NLGJA | Campus Roundtable

George Padgett
Associate Professor, Communications
Elon University

I teach largely “Media Writing” and “Media Law & Ethics,” so I will keep my comments to those two courses.

"Media Writing"

I do a diversity unit in the writing course. Each student is required to answer these questions:

What is diversity?
Why is diversity important?
What is the current state of diversity in the newsroom and in news content?
How can an improved state of diversity be achieved?

I then divide the class into groups of four or five and assign each group one or more of the following populations to study: African Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities, LGBT people, Native Americans, Asian Americans, people of faith, seniors and people of a low socioeconomic status. They are asked to research the population, using the following questions as guidelines:

What is the current status (raw numbers) of the designated population within the national community, the local community?
What is the status (raw numbers) of the designated population within the American newsroom?
If the goal of having a diverse newsroom is to provide better coverage of the diverse community, what is being done to increase representation of the designated population in newsrooms?
Consider the question of numbers vs. training. Is the solution to achieving representative diversity within the newsroom simply to train all reporters to be able to report on diverse communities, or some combination of both?
What can media do better than they are doing now in covering the designated population? What are they doing wrong? What are they doing right? What do they need to know?

They also are instructed to make contact with representatives of each group. When there is money available, I try to fund a pizza or two for a roundtable conversation, though that does not always work out. I give them the following questions as suggestions to guide their conversations with the assigned population:

Where do you get most of your news? Daily newspaper? News magazine? TV news? Online radio?
Overall, how good of a job do media do in reporting the news? What's good? What's not good?
What kinds of stories in general would you like to see reported that generally are not?
How good of a job do media do in covering issues related specifically to [assigned population]? What's good? What's not good?
Let's say I'm a reporter in need of story ideas. I want to do more stories dealing with the [assigned population]. Give me some ideas.
I want to write a story about you. What's my angle? What do you want the world to know about you?
Do you think it's necessary for stories about one group to be written by a member of the same group, or can the same thing be accomplished by training all reporters to be able to report on all groups within a diverse community?

Afterwards, we spend a couple of days doing individual group reports and discussions. I think students who put effort into the project (and that's the majority) genuinely enjoy and benefit from the experience. The ones who don't want to do it don't get much out of it.

"Media Law & Ethics"

I don't have the opportunity to do anything quite so elaborate here, but I do spend time talking about the ethics of diversity. Again, we have a discussion about the what and the why of diversity. We trace the industry's attempt to achieve more newsroom diversity through the various ASNE reports, the Hutchins Commission recommendations, the Kerner Commission, recommendations from the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and various industry ethics codes. I also have them look at the Web sites of various journalism minority groups like NABJ, AAJA, NAJA, NAHJ and NLGJA.

This column was added to NLGJA's Campus Roundtable in May 2008. For more information about this ongoing project or to make a submission, please contact NLGJA Deputy Executive Director Tom Avila at tavila@nlgja.org or 202-588-9888, ext. 17.