By Farai Chideya

There are many ways to cover politics—data, field reporting, expert analysis—but all of them require a sense of not just what to seek and include, but what to exclude. So when I was verbally sexually harassed by a Trump supporter after an interview, that didn’t make my coverage. It wasn’t germane to the story I was writing. But it did make me think, once again, how reporters’ experiences in the field are shaped by things we can’t control, like the bodies we are born into; as well as ones we can, like the expertise with which we research our topics and listen for key insights.

Being a black woman reporter who covers politics, race, and gender has made me unafraid to enter spaces where I am not particularly welcomed. I once showed up unannounced at an all-white country church to interview a pastor who had threatened to dig up the body of a mixed-race baby from their cemetery. Most of the time, things are less dramatic than that. But I’ve learned a lot from having to remain compassionate under challenge, to navigate differences big and small with an eye on being fair in my final reporting. I’d wager that all political reporters who go out into the field have to deal with their own version of these challenges, which is one reason diversity matters in political teams. Different perspectives on as massive a topic as American politics should strengthen the work of the whole newsroom.

That’s me speaking through the lens of my experience, of course. I also believe it’s important to quantify the question of who reported the 2016 election, and whether political teams’ race and gender diversity had any impact on newsrooms. As a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, I’m researching the subject by conducting interviews with reporters and experts, and using the newly released MIT Media Lab analytics tool MediaCloud, and data from the firm Media Tenor.

But the most important data point for this project—numbers from newsrooms on their 2016 political team staffing—has been the hardest to collect because very few managers or business-side staff are willing to disclose their data. One company admitted off the record that they were not responding to diversity requests, period. The Wall Street Journal provided the statement that it “declined to provide specific personnel information.” An organization sent numbers for its corporate parent company, whose size is approximately a thousand times the size of the entire news team, let alone the political team. Another news manager promised verbally to cooperate with the inquiry, but upon repeated follow up completely ghosted.

There are exceptions. Liz Spayd, the public editor of The New York Times, wrote an excellent piece noting that of the paper’s 20-plus political reporters during 2016, two were black, and none were Latino, Asian, or Native American. Susan Page of USA Today responded within minutes of my sending an initial email to say that the paper’s core political staff consisted of 10 women and eight men; and among those, two Latinos and one African-American. Their level of candor is both refreshing and rare. So far, several other news organizations have promised numbers but are still in the process of delivering.

So I’m going to put this out there for everyone to see. I’m looking for metrics on the racial and gender diversity of newsroom political teams—notes on how to share yours are below—and for us to self-report because it’s the right thing to do. We should not be ashamed by these numbers, whatever they are, but we should be deeply ashamed if we hide them.

Arguably, 2016 was the most racially contentious and gender-fraught election of the modern era. This election required extraordinary things of journalists. Sometimes we lived up to the challenge; but in many other ways, we missed the mark. When it comes to the diversity of our political reporting teams, it seems we can’t even find out what the mark is, because despite our proclaimed love affair with data, we won’t disclose our own.

We’re going through a heady and self-congratulatory period in American journalism. A tough one, yes, but a time where we are arguably needed more than ever. We are demanding transparency from the Trump Administration, other branches of government, and business entities. We are using our role as journalists to claim the moral high ground, and patting ourselves on the back for speaking truth to power.

But here’s a truth: diversity in American media has nearly flatlined for more than a decade, and there’s no reason to expect it’s any better in our political units. The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ annual diversity study in 2014 noted that “The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.” In 2016, it rose to 17 percent, which sounds good until you realize that more than a third of Americans are Latino or non-white. Women were 38 percent of the newspaper employees in 2016… and of course women are 51 percent of the population.

My own experience

I was the only black reporter in my newsroom at FiveThirtyEight during the 2016 election cycle, and the employee who had covered the most presidential elections. I was also a non-data journalist at a data journalism site, which led to debates over how to approach stories. For example, as someone who has written three books that deal directly with race or gender, I wanted to dig more deeply into the political science behind why racial rhetoric is both toxic and persuasive sooner in the cycle.

As a newsroom veteran, I tried to deal with any tensions in a productive way; spent time mentoring other employees; and also got the benefit of learning data journalism techniques from an amazingly talented staff. Was it easy? No. Any time there are differences in skillsets and/or diversity, there is more chance of conflict, but as many business analyses show, companies with more staff diversity outperform similar but less diverse ones. And in journalism, where our life histories help inform how we get the story, we should recognize diversity helps prevent groupthink—something there was far too much of this election cycle. (FiveThirtyEight has since hired a black political reporter and a black sports writer.)

In my time as a political reporter, I have learned to deal with the indignities of being a black woman on the road. A couple election cycles ago, a man at an offsite event at a political convention repeatedly used the word “nigger”—not to describe me, of course, just those other black people he hated. As mentioned, this cycle I was verbally sexually harassed by an interview subject, an older white construction worker who then had the audacity to thank me for not chewing him out the way the ladies at work did. In other words, he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he took advantage of the fact that I was on his turf and there in a professional capacity, hardly the time and place to have an outburst. (That’s not my style anyway, but it seems to be what he requires to stop).

These are small prices to pay to get a front-row seat while history is made. I never expected being a reporter to be easy. But what breaks my heart is when fellow journalists disrespect the idea that newsrooms should be integrated, and do their best to justify de-facto newsroom segregation. When I wrote an article several years ago on newsroom diversity, a person from a major newsroom wrote in response that they had done excellent work covering Hurricane Katrina with their disproportionately white staff. What kept coming to mind as I replied to him was: Do you want me to compliment you for being able to work without diversity? That’s like saying “We run an excellent segregated school in an integrated neighborhood.” It’s not a cause for applause.

In addition, I know on background that same newsroom paid a settlement to a journalist of color who’d had run-ins with a white journalist known for conflict with a series of reporters of color. Some of journalism’s more intense racial and gender problems—not just harassment, but being passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white or male reporters—are veiled behind settlements with non-disclosure agreements. (Think of the many settlements involving Roger Ailes that predated the public knowledge of allegations of sexual harassment.) As a journalist for 25 years, I’m privy to some of this insider knowledge, but the nature of the settlements make them hard to document publicly. Settlements with women and journalists of color are not just evidence of discord within America’s newsrooms, but also offer a secondary business case for diverse staffing and better management to avoid costly payments.

Judging from the spate of articles about the lack of diversity in President Trump’s cabinet, journalists know that there’s merit in reporting on race and gender metrics… except when they’re our own. Only doing the research will provide us with a sense of how this impacts newsrooms. But I suspect in the long run, in a world where audiences can cherry pick what they find relevant, less diverse newsrooms are likely to miss key stories, or join in late. That can’t be good for the bottom line. No matter what the numbers tell us, shouldn’t we want to know? And it’s better for us to learn sooner than later. If newsrooms want to be more diverse by 2020, it’s time to plan ahead and see about casting a wider net for talent, or giving new opportunities to those already in the newsroom.

If we journalists can’t turn as unsparing a gaze on ourselves as we do on others, it speaks poorly for us and the credibility of our profession. If the press lauds itself for demanding transparency from government but cannot achieve transparency in its newsrooms, that is cowardice. If we say we can cover all of America with representatives of only a few types of communities, we may win battles but lose the war to keep news relevant to a broad segment of Americans. This is as strong a business argument as a moral argument.

When it comes to race and gender, I have some means of getting rough data without newsrooms’ participation. My tireless research assistant and I are literally going through rosters of reporters and editors and coding them by race and gender. This has the potential to be incomplete, and the process is, frankly, comical. For example, we use membership in ethnic news organizations like NABJ and AAJA to help us categorize the race of reporters of color. But there is no affirmative categorization for whiteness, just the absence of other markers. Thus, most of the people in our rosters are now coded WX—meaning: White… eXcept how do we know for sure? To be rigorous—to move them from WX to a firm W—we need to literally call every person coded WX and ask: “Are you white?”

Doing this kind of work is tedious, and being stonewalled is humiliating. It’s not my fantasy to spend time harassing news organizations who pride themselves on fostering information transparency to be forthcoming about their diversity numbers. But someone needs to do it, and I’m in a position to give it a good hard try. If I can’t get it done, even with the imprimatur of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center behind me, it speaks to a deep and shameful resistance within our news culture to holding ourselves accountable.

This is our chance to do one small good thing for journalism, to stand up and truly be accountable. So let’s do this. Lay your metrics on the table, American journalism. We can congratulate ourselves afterward on having been brave about it.

The question isn’t, “What lessons can we draw from 2016?” The question is, “Which of the many answers should we focus on?”

by Michael Oreskes

Reporters speak on-camera as they wait for supporters to arrive at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s election night rally in New York Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

Focus is one of journalism’s most important skills. It’s that separating the wheat from the chaff thing. In an age of distraction we need THAT skill now more than ever. (Is anyone going to explain why Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign slogan has made such a comeback?) We need to apply that focus to ourselves right now. The question isn’t, “What lessons can we draw from 2016?” Answers have already flooded in to Nieman at a pace to induce future-of-news vertigo.

The question is, “Which of those many answers should we focus on?”

To pick, we first have to decide our goal. Are we asking which lessons we need to heed to create a stronger media? Or a stronger democracy?

We need to articulate this. Because we talk a lot about our crucial, dare I say privileged, role as guardians of democracy. Yet, not all of our actions conform to the notion that democratic society is our North Star. We know all about news organizations that pursue partisan factions as audience. But what about news organizations with clearly elite strategies? They seek wealthier audiences, for example, because that’s who advertisers buy. Is a partisan niche any worse for democratic discourse than an economic one?

This is hardly all our fault. The business crisis of journalism has been intense. A paywall, to pick one example, may reduce access to information citizens need. But without it, there won’t be revenue to sustain the news organization as it gathers that information. And any effort to create broadly democratic conversations by reaching broader audiences runs headlong into the role of our “platform partners,” Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the rest.

Much has been said about all this by more business-savvy people. So for here and now, let’s stipulate that our goal is to strengthen our democratic purpose in the faith that if we focus on fulfilling society’s needs, successful business models (including serious efforts by platform owners) will follow. Let’s face it, this is actually our only course. Strong business models and a weak democracy won’t really help us, as our colleagues in Turkey are finding.

So with that stipulation, what should we do?

Here are four steps to strengthening journalism’s role in our democracy: We should focus on being more local, more networked, more diverse, and fiercely independent. This will improve community access to reliable information, rebuild trust in us, and strengthen democracy.

LOCAL

All politics is local, said Tip O’Neill. So is the most essential journalism. Whether it is journalism that holds local public figures to account or that connects communities across divides of race, creed, class, origins, or orientation. We have an essential role in bursting filter bubbles. This can most effectively and productively be done in local communities. Some of these communities are physically isolated from others (more on that under “networked”). But in many cases, they are actually cheek by jowl.

As journalists continue to critique their coverage of the presidential election, Nieman Reports is publishing an ongoing series of articles exploring the issues, challenges and opportunities—from newsroom diversity to fake news to community news outlets—that will inform reporting going forward. Click here to see the full list of articles.

During the election, David Greene of NPR rode a public bus line that connected downtown Milwaukee and adjacent suburbs. He traversed from Clinton country to Trump country, capturing how citizens viewed each other. Those communities are all within the circulation of the Journal Sentinel and the signal of WUWM, Milwaukee Public Radio. I mention them only because they have a record of working together to serve their communities better.

There is a lot more to be done. Milwaukee is a lucky place to have the Journal Sentinel and WUWM, as well as Wisconsin Public Radio. Many local communities have become little more than “news deserts,” according to a recent report from the University of North Carolina. If we mean to be one country, we should no more tolerate letting some of our fellow citizens go ill-informed than we would consent to see them ill-fed or ill-clothed. The Public Broadcasting Act instructed us in public media 50 years ago to fulfill needs unmet by commercial media. The loss of local journalism is clearly one of those needs.

NETWORKED

My friend and colleague Joyce Dehli addressed this forcefully in another Nieman piece. We can’t expect to simply rebuild all of the newsrooms damaged by the disruption of the newspaper industry. We need to build something new. Many folks are using the word collaboration here to describe how by combining forces we can maintain and even expand strong journalism. When I talk about networked I mean all that and more.

NPR is already a network of community-based news organizations in every state. (We have 264 members broadcasting over close to 1,000 signals, radiospeak for channels.) We are committed to working together to strengthen their local journalism, which then becomes the basis for the stories we tell the country about itself. In other words, our sense of the country doesn’t come from the coasts. It comes from everywhere.

Like, say, Laramie, Wyoming. There were many questions about President-elect Trump’s promise to save coal mining jobs. Stephanie Joyce at Wyoming Public Radio understood both the miners and the industry. Coal’s fundamental problem, she reported from Laramie, isn’t government regulations, which President-elect Trump could change. Coal’s problem is the rise of cheap natural gas, which Trump has vowed to expand. More gas, less coal. There is no substitute for local knowledge and on-the-ground reporting.

There are efforts in many states and cities to form not-for-profit news organizations to take up the slack left by the decline of newspaper newsrooms. For 2017, NPR will be working closely with public radio stations and others to strengthen coverage of state legislatures and government. Public radio sounds like America because it is everywhere in America. We aren’t the only ones with this idea. Gannett is building a network of newspapers with very much the same goal. A democracy the size of the United States has plenty of room for both of us.

DIVERSE

The subject of diversity has been on newsroom agendas for a long time. We haven’t done a good enough job. Not only do we still have much work to do to bring journalists of color into our newsrooms and into positions of responsibility, we have to recognize that broadening our perspectives includes others, too. Take my NPR colleague, Sarah McCammon, who covered the Trump campaign this year. Sarah is from Kansas City, Missouri. She was raised in a conservative Christian home. Her background made a real difference in her ability to cover evangelicals. “These aren’t zoo creatures,” McCammon told The Pub, a podcast covering public media. “These are human beings who think differently than a lot of people in Washington.”

Diversity of audience is crucial here too. Danielle Allen raises the important question: Who are we speaking to? There are a lot of business pressures that push many media companies toward niche strategies. If we accept our role as serving the public’s information needs in a democratic society we need to include all of the public. That means it may fall to journalists to argue inside our own organizations for approaches that reach out for broader audiences rather than narrowing them based on income or any other demographic. It also means speaking forcefully to the platform companies like Facebook, Google, and the rest in favor of transparency in their algorithms and a recognition that they have a large effect on who gets the work we do. We have a democratic responsibility and so do they.

INDEPENDENT

This is everything. Without it the rest won’t matter. Ask yourself as a journalist, “Who do I work for?” If we can’t reply that our first allegiance is to the public, we confirm the worst of what a lot of that public thinks of us: That we are tools of some amorphous corporate establishment. To win the public’s trust, we have to be the public’s media. Connected locally. Networked nationally and awash in diverse perspectives on what is newsworthy and how to report it. When we ask hard questions or hold leaders to account we must always remember we are doing it on the public’s behalf, not for our own aggrandizement or advancement. We are their eyes and ears. Their windows on other points of view. We must be their information partners in the work required of each citizen to make democracy effective.

We have a distance to travel to become this. But if we focus our efforts we can do it.

Your Editor Muses: Effective journalism demands inclusion. We try to practice it

By Ricardo Sandoval Palos

I watched election-night coverage on television with acquaintances from Europe, who seemed flummoxed by what was unfolding on the screen. I spent a lot of time explaining the Electoral College and unpacking why I thought that Donald Trump was getting enough votes, in the right places, to win the election.

Early on, it was a fun night. We laughed as I, a Mexican-American, gladly accepted the moniker, Bad Hombre. Trump had set a tone on the first day of his presidential campaign, calling out Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. And, by the end of the campaign, he’d cemented his hard stance, asserting there were some “bad hombres” out among the population of Mexican immigrants. It became a bitter joke among Latino men. But as the CNN map turned redder and redder that night, the laughs disappeared. It appeared that many voters had taken Trump’s hyperbole as gospel.

This brought me to a conundrum: As a proud, professional journalist, I am politically neutral. I’ve worked to hold the feet of politicians of all stripes to the fire. But on election night I began to wonder: How do I remain the neutral observer when the president-elect and his advisers have used openly racist language about Mexican immigrants, people like me?

He may call himself simply a nationalist, but Trump adviser Steve Bannon has made money and fame hawking white nationalist notions on the Breitbart website and his radio program. He’s praised Jason Richwine, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, as “one of the smartest brains out there in demographics, demography, this whole issue of immigration, what it means to this country.” Richwine has argued that Hispanic immigrants “do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives.” He echoes eugenics theory, which ranks me and mine well down the ladder of able races.

Add in talk during the campaign of walls and registries that would shield us from people demonized as dangerous and running amok. The result: an environment that’s deeply unsettling to many journalists of color.

Which brings me to this.

I haven’t ever said this publicly, but even though I’ve accomplished a great deal, I’ve often felt like an outsider in mainstream journalism. Perhaps it’s my start in life as a barefoot kid on the dirt streets of Tijuana, in Mexico, or the fact that there are so few Latinos in the upper reaches of English-language media, despite our growing share of the U.S. population. I’d wanted to be a journalist from early on, starting a school newspaper in the sixth grade. But for me, scraping together money to go to a good state university was an achievement, especially after few teachers in high school expressed confidence in me.

Today, my bookshelves are dotted with major journalism awards. I was fortunate enough to work for a decade as a correspondent in my native Mexico, and I’ve held positions of authority in prominent newsrooms in print and public radio. But my climb in the business was accompanied by remarks like these:“Now that we’ve hired you, we can make a normal hire.” “Don’t we already have a Hispanic in the business section?”

Those words were from colleagues and supervisors, and they left me with a sense that my stay was transient—that for me and other journalists of color the margin for error was thinner and our roads to success much more serpentine.

That gut feeling had actually taken root when I was a kid, growing up near the border, south of San Diego. I’ll never forget that police officer who used to park in my neighborhood and often asked to see my ID as I walked to school.

But the most humiliating incident occurred just after I got my college degree. It was on a train from San Diego to Los Angeles. I was dressed in my one sport coat and button-down shirt, ready for lunch with an editor at a large daily newspaper. Back then, uniformed border agents routinely patrolled trains northbound from San Diego, looking for passengers who seemed to radiate “otherness.” I traded stares with the agent, and he demanded that I produce my ID and proof of status. I bit my lip against a smart-mouth retort and produced my California driver’s license and my green card. I was born in Mexico and was not yet a U.S. citizen.

I had believed my shiny new degree in journalism from California State University proved I belonged. Getting singled out by this agent instead made me feel shoved back in my place. He had asked no one else to produce an ID. The interaction reminded me that no preppy sport coat could completely cover my brown skin.

I know that many of my colleagues have never been compelled to produce ID for anything other than the right to buy a drink.

I reflect on the past as we consider a new challenge. It’s a special time that’s forcing us to redefine what it means to be a Latino and a professional journalist. I can only imagine the waves of fear, anger, and uncertainty that journalists who are Muslim or who are of Arab heritage are experiencing.

The optimist in me predicts we won’t witness mass deportations, with crowds of frightened people at the border and armed guards forcing them out. I don’t foresee enough politicians willing to enact official registries for Muslims. Yet there’s a disturbing level of public support for such measures, and the Trump transition team isn’t ruling them out.

We’ve seen wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. And my own American-born mother and her Mexican immigrant parents were coerced into leaving the U.S., from Denver, in a mass deportation during the Great Depression.

So what do I do as a Latino, and a journalist?

I’ll adhere to as high a professional standard as possible. I’ll report and write accurately, without favor for skin tone or political bent.

But I’ll also demand that as we head deeper into these changed times, I get the opportunity to speak up about editorial decisions. There has to be room to confront myths about people of different ethnicities as they emerge in policy debates. I’ll also ask colleagues to refrain from labeling me as biased when I point out that an alleged fact is a racist myth.

I fear that Team Trump’s coziness with advisers who consort with white nationalists will be treated as no more controversial than the president-elect’s positions on trade deals. But if we aggressively question authority over the next four years, I’ll feel like the industry has my back. Maybe then I’ll finally shake that nagging suspicion that I’ve not been shown the secret handshake of journalism.

Your Editor Applauds: Some national news organizations are bringing foreign correspondents to cover their beats for domestic readers. It’s their point-of-view we need.

By André Natta

More than a month after the election, the following sentence has become a cable news cliché: Journalists in New York and Washington, D.C. are out of touch with the rest of the country.

It’s true. There’s a lot of local nuance that doesn’t make the national news. And it’s even true within cities like New York — growing up in the Bronx often meant watching reporters based in Manhattan getting stories wrong in their own backyard. Without nuance, journalists can’t help Americans understand each other and explain the division currently afflicting the country.

We could blame this on other clichés — “urban versus rural” or “coastal versus ‘fly-over’” — but we risk glossing over the problem until it becomes another full-blown crisis. Rather than searching for a scapegoat, we need a solution that puts local journalists in conversation with their counterparts at national news organizations.

We need more collaboration.

This possibility was raised last month just after the election by Spirited Media CEO Jim Brady, who suggested that news organizations set up a national network in time for the 2020 presidential campaign:

And it should be easy to collaborate with one another, in part because journalists all over the United States are doing it already. That’s why the most logical next step is supporting and enhancing existing collaborations rather than starting from scratch.

This might not be such a crazy idea. During the election, ProPublica teamed up with more than a thousand reporters from news organizations across the United States to suss out voter fraud and long wait times.

ProPublica also recently announced plans to set up an operation in Illinois, which is another step in the right direction. With its first expansion, the nonprofit will bring its model of collaboration and co-publication to regional journalism.

Illinois is also home to another encouraging experiment in collaboration. City Bureau, the successor to Chicago’s old City News Bureau, has multiple partners throughout the community, including the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit news organization.

But I don’t want to pin my hopes for more in-depth partnerships solely on nonprofit organizations. Journalists must also find for-profit solutions to break down barriers of lifestyle, geography and political influence that divide us.

A report released shortly before the election, “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts,” highlights several challenges local news organizations face as part of that possible solution.

The study, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism, shows that news organizations are being bought by faraway investment groups. Money is their first priority, so many of these investors lay off editors and shutter publications at the expense of quality journalism.

Unfortunately, these problems disproportionately affect local news organizations that employ journalists where they’re most needed. National newsrooms, meanwhile, parachute reporters into these decimated news ecosystems every four years to cover the election.

But imagine how this could change. If the local and regional news ecosystems were healthier, national news organizations could rely on community newsrooms for boots-on-the-ground expertise. And smaller organizations could turn to their national counterparts for specialized help.

Making collaboration work isn’t simply a question of finances, however. It also requires a fundamental cultural shift. News organizations view themselves in competition with one another — for stories, for readers and advertisers. Local news organizations often resent bigger outlets for bigfooting their stories, and national outlets often view smaller publications as cash-strapped backwaters.

If we’re all going to work together, we have to learn to respect one another, and come up with a partnership that’s beneficial to everyone involved.

While the road ahead for collaboration seems rough, it doesn’t mean we should give up. It just means we need to be smarter: National news organizations don’t have to pretend they can be everywhere at once. And local outlets can’t pretend they have all the resources they need to tell all the stories they want.

If we realize that now, we can work together to make our journalism more powerful together.

Your Editor Concurs: A lot of good things can come out of our current challenges..