspiration on how to cover how our school recognized the remembrance day, I realized that our site had never once covered anything related to the Holocaust. Even with the added difficulty of Zoom interviews, I pushed for Holocaust coverage to give a platform to the Jewish members of our upper school community, pitching the story idea to my adviser and my then editors-in-chief. Working with our then features editor, I spoke with Jewish teachers and students, local rabbis and professional Holocaust researchers, working over the course of eleven months to produce a longform article that featured a profile on our Literature of the Holocaust teacher, a grandson of a Holocaust survivor, Holocaust education in our school and the United States and modern-day effects of antisemitism.
My adviser once told me that you don’t truly understand someone until you’ve had the opportunity to speak with and engage in conversation with them. After speaking with our upper school’s Holocaust and Genocide teacher, whom I had never truly interacted with at school, I finally understood what my adviser meant. What was initially proposed as a 20-minute interview turned into an emotional one-hour-long conversation. See the video to the right for the full interview.
Along with winning a Best of Student News Online (SNO) award and being republished nationally by SNO, it was one of the most gratifying moments of my high school journalism career when the article won fifth place for social justice reporting in the 2021 NSPA Best of Show Awards. For two weeks, it also trended as the most-read story on our “trending stories” list on our site (for more, see Web and Social Media).
Read the full article here.
Multimedia
These are the google doc scripts that my staff members shared with me via email.
Aquila Audibles
As part of my mission to increase multimedia content on the site this year, I worked closely with one of my managing editors who has a focus on multimedia to bring more diverse elements to the site. Aquila Audibles are a piece of audio that presents a narration of the written article, so people who are unable to read the written version due to obstacles such as visual impairment can listen to the article instead.
A screenshot of an “Aquila Audible” script.
As seen in the screenshot in the top right, in class, my staff members would share their “Aquila Audible” narration script with me. I would personally review each one, adding comments of where in the script to add more emphasis on a word or to where to leave a natural pause between certain sentences.
The second screenshot to the left shows various narration indicators that I asked our reporters to put in, such as bolding certain words that needed more audible emphasis or adding a “[SPACE]” to indicate where to leave a pause between the words while narrating.
I also practiced executive producing in order to prepare for future broadcast projects in class. One such example, as seen in the video to the left, is when we read out our news journals in class (for more context, see Reporting) as a newscast. In order to guide our reporters, I used certain hand gestures to indicate when to slow down when a reporter was speaking too fast, when to speak more dynamically, and when to increase their volume. This practice was something I found especially helpful to monitor other “Aquila Audibles” and helped me realize that dynamism in an audio recording is just necessary in telling a compelling story as narrative style is in writing in order to reach a wider audience range.
Furthermore, after school, I would spend time coaching our younger reporters to become more comfortable with working with recording on our microphones and other audio gear in an effort to familiarize more people on staff with integrating multimedia elements into our daily work as reporters.
This is a spreadsheet I worked on with one of my managing editors on keeping track of multimedia content, making sure that each production cycle we have at least two different forms of multimedia.
Consistent Multimedia Content
To the right is a screenshot of a spreadsheet I worked on with my multimedia managing editor to manage and assign more multimedia content. Though we were able to expand our goal of including consistent multimedia content on the site, we wanted to expand the type of content. Instead of having just videos, one of our biggest goals this year was to include more podcasts and video features.
For more, see multimedia and broadcast.
Within the Newsroom
Staff Inclusivity
In order to create a spreadsheet of assignments per cycle, strategic pulls from the pitches that we gather from the pitch form each cycle (to see more about the pitching process, see Reporting). Though the strategic team used to review the pitches each time, I firmly believe that the perspectives and opinions of our younger staff members, not just those of us as the senior managing editors and editors-in-chief, mattered deeply in creating an inclusive and comprehensive cycle of stories. Therefore, I instituted Thursday pitching meetings, where the entire leadership team (anyone who holds a leadership role from the section editor level up) gathers in the journalism room before assignments are sent out on Friday (for more on the assignment calendar, see Reporting) to review the pitches and input stories they believe should go into that particular cycle. It was a valuable learning moment for me as editor-in-chief to hear more from our STEM editor on how we should implement more climate change stories, leading me to work with her to assign a story on ocean acidification and its effects on marine life in the Monterey Bay. What started from one conversation through a staff inclusivity initiative led to a longform article, which we wrote after driving an hour north to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and interviewing the staff, volunteers and aquarium visitors there.
Another change I made this year was requiring diverse pitching from our staff each cycle. After noticing that our sports and opinions pitches consistently leveled around under three pitches in a pool of over 100, I worked with my co-editor-in-chief to revise the pitching form, requiring at least one sports or opinions pitch out of the three that we normally require. This was incredibly helpful in upping our sports content from mostly just game recaps to longform articles on mental health in sports (one of my favorite articles that I pitched) or the lack of support for female sports in our school.
As seen below, our Cycle 4 pitch form changed o include a sports or an opinion story idea in order to populate the site with more diverse stories in these two sections.
Our cycle 3 pitch form, without the sports/opinion pitch requirement.
Our cycle 4 pitch form, after adding the sports/opinion pitch requirement.
Diversity in Our Stories
Compiling the resources: To the right is a screenshot of a list of online diversity resources I compiled over the summer, when the strategic team would meet each week over Zoom to prepare resources and guides for our reporters during the school year. For more background on strategic team planning over the summer, see Leadership and Team Building.
See the google doc here.
Editing articles: In tandem with leading my staff and our commitment to diversity this year, I often need to pay attention to more than just the story idea itself. In the screenshot below, I remind my reporters while editing an article to pay attention to diversity in sourcing, ensuring that we don’t unintentionally over cover certain demographics, such as upperclassmen or male sources. For more on the editing process, see Editing.
Focus groups: Focus groups is a new initiative we started this year, spending hours over the summer to figure out how o create equitable coverage of our around 70 student organizations on campus. Everyone on staff interviews a student organization at least one a semester during a cycle production—then writes a report on the student organization’s feedback and opinions as well as lists any (if at all) of our news site’s past coverage of that student organization.
The main goal was to hear back from our community on whether they felt like they were being seen and heard, whether our news site was providing adequate coverage of their organization, events and members. The results were incredibly helpful, helping us to highlight over this first semester which groups we consistently under covered, such as Robotics (which helped me assign our news site’s first article on Robotics and their kick off event here), and which groups we were doing well on coverage, such as DECA.
I would then go over these analytics and written reports with during our strategic meetings (see more about strategic meetings in Leadership and Team Building) and use them to help us better curate news stories and assignments for the next cycle. Overall, this initiative has been incredibly eye-opening for us as a publication to identify our coverage blind spots and correct them in future production cycles.
Our planning began as a list of ideas over the summer, brainstorming ideas on how we could engage with various student organizations and how to integrate these additional reports into our monthly production cycle.
The initial brainstorm over the summer.
The final guide on focus groups.
Working with one of our managing editors to centralize a focus on diversity, we created a step by step guide for reporter’s to report on their specific focus group for a particular cycle.