Here are a few things left in the notebook from Institute
for Justice and Journalism’s seminar at Harvard for its 2005 racial justice
fellows.
‘Covering Race Beyond the Box’: Newsrooms
are facing increasing financial and staffing pressures, making it harder at
some newspapers for reporters to get stories about an issue as complex as race
into the paper. This panel of reporters and editors discussed tactics to
overcome that obstacle.
Mae Cheng, an editor at Newsday and president of Unity:
- Write
“bite sized stories on the same topic” instead of the five-day project.- Repackage
these stories after several months, in print or online, to get a
cumulative effect.- Develop
partnerships with ethnic or alternative media.- Use
different story forms. “We may need to get off our high horses and blog.” If “our
ultimate goal is to be conscience of society” then use whatever format is
available.- Do
some “happy” stories. “We always want to bring out the gut-wrenching, the
heart breaking stories … but reader like the success stories. … They don’t
want to read blood and gore every day.”
Steve Magagnini, a reporter at the Sacramento Bee who has
been covering race and ethnic issues for 12 years:
- Every
great story has to have one or more of these things: overcoming conflict,
humor, surprise, history, something the reader can use.- Take a
tiny thing, turn it into a yarn that can say something about the culture
and the people.- Get in
the living-room to bridge cultural or language gaps. “I like to go into
people’s homes. … You don’t usually get the truth from people until you’ve
been there for an hour.”
Tom Arviso, editor and publisher of the Navajo Times:
- “Do some really good homework. … Don’t
just bang your way in there. … If you do, you’re going to end up with a
story that’s not true.”
Elizabeth Llorente, an immigration reporter at The Record,
Bergen, N.J.:
- Use
down time to connect with real people. “We’re not always firing on all
cylinders at work every day.” Go out in the community for a bit, go to a
diner, even for 30 to 40 minutes. “Or, go to a school when parents are
picking up their kids. They’re sort of a captive audience there on the
sidewalk.”- Skip
the he-said-she-said story. “Those stories often inflame whatever tensions
… but really don’t leave people with any more insight. … There is no
longer an excuse for stopping at those superficial kinds of stories.”
‘Writing Thoughtfully
About Race’: Keith Woods of Poynter, after finishing his own week-long
workshop on reporting about race, came to Harvard and offered this advice:
- Great stories about race and class have three
characteristics – strong authentic voice of the people we’re talking about,
context and complexity. “All good journalism will do that.” Take them away from
normal stories and they become dry, vacuous or uninteresting, but take them away
from race stories and “I fill in what I don’t know and that will cause harm,”
meaning that people will fill in the blanks about race with their own
prejudices, beliefs or stereotypes. Writing about race requires precise
language and context. Without context, “I am harming the truth; I am harming
the public’s ability to understand what it is that I am talking about.”
‘Los Angeles Now’:
The fellows watched filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez’s documentary on the changing
demographics and culture of Los Angeles. The film portrays Los Angeles as a
pan-ethnic community, one in which old white-black paradigm of racial
divisiveness is changed by the multi-culturalism of the city’s newer
generations.
Louis Freedberg, an editorial writer for the San Francisco
Chronicle and an IJJ racial justice fellow, offers this commentary on “Los Angeles
Now”:
Phillip Rodriguez’s film on Los Angeles was excellent. I thought though that there is danger in
suggesting that the challenges facing black America are yesterday’s problems, and
that the hopefulness of the browning of Los Angeles will somehow resolve the economic
and social isolation of too many black Americans.It’s not clear to me how the dynamism of Latino migration
will resolve in any way the racial isolation and poor achievement of kids
trapped in segregated schools in Oakland, vulnerable communities like those on
the Gulf Coast, or the huge unemployment rates among African Americans (and
Latinos for that matter). I think we
have to consider that Latinos may be another immigrant group that successfully
integrates into mainstream America – while leapfrogging over black Americans
who are left far behind, as they have been for most of this nation’s history.
