Is your newsroom working to broaden the diversity of your sources to better reflect and serve the communities you cover?
There are many ways to go about this work and one of the tangible ways to get started is to start the practice of auditing and monitoring sources quoted in local stories.
For many newsrooms, conducting a source audit or source inventory can be a tedious task. To help solve this challenge, the American Press Institute launched a new tool in June called Source Matters to help publishers automatically track all of their sources in all of their stories. If your newsroom is looking for strategies and tools on how to do this, please join our open demo on Monday Dec. 6 at 1 p.m. EST. You can register for our session here.
Each newsroom can customize the dimensions of diversity they want to track and decide when and how often to conduct an inventory of their sources. Most of the newsroom partners we work with involve their entire staff in this work to learn who is quoted most often, whose perspectives dominate their journalism and where there are opportunities to be more inclusive. Doing this important work can show you where your sourcing falls short, help you set goals for improvement and measure your progress over time — all with the goal of better serving your communities.
We are excited by the tremendous interest we’ve had from publishers wanting to do this work. Please join us to learn more about Source Matters and let us know how we can help. Any questions can be directed to Liz Worthington, API’s Director of Metrics for News and Source Matters. Liz can be reached at liz.worthington@pressinstitute.org
You might also be interested in:
Experts define moral injury as the suffering that comes from witnessing, perpetrating or failing to prevent events that violate one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values. It is not classified as a mental illness, but it can lead to depression, substance abuse or burnout, which is one reason news managers need to understand the phenomenon of moral injury — and ways to address it or head it off.
For many newsrooms, changing the systems that protect unhealthy culture could be a few sustained decisions away from reality.
With all of the demands on a newsroom, how do you make time to build new habits in pursuit of larger goals?
