Mining a Collection of Race Stories

The Pew Center for Civic Journalism has been around for nine years now. One advantage of this longevity is that we have amassed a considerable collection of journalism initiatives – more than 600 newspaper projects alone. Another 100 radio and television efforts.

Out of this accumulation last year, a University of Wisconsin doctoral student handed me a list. She had been methodically analyzing work we had collected under the rubric of “civic journalism.”

“Jan,” she said. “Do you realize how many of these involve reporting on race?” I studied the list and recognized many excellent efforts.

Of the 641 print projects in her civic journalism database, 83 involve reporting on diversity, immigration or race relations – 13 percent of all the efforts that have crossed our radar screen. And those, mind you, are only a small portion of the enterprise underway in U.S. newsrooms.

One obligation of amassing such
a collection is to share different approaches to the same topic.

So, a year ago, staff writer Pat Ford began doing journalism on these race projects – and on others that she solicited in an open invitation to newsrooms around the country. Her assignment was to pull out common threads, techniques, lessons learned, new ideas.

The result is the new Pew Center publication, “Delving into the Divide.” It is a look at how newsrooms, large and small, have tried to capture the different expectations, different perceptions and different aspirations that so often intertwine life in a multicultural society. It focuses on journalism that seemed to connect with the community. And it tells the stories behind the stories.

We know that journalists know that reporting on race is one of their biggest challenges.

They know there are stories here. They don’t always know how to access them. How to write about them without further fracturing the community. And how to write about them so that they don’t fall into traps that they don’t even realize are there.

We had a few epiphanies of our own in producing the book. Consider this observation from a Herald-Palladium reporter in southwest Michigan who had interviewed black and white clergy in adjoining towns: “White ministers tended to speak of racial ‘harmony’ while black ministers spoke of ‘equality’ and ‘justice.’ ”

How many times had we inadvertently used the word “harmony” in our initial draft? We searched and found too many instances for comfort.Had we too easily slipped into a white “frame” for some of the stories?

It prompted us to invite Rosemary Harris, columnist for The Gazette in Colorado Springs, to point out other traps. She did an excellent job.

For instance, now instead of referring to a newspaper partner as “representing the African-American community” we simply report that it is “a black-owned newspaper.” Instead of describing children of interracial marriages as of “mixed race” we note that they are “multiracial” children.

We hope this book will enlighten you with similar epiphanies.