Having diverse coverage is absolutely essential for any publication, hence why wlhsNOW has a coverage editor. Engaging in practices that promote diversity helps create bigger platforms for underrepresented communities which is something wlhsNOW strives for because each person has a story to tell. Below, you will see my work and my commitment to diversity.
The idea of my “Proposing and promoting ethnic awareness” story
As a journalist, I strive for stories for underrepresented communities. This was no different when I volunteered to do the story on the new ethnic studies story. I felt like this story was a change of pace thing at our school because I think at our school, there is a lack of ethnicity awareness. This has led to a lot of people not knowing the importance of that part of people’s identity and I aimed to do my part and use my journalistic platform. Here are a few other reasons why I wanted to write a story about the new Ethnic Studies class, which was Best of SNO.
- I already had experience with Affinity Club. At the beginning of my junior year, I did a little photo story for their Diwali celebration at the West Linn Public Library. I did interviews for their event and had a good time getting to know the club.
- I wanted to diversify my own coverage. It’s true that I do a lot of sports article and take a ton of sports photos. I think making sure there is diversified coverage starts with me so I knew I needed to branch out to other communities that weren’t just sports.
- This story felt new. I don’t think it’s every day that a new Ethnic Studies class is inaugurated. I wanted to make sure I did a story because it felt new and exciting. I think this begs the question on how many other stories are like this, that we just don’t see. The Affinity Club at our school is underrepresented so I did the story so they can get a bigger platform.
- To give the absolute facts. In my Ethnic Studies story, I made sure to give the facts about our lack of diversity at West Linn High School. This was important because not everyone may know these kind percentages. Again, giving the platform to communities like Affinity Club is something wlhsNOW and I strive for.
How sports coverage is balanced
West Linn High School has a ton of sports to cover. wlhsNOW always aims to cover these sports in a balanced way because we know each athlete and team works just as hard as any other team. We display sports coverage in a multitude of ways, including our sports posts on Instagram. Social media is a vital part of our publication and also a place where people share our content, therefore helping us gain more traction as a publication. Our number one goal with our social media is to have anyone be able to share a post at some point. This means we want all kinds of communities to have a reason to repost our posts, meaning we always aim to diversify our coverage. This is often found in sports for us because sports is probably the biggest thing at our school. So, having our sports coverage diversified is extremely important for our publication.
During our story brainstorms, we always contribute to all sports that are happening right now. This ensures that all sports are represented.
Also, I try to balance my own sports coverage. I like to go to sports games to take photos, but I do so selectively because I want to make sure I go to different kinds of games and highlight other players. These are photos that wlhsNOW also uses so I always want to promote a diverse amount of photos so that wlhsNOW can use those photos to have more diverse sports coverage.
Displaying content categories on wlhsNOW in a balanced way
Content categories are an essential part of our publication because it gives the story “a label” that it falls under. Having these labels helps us because it gives us an easier opportunity to assess our coverage. We promote diversity and equality at wlhsNOW and my first step to do so is display content categories on wlhsNOW in a balanced way, as the Web Editor-in-Chief.
Our four main categories for wlhsNOW are sports, student life, arts and entertainment, and current events. To display these categories on wlhsNOW, I aimed to proportionally balance their web page coverage. At our school, there are a different amount of opportunities for each category. For example, there are a lot of sports opportunities, so naturally they have one more slot than the arts and entertainment section, because they naturally have less opportunities at the school. However, this isn’t static. This doesn’t affect our story coverage.
This is something that is super simple but yet very effective. By thoughtfully displaying our content categories, wlhsNOW is able to display all the work that has been put from any community, which is essential when doing journalism.
Using content audits to promote diverse coverage
To keep tabs with our content, our coverage editor makes an audit every school quarter. The coverage editor, Finn Howell, does this so that I can know what needs to be covered more than other things. Using audits teaches us what to cover next time because, let’s be real, it’s never perfect. For example, by looking at this audit from earlier this year, we learned that we needed to have more arts and entertainment stories because there was an extreme lack of coverage when you compare it to the other categories. However, we also learned that we were doing a good job with keeping up sports, which includes how we are weighing mens vs. womens sports.
Overall, using content audits dictates how our next brainstorms go. I am pretty involved with the brainstorms because I know there are stories that I think are an absolute necessity to cover. The content audits also help Finn because he leads the class brainstorms and he uses the audit to encourage others to come up with more of those kind of stories. All around, content audits is a huge tool in our commitment to diversity, and everyone should be using them.
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