Commitment to Diversity
At a school with a diverse student body, I along with my staff must always strove for inclusion in our reporting and staff environment. We maintain specific protocols to ensure adherence to this ongoing goal, and personally, I am conscious of who I am interviewing and how I can better reach outside of my sphere of influence and cover underrepresented communities accurately.
Screenshot by Audrey Enghauser, sourced from the Journalism Education Association
Honorable mention for diversity, JEA
January 2021
The ODYSSEY Media Group was named an honorable mention for the JEA Diversity Award in 2021. As the article references, what goes into diverse coverage is awareness of the people around oneself. As such, we think outside of our own influences and consider the stories important to different sectors of our school. We also focus on recruiting a diverse staff so that we can tell these stories from diverse perspectives.
Immersed in the industry
April 2019
While many CCHS students work taxing jobs outside of school to support their family, it is rare that their stories of passion are shared. By profiling Julio Rivera about his commitment to his family's restaurant, I brought an untold story to our publication's audience. I visited him at the restaurant to take photos, and in our interview, I focused on questions that encouraged Julio to open up and reflect on the significance and motivating forces of his career.
Photo by Audrey Enghauser
Work with former Linnentown residents
This letter of recommendation from former Linnentown resident Geneva Johnson Eberhart references my commitment to telling the story of the former residents of Linnentown. Through listening and attempting to understand the experiences people like Eberhart endured, I was able to connect this important story with my school and spread awareness about the issue. I am very committed to telling the stories of a diverse set of people because it brings light to important change that must be made and allows me to examine my own perspective as well as encourage others to do the same.
Screenshots by Audrey Enghauser
"Inclusion" news story assignment
Throughout 2021, in order to continue to grow our staff's skills between magazine cycles, we introduced week-long feature packages compiled by teams of 4-5 staffers. One of our required prompts is "Inclusion", which asks staffers to highlight people in our school and community working to elevate marginalized voices. Our leadership cabinet created this prompt based on the Team On-Site Competition at the Southern Interscholastic Press Association Conference and adapted the requirements to the needs of our news website.
Alumni diversity and inclusion panel
March 2021
In order to better understand how to foster diversity and inclusion within our program and in terms of recruitment, our adviser hosted a panel facilitated by several current editors, including myself, to speak with POC alumni of the program. We listened to their experiences in the program with inclusion -- many of them shared times when they felt excluded -- in an attempt to improve our environment and work toward a more diverse staff. Our focus in this meeting was action steps, because beyond important discussions, we must put these ideas into a plan in order to meet our goals and values as a program.
Photo courtesy of Andre Robinson
Dr. Kecia Thomas lecture
The ODYSSEY Editorial Board attended a Zoom presentation with Dr. Kecia Thomas, the current Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She taught us how to understand the difference between diversity and inclusion and gave us practical tips for promoting inclusion on staff. By hearing from an expert on this subject from researching it throughout her life, I could better understand what I need to do within my program to truly represent the people of CCHS.
Presentation by Kecia Thomas
Screenshots by Audrey Enghauser
Do Not
Interview list
In order to ensure that we are maintaining representative coverage of our student and faculty body, at the end of each semester, each staff member submits the name, grade or title and race of the people they interviewed in that time period. We then review the submissions and have discussions among our smaller teams about how we did as a group in interviewing people from a diverse range of races that is representative of our school, as well as how we did personally. These reflections allow us to refocus and understand what we need to improve upon in order to create more inclusive content moving forward.
Why social class matters in journalism coverage
At the 2020 National Scholastic Press Association online conference, I took part in a session about social class and journalism. The presenter discussed why and how reporters should consider sources from all socioeconomic backgrounds and explained the prevalence of class in our society. Because CCHS is in a low-income school district, this is very relevant to my staff's coverage. I learned that even if it may at times be difficult to include this diversity, it is our journalistic duty to do so, because social class influences people to the same degree as other diversity factors.