Ferguson would birth a movement and set the nation on a course for a still-ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents—from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Brown’s blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing. As protests propelled by tweets and hashtags spread under the banner of Black Lives Matter and with cell phone and body camera video shining new light on the way police interact with minority communities, America was forced to consider that not everyone marching in the streets could be wrong. Even if you believe Mike Brown’s own questionable choices sealed his fate, did Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland all deserve to die?2
Lowery ’s words mirror Chap. 3’s assertions that Traditional coverage of racial issues transformed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, Jr.’s. Chapter 4 foregrounds the voices of journalists who covered Ferguson to help interpret what influenced the shifts in Traditional journalism coverage and to shed light on the differences among paradigms—from the journalists’ perspectives. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight journalists across three paradigms, this chapter interprets their responses across levels of influence from individual to ideological forces.3 Because deeper or underlying values, ideologies, and influences on reporters aren’t directly observable through analyses of the content they produce, interviews with the reporters who created the coverage are the best source of information to gain further insight.
The individual-level questions focused on journalists’ career paths and what led them to cover racial issues. Where applicable, I asked reporters how working in their current paradigm differed from working in a previous paradigm (in all cases, the Traditional paradigm).
Questions about routines included how reporters decided whether something was newsworthy, the steps they took to conduct reporting, whether they monitored other news organizations’ coverage, and whether social media played a role.
Media organizations questions centered on asking reporters’ opinions about whether news organizations should have reporters assigned to cover racial issues as a beat.
Questions at the level of social institution, or journalism as a field, asked about what journalists admire in coverage of racial issues and what they don’t admire, and whether they had seen changes in coverage of racial issues over the past decade.
The social systems category focused on journalists’ conception of objectivity. The interviews sought to examine how these influences served to push against or sustain the values associated with each paradigm. This chapter looks at each level of influence across paradigms to show difference and sameness.
The Reporters
Reporters interviewed in the Traditional paradigm were John Eligon of The New York Times and Wesley Lowery and Krissah Thompson of The Washington Post . All three covered Ferguson. All three identify themselves as African American. Eligon has been in the field since 2004 and covers racial issues as a national reporter. Lowery covers justice as a national reporter. He has been in the field since 2013. Thompson has been in the field since 1997 and at the Post since 2001. She has covered civil rights racial issues and former First Lady Michelle Obama, but now writes for the Style section. Although both Lowery and Thompson work for the same organization, Thompson has been a journalist for more than two decades, while Lowery is new to the field. Because field norms and newsroom socialization were important to this study, length of tenure in the field was more of a benefit than working for the same news organization was a limitation.
The Interactive Race Beat paradigm has the fewest number of journalists and outlets, with only two Traditional national news organizations—NPR and ESPN—having standalone, digitally enabled race-beat platforms. Gene Demby is the lead blogger for NPR’s Code Switch platform. He has also worked in Traditional journalism for The New York Times. Demby identifies as an African American man who has been in the field since 2005. Soraya McDonald identifies as an African American woman who writes for ESPN’s The Undefeated, previously worked for The Washington Post and has been in the field since 2006.
Journalism 3.0 journalists interviewed included one current and one former BuzzFeed reporter and one Mashable reporter. Mashable’s Colin Daileda is the only journalist interviewed who had not previously worked in a Traditional newsroom. Daileda identifies as a white man and has been in the field since 2012. Evan McMorris-Santoro, who also identifies as a white man, covered Ferguson for BuzzFeed, but now works for VICE. He has been a journalist since 2001. BuzzFeed reporter Darren Sands, who identifies as an African American man, has been in the field since 2006.
Influences on Reporters Covering Racial Issues
Individual-Level Influences
No individual enters a work environment and checks their identity at the door—even Traditional journalists whose professional norms and training demand some type of detachment from their lived experience to be “objective.” How reporters understand their lived identities in the context of professional expectations is part of individual-level influence. For example, Traditional journalists of color have recalled not wanting to pitch stories with racial components because they fear they will be seen as biased. Four of the journalists interviewed identified themselves as black or African American men, two as black or African American women, and two identified as white men. The two white men both worked in the Journalism 3.0 paradigm.
This is important to note because for these two participants, they cover people of color but don’t experience life as people of color.
We have a quote somewhere—in The Washington Post … We’ve got all these quotes on the walls and stuff…it talks about journalism being a noble job because when we do it right, we can change the world. I think that’s…very earnest, but I think that’s true. One of the reasons I love journalism is I see it as a means of making the world I live in a better place…a more responsive place for people who look like me. I think that that is very important.
I think that there is unparalleled power in a well-told story. I think that that’s something that as an ideal, I very much believe in. I also believe in the idea—and I think about this a lot—I believe in the idea of writing things down for historical sake.
I think sometimes as journalists, we overfocus on the need to create change in the short term. We’re having this crisis right now. What can journalism do in a post-truth era? It seems like everything we write doesn’t matter.
Not everything we write is about changing things today. A lot of it’s about providing historical understanding later. I don’t know, but it’s hard for me to imagine that Ida B. Wells thought, “When I cover this lynching today, it’s going to be the last one because I’m just going to write the hell out of this, and then everyone’s going to know this is wrong, and all white people are going to stop killing us.”
I’m pretty sure she knew that the power and the mandate and the necessity of the work she was doing was not, in fact, contingent upon its ability to change anything in the short term.
I’m so thankful for people who did journalism like that because we now have a deeper understanding of the world we live in because these things were written down.
I’m not convinced that covering a police shooting tomorrow is going to be—everyone’s going to go, “Did you read this Wes Lowery piece? We’ve got to stop killing people.” That’s not what’s going to happen.
I do think it’s important for the historical record so that when we look back at this period of time, and when our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren look back at this period of time, they can understand what was happening. They can understand these realities… I think that’s just something that’s important.
Reporters working in the Traditional paradigm wanted to cover racial issues in a way that filled a void they observed, in a way that reflected the lived experiences of people of color, and in a way that created understanding for people who have not had those experiences. They also emphasized showing racial oppression as a contemporary problem with historic roots.
Everyone was so devastated when he [Merida] announced that he was leaving…. Because Kevin was the highest-ranking person of color in the newsroom at the Post. Not only that. He was just a good boss. He was also the person who people of color in the newsroom could go to for advice. Or with their grievances. Or any number of things. When we knew he was leaving, everyone’s asking themselves, “Who… In the old Post newsroom, there is basically a bank of offices on the north-facing wall…and that’s where all the top editors’ offices were. There were a lot of people who were asking, ‘Who, on the north wall, is going to be that person for us, now that Kevin is gone?’ That was really worrying. When Kevin offered me a job, I was like, ‘Great, I don’t have to deal with that.’”
Also, he was able to promise me a bunch of opportunities that I probably wouldn’t have had at the Post had I stayed… There’s a pipeline for people to move up, and do things… Looking around, what opportunities are there for me to advance in the newsroom, and in my career?… I didn’t really see a path. I felt like no one had really talked to me about those things. There just wasn’t a whole lot of nurturing of talent.
I think what was frustrating I would say, generally, the reporters who did get that sort of attention and consideration, tended to be white and male. It’s too bad. I really liked working there.
Like Traditional reporters, Interactive Race Beat reporters emphasized wanting to broaden newsroom representation for people of color. Demby said, “I always assumed that that would be part of what I was writing about.” McDonald said her journalism ambitions were born when she was in high school and noticed a lack of diversity in sports coverage. “Initially, I was very interested in being a color commentator, because I was really irritated that there were no women in the booth for Monday Night Football games,” she said. She described beginning to write more about racial issues when she noticed “holes” in Post coverage. She attributed the problem to the newspaper’s declining revenues and “several rounds of buyouts.” She said she sought to fill what was missing because nobody else seemed to notice the things she was seeing. Interactive Race Beat reporters, who work in newsrooms that are exclusively or almost exclusively staffed by people of color, talked about lack of newsroom diversity as a determining factor in their career paths.Part of the environment at Huffington Post was like… Black Voices and Latino Voices were literally next to each other in terms of the newsroom… We were basically the only brown people in the entire newsroom. We used to joke. We used to call ourselves the South Bronx, because we had to walk through this neighborhood of brown people to go to the otherwise completely monochromatic newsroom.
Mashable reporter Colin Daileda, the only participant who had never worked in a Traditional newsroom, said his curiosity and desire to cover voices with experiences different than his own led him to his job covering social justice issues. The stories he was covering, he said, “were certainly outside of my own straight, white male narratives… I was floored by how much I had to learn. If I felt that way, I felt sure that there were so many other people who were that way or had not even considered opinions outside their own.” Daileda highlighted using technology as a monitoring tool to see where to go and what was being said, but emphasized being in the streets and interacting with sources in person as essential to strong reporting.The thing about the internet was people read it. Internet publications are more interested in innovation and innovating the new platforms, and I want to be a reporter that communicates with and tells stories to the most people. I went to the innovative outlets, and it’s been very successful for me. That’s how I got to BuzzFeed.… I want to go where the readers are.
…One thing that was disappointing about working at older, legacy publications was that they didn’t seem to care very much about what it is readers wanted… They didn’t know how to really find them, and they were scared to find them where they wanted to be found.
You want to write the stories that they want to read… People want to see stories where they can find them easily, and places like BuzzFeed were very good with integrating with social media really early on… BuzzFeed was always right there making sure that my work was featured where readers were trying to find it.
In sum, Traditional reporters emphasized a desire to show race as lived experience and racial oppression as manifest in everyday life, Interactive Race Beat reporters highlighted career trajectories influenced by a lack of newsroom diversity and a desire to increase representation for people of color, and Journalism 3.0 reporters emphasized the importance of jobs in which they leveraged digital technology to listen to and reach audiences in new ways. It’s also noteworthy to talk about what reporters did not say. Traditional reporters did not talk about wanting to be close to people in power or to cover elites; rather they talked about giving a voice to the oppressed. Interactive Race Beat reporters’ responses mapped on to the Discursive paradigm to a degree, by seeking to add voices to the conversation. Journalism 3.0 reporters’ responses mapped on to Constructionist values in their mission to give voice to the oppressed.
Influence of Media Routines
Studies of US newsrooms have centered on reporters in the Traditional paradigm. They have shown that news routines share similarities across individuals and news organizations.5 News routines are important because, at their essence, they influence news content via norms of story selection.6 Some reporters are adjusting their routines in relation to technology, but in ways that foreground publishing immediacy rather than newsgathering.7 The routines of reporters working in the emerging paradigms haven’t yet been subject to longitudinal examination.
Routines of reporters who cover racial issues have also not been the subject of significant examination. This chapter seeks to help fill that gap by showing how reporters in each paradigm decide what to cover, the steps they take to report on stories, whether and how they use social media as a tool, and how much they monitor other news organizations’ work.
These comments speak to racial coverage that is contextualized rather than event-driven, that is part of a larger theme rather than being an “outrage of the day,” as Lowery put it. Lowery emphasized how context is essential to showing links between a local story and a national issue. Although he did not use the term, he spoke about systemic awareness as a news value. “How do I think bigger and broader? I think that’s where my accountability angles come in. That’s where the policy angles come in,” Lowery said. “Again, covering this thing not as necessarily some isolated incident, but rather as something that is larger. What context can I add?” Lowery included himself in his critique that most Traditional coverage lacks context because it’s driven by a “scoop” mentality that centers on details rather than larger context. He attributed this to media routines:Another category [of newsworthiness], I would say, would just be accountability, right? Oftentimes when it comes to the history of race in this country, the government has been very complicit in a lot of the problems, a lot of shortcomings, a lot of the reasons we’ve had racial tensions. Any stories where it shows that government agencies, public agencies, have not been accountable in what they’ve been doing…
Speaking in terms of covering race, we’re the courts’, states’, the government’s watchdog in a way. Any stories where you have a chance to hold public entities accountable to the people they’re supposed to serve, those are also ones that I think really stick out to me.
Lowery said Traditional routines get in the way of systemic coverage because they emphasize specific details and competing with other journalists rather than taking a deep dive into the environment in which events are unfolding.[W]hether it be a police shooting or whether it be a terrorist attack, one of the big things people try to get really—it’s a scoop when you’re the first person who has the name of the shooter or the person who’s been killed, right? That is a very journalism-y scoop in that it’s a means of finding additional information. It doesn’t actually tell you anything, right? Knowing the name of the person tells you zero things that help you understand the situation…
I think we get caught in the rat race sometimes where people are only looking at what their colleagues across the media are doing, and they’re not thinking about, what’s the next angle? What’s the next thing I need? We fall into this pack mentality…
I think that very often, we just get caught. We get stuck in this very menial, small update coverage that doesn’t actually illuminate anything for our readers. I think that—for example, I think about this in the context of Ferguson all the time. How many stories did we read and write about a new witness who now says maybe his hands were kind of up or—that actually is in no way illuminating.
…It didn’t actually help me understand this place or this interaction or any of it, right? That we’re trying to litigate the hyper-specifics of an interaction when, in reality, we’re never going to be capable of knowing what actually happened. We were not there. There’s no video of it, right? Versus reporting that focuses on the larger realities.
Some of the best reporting that happened was reporting that focused on the kangaroo courts in greater St. Louis, that focused on the way tickets and warrants were being issued. That was the journalism that actually made a difference and helped us understand that world, not 500 re-creations of whether or not Michael Brown’s hands were up…
The Times’s Eligon, whose coverage of kangaroo courts Lowery praised, emphasized giving voice to the marginalized as a value driving his decisions about what to cover. Eligon said a story will “jump out” at him if it’s primarily about something experienced by “those in society who don’t necessarily have a voice, who don’t get to work at The New York Times , who don’t even get opportunities that I’ve been so blessed to have.” Eligon said he seeks to explore sources’ life experiences. “Any story that, to me, tells a perspective of a marginalized community—which oftentimes in America are communities of color—those are the stories that really jump out at me,” he said. Eligon also said he decides what to cover based on whether the story contextualizes larger systemic problems.
When covering a news story with national-level implications, which every reporter interviewed does, reporters in the Traditional paradigm were the only ones to mention the value of local news coverage. That includes coverage produced by the Black Press. Part of that value for the Post’s Krissah Thompson crossed into her individual-level influence because one of her first jobs in journalism was at the Houston Defender, a weekly, African American-oriented newspaper, or “targeted media” outlet, in her Texas hometown. “When there is some racial incident…and you’re swooping in from out of town, I often find that people who work for targeted media, especially the newspapers, because they know the community, are great people to talk to,” she said. Lowery put similar value on local journalists as helpful sources for avoiding the parachute journalism often seen when the national news media descend on an unfamiliar location. Traditional reporters valued other journalists as informants with their fingers on the pulses of the communities they serve. That pushes against the Traditional norm of elites as the key sources and looks more like the popular inclusion of the Discursive paradigm of Interactive Race Beat coverage.
Interactive Race Beat reporters described their routines for identifying stories as seeking complexity, meaning narratives that did not have easy answers or showed how two seemingly opposing values could be held at the same time. They described their news sense as strongly influenced by a need to provide context they saw as missing from Traditional coverage. They described story-selection routines as centered on coverage that was not simple, obvious, predictable, or pointed to a clear goal or outcome. Interactive Race Beat journalists described their news values and routines as different from those of the Traditional newsrooms in which they had worked. Interactive Race Beat reporters were also the only ones to describe intersectionality as important to the way they approach coverage. This mirrors Chap. 3’s finding that the only stories that included intersectional concepts appeared in Interactive Race Beat coverage.
Dialogue is a Discursive paradigm value.I think one of the things we’ve been trying to do is really pointedly finding people who live at the nexus of these ideas we are talking about…
For us on Code Switch, one of the things that we always say is that we want this story to be surprising to the people who belong to the group that we’re talking about… A lot of times we want to get to a place where you actually—you understand that these things are really complicated and don’t have any answers.
If the story does not have an answer, then that’s a good thing for us. The story does not have a pat answer. That’s always the thing that makes it Code Switch-y.… If we come out at the end of it, of our pitch meetings, confused, then that’s a really good sign. At the end of the reporting, we come out of it without an answer, that’s a really good sign…
I think the goal is to move people to someplace else. I think that’s the big thing… If you end up in an obvious place, then it’s pointless. Right? Because you could have come away with this presumption before you read the story. Everyone who comes to the story should have something—some presumption of theirs challenged in some way, which doesn’t obviate starting dialogue. A lot of times starting dialogue does that very thing.
The Undefeated’s McDonald said her emphasis in determining what to cover comes from seeing what is not being covered in Traditional news. She said she relies heavily on what she picks up rather than on what has become a popular narrative. She used an anecdote from her coverage of the opening of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, as an example. McDonald said she knew her former colleagues at the Post would be covering the overarching stories, so she sought to cover smaller angles more deeply.
McDonald saw the stitching as jarring because someone invested the time to handcraft an artifact of hate. She saw reflected in that stitching both a deep commitment and a surreal normalcy of the everyday task of stitching. She felt it contributed to a larger story.Seeing the stitching, and just the way it was constructed. Really kind of had an effect on me. Just in the fact that there were these seams around the holes of the eyes. It’s like, “Oh, someone really put some amount of work into this.”
Then that became, I think, for me, there was some symbolism there. In terms of the energy, and purpose behind it. Behind the racist attitudes, that brought it to bear. I was just curious. I was like, “I want to talk to someone about this.”
Because they’re so specific. Particularly, the red one. You start staring at it up close. It really looks like something you would see on a Papal bishop. At least, it seems like it’s drawing from that. Since that just gripped me, and it was one of the things that I could remember out of this sea of artifacts that I’d seen.
It was one that wasn’t one of the giant ones that you couldn’t miss, that everyone was talking about. Like the guard tower for Angola Prison. Or one of these larger things. I was like, “Okay, I can definitely—I can hone in on that.”
[T]here’s still an inclination [in Traditional journalism] to flatten.… As long as newsrooms and reporters and editors are, like, “Okay. Now we’re going to talk about things like that Latino vote.” Right? There’s just this impulse towards talking about groups as monoliths.
Interactive Race Beat journalists were the only reporters to talk about conceptualizing racial issues more broadly than black-white and across intersections of gender and class.
Although Interactive Race Beat journalists emphasized exploring new angles that were ignored in Traditional coverage, they did not see their mission as providing a counternarrative. McDonald said she was aware of and careful not to “answer to mainstream media” by producing stories featuring blind praise or overly laudatory coverage of things done by African Americans. “I think you can basically overcorrect in the other direction. Be hagiographic. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think anybody at The Undefeated wants to do that. That’s something that’s always in the back of my mind,” she said. McDonald said she focuses on nuance and on being critical, even when it might not be popular—such as a critique of Nate Parker, the African American director of the 2016 Birth of a Nation. McDonald didn’t write about Parker as a “savior,” which is how she said Parker was described in other coverage. Her reporting focused on Parker’s acquittal in a rape trial in which the survivor would not testify. McDonald’s coverage highlighted how Parker had been acquitted of a rape charge and critiqued his roles for African American women in the film as thin and undeveloped. In other words, while many critics were hailing the film as a success for an African American director, McDonald focused on the ways in which it was problematic for women of color.
Demby echoed the value of coverage that is “messy” and complicated rather than valorizing. Demby pointed to coverage in which there is not a clear right and wrong, coverage in which both sides of a racial debate might either be somewhat both at fault or both have sensible reasons for their positions as the coverage that best helps the audience understand racial issues. He used an example of a story produced by his Code Switch colleague Kat Chow. Chow’s story explored the controversy surrounding a Seattle band called The Slant trying to trademark its name. The band’s members are Asian American and chose their name as a way to speak back against stereotypes. The name itself is a slur, which has caused controversy not only among Asian Americans following the issue but also with the trademark office whose regulations stipulate that a racial slur can’t be trademarked. Demby cited that example of one that is “messy” because both sides are making strong arguments: one against profiting from a slur and one in favor of reclaiming a slur and taking away its power.
McMorris-Santoro also cited his practice of vetting his story ideas with people of color in the BuzzFeed newsroom, which he described as placing “a very high priority on having a diverse newsroom.” “I’m a white, straight, male reporter, and there are innumerous times you can count that people like me have stepped in it…when it comes to writing about issues about people that don’t look like us or aren’t like us,” he said. But because BuzzFeed had a diverse newsroom, he said, “It was very easy for me to go into story meetings and pitch sessions and talk about things that I’ve heard and get back feedback that made it easier to go and do reporting correctly” by incorporating their feedback.Bernie just existing, which very much excited young white college students, did not exactly have the same effect on all young black people, for example. That’s a big deal for Democratic politics, because the black vote is a huge part of the Democratic base. If you want to have a movement inside Democratic politics, you have to have minority support. It has to be a diverse movement in order for it to be successful. That ended up being a story that played itself out, I think, over the rest of the campaign.
Reporters in the Journalism 3.0 paradigm also mentioned routines in the context of “people on the street” who are using technology to tell their own narratives. For example, in covering protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, after Officer Michael Slager, who is white, fatally shot a fleeing Walter Scott, who was African American. Mashable reporter Colin Daileda said he noticed a large number of protesters were using the Facebook Live app to stream their experiences from the protests. He decided to write a story about it. “They were providing their own narratives for what was happening, because for many reasons that they talked to me about, people weren’t portraying them on the news correctly,” he said. “Some of them were just worried that if something happened, they at least could—there was a video evidence of it.” In covering this, Daileda was writing about two things: accusations of misrepresentation by Traditional coverage and how people at the grassroots level were addressing it. His story showed how protesters were using technology to create a counternarrative and to protect themselves.I think that a lot of times if they want to know what happened, they’re going to open The New York Times , or The Washington Post . Or they’re going to turn on MSNBC or CNN—that’s the legacy media today. I don’t think people are averting their eyes from that stuff. I think they’re still going to it.
I think what we try to do is give some level of nuance, and tell a story that maybe other news outlets won’t cover. I think what we try to understand and factor into all of our coverage is that the world is changing. It’s changing really fast. Adapting to that part of it means that we approach news in a different way.
On the campaign trail, that might not be Obama talking about how getting the Iran nuclear deal done is the reason why you should vote for Hillary Clinton. It might be the Planned Parenthood protests out on the street, at the Obama speech, that got testy, and here’s what it means for Planned Parenthood. Here’s what it means for pro-life advocates… I think it’s so much more of a tangible way to approach covering politics. It makes it real for people in their lives.
… I don’t approach it in terms of this idea that I don’t want to cover the Obama speech, I think it’s in sourcing, and it’s in what we deem to be important to people… I haven’t really thought about this a whole lot in the past, but I think a lot of it just really has to do with paying attention to everybody. Everyone’s important. The person that introduces Hillary Clinton, who is some big-time activist or something, is just as important as the person out on the street who’s holding a sign with tape shut over their mouth. Right? What does that person have to say? Why are they on this street?
In sum, Traditional reporters emphasized accountability, which they identified as showing systemic racism and how it manifests. They acknowledged their coverage sometimes relies on elite sources and their routines are sometimes driven by finding small details rather than investigating larger context, although they regret it when that happens. Traditional reporters expressed a mix of Traditional values and Constructionist values. Interactive Race Beat reporters described how they look for stories that don’t have easy answers or are not being told elsewhere. They said they valued an intersectional approach and cautioned against coverage with a mission of counternarrative. This was consistent with Discursive paradigm values. Journalism 3.0 reporters said they decide what is news and begin covering it based on the larger conversations they are observing via social media and rely on “people on the street” to help shape the narrative. This is consistent with Constructionist values.
Thompson said social media, especially Twitter, was valuable in helping her find sources. “I feel like so many more voices have surfaced through social media, especially on Twitter, who often have insightful, critical, or thoughtful things to say about this racial moment… You come across thinkers that maybe you would not have otherwise known,” she said.It is a very broad beat. I think the one thing, just browsing the web, searching social media kind of thing, just searching the Facebook feed, Twitter, and all that stuff, see what articles people are posting about race and just reading as much as you can, consuming as much as you can, you can get a sense of what’s going on there. Especially with covering race, it’s about being part of a national conversation, right? It’s about, in some ways, curating that conversation, is the way I look at my job as someone covering race. You’ve got to get your pulse on what the conversation is and in some way contribute to it. I think that’s how I get the general sense of what’s out there.
Interactive Race Beat journalists also identified Twitter specifically as a way to give a larger presence to those whose voices are not often heard and as a tool for journalists to monitor larger conversations in real time. In the words of Code Switch’s Demby, Twitter is “way browner than the population more broadly… It’s just been essential to us—to get a pulse of where people are or to get a sense of where people are and what they’re thinking about.” Demby’s sense of Twitter mirrors the demographic data outlined in Chap. 2.
Thus, Traditional journalists viewed Twitter as a way to monitor conversations, Interactive Race Beat journalists viewed it as a way to monitor and draw upon conversation happening among people of color, and Journalism 3.0 reporters viewed social media, in particular Twitter, as less of a voice of the people and more as a tool for looking at what other journalists were doing.When I’m actually in a location, I don’t worry as much. I do check, but I don’t worry as much that I will just rehash something, because I’m talking to different people than they are. I’m just not as engrossed in what’s happening on Twitter at that moment. I’m just talking to whoever I’m talking to. It’s easier to find different stories, because this is what actual journalism is.
Traditional journalists said they used leveraged social media technology to help meet Constructionist ideals of privileging the voices of the oppressed, Interactive Race Beat reporters expressed those same Constructionist values, and Journalism 3.0 reporters, who work in the Constructionist paradigm, expressed concern that technology might be more elite than democratic, so talking to people “on the ground” was the most important. This foregrounding of values on a technological affordance shows how the same tool can be leveraged with different goals in mind.
All three reporters in the Traditional paradigm gave similar answers about how much they monitored other news organizations’ coverage—which is to say they read it, but only Traditional journalists viewed other Traditional journalists as competition. Traditional reporters noted friendships with and praise for the coverage of the work of reporters in the other two paradigms. None of them viewed cross-paradigm work as competition. All of them discussed Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 coverage as work they see in their social media feeds. All of them discussed the new paradigms as positive contributions and conceptualized them as different than the type of work they were doing. For example, the Times’s Eligon said Code Switch coverage “is about having conversations. I think that that’s what should really drive racial coverage, is really about better understanding, and you only do that through the conversation about it. I think they’ve done a great job of that.”
Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 reporters gave similar responses. They read the coverage and knew journalists in other paradigms as friends. They monitored coverage to make sure they weren’t repeating what had already been said or to look for a small angle to dig into deeper coverage. One difference between Interactive Race Beat reporters and Journalism 3.0 reporters was the understanding of where those “uncovered” angles could be found. For Interactive Race Beat reporters, those angles were found largely in their own expertise and in conversations with other journalists. For Journalism 3.0 reporters, they were found among the people on the street.
In summary, reporters in the Traditional paradigm discussed their media routines as driven by a desire to avoid event-driven coverage and instead provide context that connected discrete events to larger issues and systems of power. Their interpretation of holding power accountable in the context of racial coverage meant showing how individual events connect to themes and how themes connect to institutions and structures that reproduce racial oppression. Additionally, Eligon’s sense of news as something that gives voice to the voiceless speaks to a Constructionist value, rather than a Traditional approach to valuing elite sourcing. This mirrors that shift in awareness of structural racism found by the textual analysis in Chap. 3, where Traditional coverage was seen as shifting toward a Constructionist paradigm that looked more like Journalism 3.0.
Interactive Race Beat reporters also expressed a desire to privilege context in their coverage and expanded that to mean racial coverage that took an intersectional approach. They expressed a desire to avoid characterizing race and ethnicity in monolithic ways (i.e., “the Latino vote”). Interactive Race Beat reporters said they seek to produce coverage that captures the nuance of racial identity and gets beyond a black-white binary. They said they gravitate toward narratives that are complicated and “messy.” This mirrors the values of the Discursive paradigm.
Journalism 3.0 reporters emphasized grassroots approaches to finding and reporting stories. Their answers were firmly within the values of the Constructionist paradigm, even so far as suggesting that the conversations on social media were perhaps too elite and that they should be vetted with “people on the street.” That contrasted with the views and habits of Traditional and Interactive Race Beat journalists who felt social media provided a “voice to the voiceless” and described its democratizing effects.
The way the journalists talked about the importance of work in all three paradigms and the lack of a sense of competition were noteworthy. Rather than using social media to monitor other reporters, they used it to consume coverage from other paradigms. The field of journalism has long been bent on “scoops” and competition, but these journalists who cover racial issues across all three paradigms described this part of their routines in a collegial way, noting how they admired the types of coverage produced in other paradigms and showing how each has an important place in the media ecology. Journalists across paradigms expressed an attitude of learning from one another rather than trying to “beat” one another to a story. This may have something to do with the fact that all of the reporters interviewed knew at least most of the other participants from social circles, professional encounters, or from reading their work. Some of them had previously worked together. It may also be influenced by the fact that the number of reporters who cover racial issues at the national level is relatively small.
Finally, it’s important to note what was absent from reporters’ answers about how they find things to cover: editor influence. Traditional reporters have been observed to be keenly aware of and responsive to their editors’ ideals, but reporters who cover racial issues did not mention editor influence in deciding what to cover (or not to cover). One of the primary tenets of new institutionalism is that it drives a top-down phenomenon, meaning that reporters who want to succeed try to impress their editors, or at least mirror what they perceive their editors’ values to be. Yet, these reporters spoke with a sense of autonomy in deciding what to cover and how to cover it. For example, news organizations dispatched reporters to cover Ferguson, but none of the reporters I interviewed mentioned editors telling them what to cover or how to cover it.
Reporters in this study emphasized using their own news sense and reporting to determine what stories were worth telling and described their daily routines with a high degree of independence. Reporters frequently mentioned wanting to emulate work done by their peers, but did not mention any mandates from their editors. This feeling of a sense of independence from editor mandates has not been observed in previous studies.
Influences at the Level of Media Organization
The influence level of media organizations is different than the level of routines because it describes the larger occupational context, which includes newsroom policies and newsroom structure. How newsroom resources are allocated is one way an organization sets its coverage priorities. Newsrooms use a beat system in which reporters are assigned to cover topic areas. Sometimes these are geographic beats such as a town or region, sometimes they are organizations such as a state legislature or a city council, and sometimes they are issues-based, such as coverage of education or the environment. Beats show what is important to the audience in that area. For example, The Seattle Times has a reporter whose beat is dedicated to covering Microsoft and another to Boeing because those hometown corporations are important to the local economy and employ thousands of residents in that region. The Los Angeles Times has reporters dedicated to coverage of transportation issues because of the notorious traffic in that region.
Beats, by their nature, are designed to be silos, which can make covering something as overarching as race a complicated problem. For example, the sports reporter, not the education reporter, covers high school football games, even though the events take place at schools. As The Undefeated’s McDonald recalled from her days in a Traditional newsroom, reporters often are territorial and do not appreciate someone from another beat stepping on their turf. In the context of racial issues, lines are less clear. Code Switch’s Demby talked about a story he was working on about housing inequality. It included a racial component because of the historical policies that have prevented people of color from securing mortgages; it included business elements and politics because laws govern loan policies (i.e., first-time homeowner tax breaks); and it also touched on education because schools are funded by property taxes. So, who in the newsroom has responsibility for covering that story? At the level of influence of media organizations, this study sought to learn how journalists working across three paradigms think newsrooms should be structured to cover racial issues.
Reporters’ responses and self-reflection, their comparing of what was ideal to what was practical, the way several participants made arguments both for and against, showed how this question is still being deliberated in newsrooms today. Previous debates about whether news organizations should have a dedicated “race beat” have included the positions of no, because it segregates news; no, because it often pigeonholes reporters who are people of color; no, because race should be part of every story; and yes, because if there is no race beat, issues of race won’t be prioritized.8 All of these views were also articulated by the reporters interviewed in this study. The reporters interviewed for this book also contributed new points of view, including yes, because race illuminates how our country works; yes, because covering race requires a specific expertise; and no, because “racial issues” is too narrow a beat definition.
The Post’s Lowery expressed similar sentiments, but added that having a reporter with specific expertise on racial issues provides an important “resource” to the entire newsroom.In an ideal world, I would actually advocate that you don’t have a race beat and that it’s more so that journalists are trained to cover race across the paper on their beat. I think that’s the better model because I think that—the fact is, I can’t be an expert on Wall Street. I’m not smart enough. I don’t have the wherewithal. That’s not my beat. I’m not talking to people over there, but I bet you there are darn well some stories to do with race on Wall Street. There must be. It’s going to be harder for me to find those being a race reporter.
…I wouldn’t discourage the race coverage, but the problem when you have race beats is that I think it fosters laziness among other people who think, “Okay, we have our people covering race, so we just don’t cover it.” I think everyone should be covering race. I think that’s a better model. I don’t think it’s a bad model to have people covering race. We have a whole team now doing it. It’s not bad, but I think it would be better if there was sincere and genuine efforts to train people throughout the paper.
Both of these comments suggest that a reporter with experience covering racial issues is valuable, but also a concern that if there is a reporter designated to cover racial issues, other reporters won’t then cover racial issues because they will assume it’s the job of the “race beat” reporter. Traditional reporters reflected an understanding that racial issues cross beats such as education, business, and the environment. Lowery was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team that created the national database to track police shootings referenced in Chap. 1. This project was noted by every other participant in the study as an example of valuable journalism. Lowery described his beat as “accountability reporting as it relates to law enforcement,” adding, “I think about it not necessarily through a racial lens, but I think of it through a law enforcement lens… Frankly, every story has a racial component no matter what the beat is.” Lowery said he views his beat as covering law enforcement and recognizes that race will be a part of that story.I think it’s important in any newsroom to build thematic subject matter expertise, right? It should be someone’s job to read every new piece of research on how race manifests or how gender manifests or sexuality manifests. Someone in the room should be tracking this thing. I think it’s also something that everyone should be thinking about. How does it intersect with what I cover? I think it’s a combination of both. Again, I don’t like the idea of shipping that all off to one person… I think every reporter should be covering issues of race. It becomes a resource that services an entire newsroom. I think what should be the mindset is, how do we build specific levels of expertise in certain spaces, and then that person services everyone?
Demby , who was in charge of the Black Voices vertical for The Huffington Post, echoed McDonald and added his concern about such spaces marginalizing journalists of color.[I]deally, my vision of a newsroom that is doing this right—everyone is responsible for thinking about these things and how they affect their coverage, and folding it into their coverage… I think that’s the only way you can really achieve true inclusivity. Otherwise, you’re still sort of continuing with this model. Where the news is basically about straight, white people. Then everything else is, I don’t know, sideline fodder that gets printed in some special section that people can ignore. That’s insane, especially when you think about just the country as a whole… it’s just absurd.
… I think there were a lot of organizations who were like, “Okay, we’re going to have this thing that is specifically black. We’re going talk about black things.” Okay, there are a bunch of other groups that are also underrepresented. Are you also going to have a Latino vertical? An Asian vertical? A Native American vertical? An LGBT vertical? I think if we were actually doing this right…we would actually be covering things comprehensively. As it stands, that is not what is happening…it should just be, “If this is important enough to dedicate this thing to, then why wouldn’t we just cover it, period?”
Overall, both Demby and McDonald said race should be covered as part of larger issues across coverage, whether that be issues of the economy or arts and culture.I think there’s this thing that happens… You end up having all of your talent of color sequestered into these places, in which they never get to be part of the mainstream news… This is the eternal question. There are plenty of black reporters and Latino reporters who don’t want to write about black people and Latino people necessarily. They want to write about everything… They want to be brown people who talk about boring Senate judiciary hearings.
The idea that racial issues should be understood systemically and as multi-faceted was true across all paradigms of journalists interviewed; thus, all reflected a Constructionist value.I know that we all see it as really essential to understanding America. Understanding our country. I say “our country” because the story of race is like how we, essentially how we have to live together… I just think we definitely view it as central to the story of our country and how our country works… I think we’re empowered more to work in that context of understanding race as part of every story and not just something [Congressman and civil rights activist] John Lewis said.
Influences at the Level of Social Institutions
The level of social institutions is broad and has been conceptualized in several ways, including how news organizations are influenced by other institutions such as advocacy groups, how they are influenced by economic forces such as advertisers, and how news organizations influence one another. Because this work explored racial coverage across paradigms, questions in this category related to that final category. As Shoemaker and Reese noted, “The extent to which elite media transmit influence to other media is no longer as clear.”10 I asked reporters to look across US news coverage of racial issues and share traits of coverage they admired, traits they found problematic, and changes they had observed. The goal was to ascertain whether reporters in one paradigm were trying to emulate or distinguish themselves from those in another. The responses across paradigms were remarkably similar and pointed to a third option—reporters viewed a media ecology with room for everyone and that benefited from different types of coverage.
Eligon recalled a story he had written for the one-year anniversary of Ferguson in which he showed how segregation was still a problem for African American residents. He told the story of a family trying to use their public housing assistance money to get to a “better” neighborhood with better schools and less crime and showed the obstacles they faced. “I liked that one because I think it really helped to humanize them. This is a theme that I hear over and over when I’m in poor communities, especially poor communities of color, is none of them like relying on the government for money,” Eligon said. Eligon’s coverage also showed the ongoing problems in Ferguson after the national news media had left the scene, providing an example of coverage that showed systemic awareness.I thought he did a very good job very quickly of—I was jealous—of walking through the history of this place, of this neighborhood, Sherman Park, where the shooting had happened, as well as the kind of deep segregation issues and societal disparities in this place where the shooting had happened. I thought that was very smart. It made a lot of sense. I wish that we all had that foresight. I wish we all had that depth of understanding when we were covering Ferguson and Baltimore. We didn’t. Again, at this point, we’ve all covered these things a few dozen times. I one hundred percent wish I could go back and re-cover some of those first few stories.
Demby and McDonald both used examples of data-driven coverage that told common narratives in new ways.One school’s all black. One school’s all white…it reached a lot of people who don’t think of these things a lot. I think that’s the thing. There are all these ways in which American life—race is implicated in American life. I think there are all these issues that we tend to see as racial issues. There are all these issues that are actual racial issues that are camouflaged as something else. I thought that episode was a really good example of how these things work in people’s actual lives.
Daileda said journalism that serves to “chip away” at unexamined values and beliefs is the hallmark of strong race coverage—and that he sees very little of it.We, as a country, like to pretend that we were founded as a nation that was based on equal rights, that was freedom for all people. Then that’s never been the case… I think for our nation, I think it’s been so long lauded by ourselves, by the rest of the world, for x, y, and z reasons that we’ve never really had to look at ourselves in the mirror and understand—our racial heritage. Also, the relationship that our racial heritage has to how power works in this country.
I think in terms of how that relates to journalism. I think that journalism, because it’s dominated by the same power structure, that same racial power structure that exists in other parts of America, because that is so hard for a predominantly white media industry to even understand that there are stories that—vitally important stories that lie in police brutality, but also in how the housing industry relates to issues of race in this country, how housing relates to policing. Why this is all related. How the prison industry relates to slavery and why there are—why is it so obvious when you look at certain elements of that trajectory why that is a giant race issue? You can see it chip away.
Most of the reporters across all three paradigms described problematic coverage in ways that were the opposite of strong coverage, but with a few more nuances. Overall, reporters could more easily point to hallmarks of bad coverage than to examples of good coverage. In some cases, they said they found these examples in their own coverage.
Lowery also stressed the importance of context and tied problematic coverage to a lack of newsroom diversity.I wish I would have spent more time litigating the things people were telling me in the street…in my experience, I don’t think people took the complaints of the residents of Ferguson seriously until the DOJ report, and the DOJ report came a year later, right? We had people on day one saying, “Actually, these cops are crazy and the way they give us these tickets and these warrants, and this one time, they did this crazy thing to me.” We’re like, “Okay, guys.” We’re writing those stories down. We’re not even using most of these anecdotes because they sound too unrealistic. There’s no way.
In reality, a judicious reporter could have found and written about everything that was in the DOJ report beforehand. I think it says something about journalism and the media that we did not do that, right? That there were thousands of reporters covering Ferguson, and none of us found any of those stories that the DOJ found? That says something about, one, our desire not to believe the people in the streets, our inability to grasp the contextual realities, the fact that there were larger things at play here. There were a few stories…a handful of stories that really got at that context, but it was many fewer than there should have been, given how much coverage the story of Ferguson got.
Eligon said that even though he knew family members with lived experience of being ticketed unfairly by Ferguson police, that individual-level experience did not override his sense of Traditional journalism norms in his early coverage of Ferguson.I think it’s important—anytime you have 100 people, 1,000 people in the streets, they’re not there just because of the thing that happened yesterday. They’re always there because of a long history of things. I think coverage that is either ahistorical or misses historical context is—can be very problematic… All these places have very long histories, right? None of these towns were founded yesterday. Because of that not understanding and not placing into the context the reality of where this is and what has happened before, [it] robs the reader of a real understanding of what’s going on.
I think those are some of the major hallmarks… I think a lot of it can be a dismissiveness that comes from a lack of empathy because many—oftentimes, many people writing and editing these stories do not actually have the real experience that is relatable to the people who they’re covering.
Eligon ’s example shows the strong, but not insurmountable, pull of Traditional institutional norms on a reporter who has lived experience with racial oppression, who is conscious of structural racism, but whose reporting initially followed patterns of previous coverage. What is noteworthy is his self-reflexivity and the way he made changes in his later coverage to devote more attention to history and structural racism, as in the above example. Eligon said:It had happened in my family. My father-in-law had been unjustly thrown in jail for the night in one of those north county municipalities for not doing anything, basically. I missed the ball on that. I dismissed it as I knew it was wrong, but I never followed up on it. I think we’ve been too reactive sometimes in terms of covering race. I think there’s not been enough of a focus necessarily on accountability oftentimes when it comes to race.
Lowery discussed the problem of racism being treated as an open question, something he attributed to a lack of newsroom diversity.One of my frustrations in race coverage that I see, there’s a lot of good stories out there, great journalism, that talks about how structures over the years, over decades and generations, have led to the racial tensions and disparities that we’ve had, but I think there’s been not strong enough reporting saying how those things are perpetuating themselves and even playing out today still.
Again, I think what that does, it allows people to say, “Oh, there’s no more racism,” and that racism was a thing of the past, and like, “Oh, those were all past things,” whereas you don’t have to look too hard to find how those things really still work in society… I don’t think the media’s done a good enough job in terms of really digging deeply in terms of how those same issues of race still play out today.
Reporters in the Traditional paradigm were self-reflexive about cases in which their coverage fell into problematic traps. They described the ways they corrected this. They also pointed to a lack of newsroom diversity as a contributing factor in problematic coverage.We live in a country that is still majority white and a media that is even more majority white. What we know is that with that comes a certain level of privilege in which people don’t have to necessarily think about how their race may be limiting them or benefiting them, while for other people, that’s something that’s constant in terms of when something’s being considered or thought about.
I think that, very often, our coverage of race and how race interacts can go lacking, and it also, I think, can be very elementary. For example, after police shootings, we very often have this conversation about, what if the officer was black? In some cases, the officer was black. That was the case in Charlotte, right? Therefore, race must not have been an issue in this shooting because it was a black officer. That betrays a very basic misunderstanding of how race manifests in people’s interactions with the criminal justice system.
It’s actually a laughably dumb point to be made, but that is actually where most of our media coverage sits, in this idea that it could only—race could only be a factor if the officer was white and if the person was black. No. That’s actually not at all how this works. I think that we very often fall into these false premises of how race works, in part because, again, I think people calling the shots in a lot of these spaces haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about how race manifests in their life because they’ve had the privilege of not having to.
For McDonald, this belies deeper problems in the newsroom, where she said whiteness is not acknowledged as an identity and therefore not understood as a structuring force in what is covered and how issues are covered. This leads to a “color-blind” understanding of news that centers whiteness. But, she added, increasing newsroom diversity is only the first step. Training all journalists about how to examine issues and explore conceptions of race is essential, she said.I would say the thing that probably annoys me more than anything else, because it’s just so obvious and so simple, is that news organizations are really skittish and really loath to label something as racist. Even when it is nakedly racist. They’ll get around it in a couple of ways.
One, if they have to acknowledge that it has—if they can’t say “racist,” but they can’t get around acknowledging that it has something to do with race, then they will say that it is “racial.” Or “racially charged.” Racial and racially charged do not mean the same thing as racist.
Or, less frequently, but this also happens, if they won’t say it’s racist themselves, they’ll rely on some other figure. It’ll be like, “This act that such-and-such described as racist,” or, “some have described as racist.” As if this isn’t something that you can call out on your own, at least, in the most egregious situation. If somebody’s painting swastikas on a building, I think you can pretty much call that racist.
McDonald emphasized that making newsrooms more diverse is not enough. Being a person of color doesn’t make one an expert. Hiring reporters of color doesn’t mean those journalists want to cover racial issues.I think for the mainstream news organizations as a whole, I think they have to do two things. One is they can’t continue with having these newsrooms that are so enormously homogenous. Because they just don’t reflect the communities that they’re covering. That should be a huge credibility issue and crisis, that should really be bothering people.
The other thing that I think is really important is that this is not an easy fix. Covering race, I think, is just like covering anything else. In that you have to work at it. I think a lot of these organizations sort of mistakenly feel like, “Okay, we can just hire these people, and then they’ll just be themselves. Somehow it’ll just eke out into the coverage.” Then, basically, you end up hiring people of color, with the expectation that they will be the ones who will do all the reporting and writing and heavy lifting about race.
Just like if you were going to send me to cover the war in Afghanistan, then I have to read a bunch of stuff. I don’t just become knowledgeable about that. About Afghani culture, and about military culture, and all, everything that informs what is going on in the war in Afghanistan. If you’re going to cover race, it doesn’t matter who you are. You still have to do the work. You still have to talk to experts and report and read things. Have a level of curiosity. That’s what’s going to make it good. That’s just a standard expectation for a reporter, no matter what they’re covering. Because that’s what good reporting is.
I think there’s this assumption that people of color have this innate knowledge that makes them better at covering race. I think there is a value to personal experience, but I think too often what happens is that that becomes a way for editors to say, “Okay, so we have these people to deal with the thing, and we don’t have to think about it anymore.” As opposed to, “No, this is something that is a part of and informs just about every facet of American life. We all need to be knowledgeable about it. It is part of all our beings.”
Journalism 3.0 reporters expressed concern for coverage that was monolithic and process oriented and lacked context. Mashable’s Daileda gave the example of police shootings, after which “there’s always a cacophony of stories that basically say that people are angry. This is why they’re angry. Here’s the trial…or whether this person will be tried... Officer isn’t tried. Okay. Now we move on.” McMorris-Santoro, formerly of BuzzFeed, said the most common complaint he has heard from sources has involved coverage that presumes to portray the thoughts or feelings of an entire racial group in a monolithic way. McMorris-Santoro gave the example of coverage in which a series of tweets from Black Twitter are curated and then presented as “This is what black people think.” He said, “If I was on the reverse end of that, if I was on the receiving end of that kind of coverage and it was about people that looked like me and sounded like me, I would be pretty upset.”
Reporters across paradigms agreed on the hallmarks of good and problematic coverage of racial issues. All of them implicated a lack of newsroom diversity as to blame for poor coverage, with McDonald adding that increasing diversity was just the first step and that training all reporters how to cover racial issues was imperative.
In looking at coverage of racial issues over time, all of the journalists interviewed said they saw significant changes in news coverage of racial issues over the past decade, particularly since 2011 (the year of Obama’s second presidential campaign). Although they had different ideas about why that happened, overall, they said technology played a role in improving the coverage. They also said the election of President Barack Obama initiated more self-examination of their organizations, and the later coverage of the death of Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson was one place where those changes were most clearly seen.
The Times’s Eligon echoed Lowery, saying he has seen a pronounced and fundamental shift in journalism as a field.I think there’s just more of a focus in general [on racial issues]. Part of that’s been because we’ve had a black president that there’s been a broad increased focus on issues of race generally… I also think that because of social media, there’s a means for black and brown people who otherwise might not have been heard by media organizations to fight back against characterizations or coverage that they find problematic. Because of that, we are now hearing more frequently from those readers. I think that’s a good thing. I think that democratizes news in a way. It allows you to say, “Hey, this representation is unfair or is wrong or is inaccurate.”
Previously, if you didn’t live in the greater Washington area, you might not see what The Washington Post had to say about the shooting in your neighborhood or the issue in your neighborhood. Now you can provide that direct feedback. I think that that’s a good thing. I think that that pressure has really helped marginalized groups of people because through social media, they’ve got a voice and a power that they might not have had with the mainstream media beforehand. Forever, black and brown communities have always complained about media coverage because media coverage has always been unfair to them.
I think that we now have a different ability, “we” being black and brown communities, now have a different ability to pressure and to influence the way that they are covered by the media. We the media now have a different, I think, obligation to hear those voices.
Journalism has moved far from the “post-racial” question posed prior to and just after the election of Obama, and not because race relations have changed, but because that never should have been a question in the first place, Lowery said. He added that the post-racial question was allowed to proliferate because of a lack of newsroom diversity.There is more of a critical eye toward race issues… I think a lot of that stems out of Ferguson… Whereas before, like I said—and I do think there’s still a lot of dancing around the edges, but I do think there’s a lot more explicit, like, “We will call racism ‘racism,’” and not just dance around it and use euphemisms and write about race when we’re not writing about race.
…I think technology, social media, and things like that have allowed us to really see more upfront what’s going on in terms of some of the injustices… I think that has also…given more people a voice. As journalists, we are one-point limited, really interviewing the people we could find or see or touch or hear, whatnot. Now anyone can have a voice and be sitting there. They all see something goes viral and you see it, and then some person who no one ever knew, was an anonymous person, but now they’ve come to the fore because of something that has happened to them or something they witnessed. I think you have more people.
I think the initial question was idiotic, had been framed by white people. Come on. That’s easy to say now, right? I think I also, even as a 17-year-old in…2007…I would have been like, what are you talking about? That’s idiotic. No. We were never going to be in a post-racial world. That wasn’t a thing that was going to happen. Our entire world, our entire society is premised on race. We built our entire economy off of racial distinctions, right? Our world cannot exist without race. It’s baked into the fundamental core of what it is to be in America and to be American, right?
I think the shift comes—one, I think you have actual earnest white people who were very confused. We elected Barack Obama. What’s all this strife going on? They actually had no idea what was going on because they didn’t understand how race worked. I think is probably part of it.
Two, I think…it’s not that everyone thought that all of this was gone, but I do think that a large part of the center-left white people, and that is, in fact, the same set of people who the leaders of the media are drawn from, did believe that perhaps this meant something good about their nation, right? This meant that we have overcome those dark days of the past and that all of these things are gone.
Again, the reality is that that just was never going to be true and was never true, that the president—having a black president only sussed out with precise clarity all of the ways in which we have in no way achieved some type of racial understanding, and rather that we still have deep divisions.
Lowery singled out Black Lives Matter movement coverage by BuzzFeed’s Darren Sands as different from early Traditional coverage in that Sands’s coverage legitimated the movement as a political force.We, as much as every other institution, the government, the business community, we like order… We like covering people who have spokespeople and can tell us what they need to say and who have direct lines of bureaucratic chains of command, right?…
These disorderly people in the streets yelling things, and who are we supposed to call? The media does not like that. We are deeply skeptical. Now it’s intersecting with other organizations and institutions that we know well. A presidential primary, a presidential campaign, those types of things. It becomes a means for us to do the same type of process coverage we do of everything else.
Which is how you end up having political reporters who for three years over drinks are essentially talking trash about the DeRay Mckessons of the world who are then trying to cozy up to them so they can get the scoop about whether or not DeRay McKesson is going to endorse Hillary Clinton, right? All of a sudden, it becomes fashionable to know these people when, for years, the coverage not only was dismissive of many of these people and of their movement, but rather—but not only was it dismissive, but also often actively worked to undermine them.
In sum, Traditional reporters were critical of journalism as an institution, showing nuance in regard to resistance and change. Lowery explained that the Black Lives Matter movement became legitimized in the eyes of journalists only after it began interacting with institutions and processes with which journalists were familiar. Both Lowery and Eligon noted technology as an influence on journalists and a force able to enact change outside the boundaries of journalism.
The Undefeated’s McDonald agreed, saying she noticed a change around 2010 when “news organizations started to realize that it looked really bad to have a black family in the White House, and not really be covering race very well.” Demby said the changes in coverage have been partially attributable to new reporters bringing new ideas to news organizations. “Newsrooms are a function of the demographics. I do think that a lot of young Americans who come out of—who graduate from college have a very different understanding of racial issues,” he said. He also sees the changes as influenced by social media.I think Obama’s presidency—President Obama’s tenure in the White House changed a lot of the way race got discussed. I think broadly one of the…more frustrating inclinations of American journalism around race is always to frame issues of race in terms of conflict. Not just conflict—because obviously, race is about conflict in a lot of ways. Not conflict over political resources and stuff like that. Right? Which is important. Right? Not conflict over housing segregation and school segregation. These things that live where people actually live literally. Just testy encounters. Just there’s often so much emphasis on testy encounters.
Thus, Interactive Race Beat reporters attributed the change to having an African American president, to younger reporters bringing new ideas about race and coverage of race into the newsroom, and to newsrooms finally valuing a type of expertise that has always been there.By the time I got to NPR, we were having—I mean, when I say “we,” I mean the collective America—we were having a very different conversation about race and violence, race and policing, race and—and a lot of that, a lot of the DNA of the way those stories got told came out of the way people covered Trayvon Martin, right? That was a social media story for a long time before it became a mainstream national news story.
…To me, it seems like there’s less of that than there was maybe four, five years ago, when people could only think about race and issues of race in the context of outrage… I think there is much more understanding of how much more subtle these things are, that things that are often more complicated and have real consequences for people are things that are not even bright-lined as things being about race, even if they have racial consequences.
Reporters in the Journalism 3.0 paradigm noticed changes in the way coverage provided more context and looked deeper than confrontations and anger. Mashable’s Daileda pointed to Ferguson as the turning point at which he noticed his own coverage going deeper. He described writing a story about North Charleston, where unarmed African American Walter Scott was shot in the back by white officer Michael Slager, who was later charged with murder. Rather than covering only the reaction of the community, Daileda wrote about why it was important for a predominantly African American community served by a predominantly white police force to have a community board with subpoena power. “It was easy, I think, initially for me to just be writing those stories that I just panned a bit a second ago, where you got a protest and you write about why people are angry,” he said. “They give you answers that are fine, but they’re just the answers that you’re going to expect from interviewing protesters and asking them basic questions.” BuzzFeed’s Darren Sands, the youngest of the interviewees, said he wasn’t sure about changes because his generation of reporters had only ever worked in an environment in which the president was African American.
Reporters were united in saying they have noticed changes in how journalists cover issues of race. They organically, without prompting or suggestion, said they began to notice this shift after Ferguson. While most reporters interviewed mentioned technology as contributing to the change, several of them noted that having the nation’s first black president compelled news organizations to think differently about coverage of race and spurred them to provide more resources. They also said newsrooms generally became more aware of race being implicated in political stories.
Influence at the Level of Social Systems: Objectivity
In examining influences at the level of social systems, the work focused on one of Traditional journalism’s most closely held norms—and the one most closely associated with reproducing problematic coverage—objectivity. Shoemaker and Reese12 identified objectivity as a “key feature” of Traditional journalism essential to understanding the level of social system. In writing about Traditional journalists, they asserted, “Even if the world has changed, media workers act as though it hasn’t, and the underlying principle of reporter detachment remains firmly entrenched.”13 Therefore, in my interview questions I sought to explore reporters’ conceptions of objectivity across paradigms. Chapter 2 explained how objectivity became a journalism norm14 that persists today although it was removed from the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics decades ago. The current Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics cautions journalists to “examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting” as a way to “avoid stereotypes.” This new language positions lived experience as something to be suppressed rather than as something that would be beneficial to creating more nuanced coverage with deeper understanding. This is an especially important concept in the context of racial coverage for three reasons: (1) a longitudinal body of research shows that Traditional news coverage has for decades reproduced negative racial stereotypes that are anathema to an ideal of objectivity, (2) objectivity maps on to the concept of “color-blind” racism,15 and (3) oppression based on racial identity is a lived experience for many reporters as well as a topic about which they write.
Lowery discussed objectivity as something that never truly was, and as a norm in opposition to the norm of fairness. The Times’s Eligon talked about objectivity as a fading value. He said there is a benefit to reporters telling stories interpreted through their own lived experiences:I don’t believe in objectivity. I don’t think it exists. I believe that my job is to be fair, and I think what aids me in being fair is beginning by understanding and accepting the reality that I’m not objective. When I accept that and I understand that and I can articulate the ways in which I am not objective, it then allows me to interrogate those things and to make sure that I am checking myself and very actively interrogating my own potential biases. The biggest lie the American media has ever told itself is that such a thing exists, some type of media objectivity, right?
In any story we write, there’s a series of subjective decisions being made by people based on their biases before the story’s even written—the first subjective decision of those being, is this a story worth covering or not? That is a subjective decision. There is not an objective list of, these things are worth covering, and these things are not, right? That is based on the opinions, the biases, the desires, the interest of a set of random editors somewhere. What we know, based on all the available data, is that those editors do not reflect the diversity and nuances of our nation and rather are a bunch of white dudes, right?
Because of that, I think that—I think we just have to disabuse ourselves of this idea that our media has ever abided by some type of strict objectivity. Our media coverage has always relied on a bunch of subjective decisions. I think that once we understand that, we can start to undo that, and we can start to think, how might this—how might we cover something in a way that’s more fair? How might we cover something in a way that’s more measured? My coverage, again, I think my job is to be fair. I think that requires a lot of reporting. It requires a lot of asking questions. It requires trying not to make assumptions. Doing that extra interview. Making that extra call.
I think that—I also think it’s my job to be willing to say things that are difficult for some people to hear. I don’t think that we have a history in American media, especially mainstream American media, of valuing the views and experiences of people of color, and so I think it can be very shocking for a white reader to all of a sudden encounter coverage that does that. What do you mean that you’re taking these protestors seriously? That’s very confusing to people.
They’re not used to media that somehow acknowledges the humanity of people of color and the agency of them, right?
I also think that it’s not my job to make readers happy. It’s not my job to be liked. It’s not my job to be noncontroversial. It’s not my job to be not divisive, right? It’s my job to tell the truth. I think that that’s something that we have to—I just think that we have to remember, and that’s something I try to think about.
Lowery and Eligon described the Traditional norm of objectivity as outdated and disappearing. Thompson talked about the field opening up to the idea of first-person narratives. All three observed Traditional norms as opening up, perhaps even going against, the long-held norm of objectivity.I think part of what makes where journalism is going now,… I think it does make journalism stronger is when you really have folks of different experiences, of diverse experiences, kind of injecting their own experience into their coverage.
That’s really what we’re here—we’re here to tell the story of America, and we can’t just ignore who is telling that story. Who is telling that story can bring it to life…
[T]here’s no way I can step outside of myself as a black man in my mid-30s who grew up in South Philly in a single-parent family… I’m an accumulation of a bunch of experiences. I don’t pretend that I’m not. I do think that there is a tendency—the way that the people in our newsroom and other newsrooms that I’ve been in have responded to the idea that they are somehow not in accumulation of their own experiences… I do think that more people are interrogating that idea. I do think…the journalism with which most people interface with still is guilty of that…
My old editor and I, she and I used to always say this. We’d be like, “Objectivity is bullshit.” We would always say that. It was funny, because we understood where we were coming from. Whenever we stepped outside of the context of our team at NPR, there was always like, [gasp] “Why would you say that?”…there’s a centering of whiteness at NPR and the way we cover things, and there’s a very specific social location that our listeners tend to be in. We treat everything else as exotic.
The newsroom is super, super white…that stuff obviously trickles out into our coverage. There’s nothing about the coverage of these things at NPR that is objective. There’s no such thing as…objectivity in journalism. There’s fairness in journalism. Right? This idea that objectivity is often camouflaged and positioned as this thing that people can achieve. I don’t think a lot of people have really thought through the implications of having white people decide that this is objective and not emotional…
That notion of objectivity in newsrooms that don’t look like anything like our country, in terms of race, in terms of education attainment, in terms of social class, is really dangerous and needs to be interrogated as often as possible. It’s troublesome… It presumes that the way we talk about things in our popular press is the natural order of things, the natural way that everyone should think…
The Undefeated’s McDonald echoed the sentiment that objectivity centers whiteness to the point of reinforcing it as a norm. “I think a lot of this has to do with the makeup of American newsrooms…in too many places, basically, the definition and framework for objectivity is still centered around color-blindness.” She said journalists don’t acknowledge that whiteness is an identity and fail to acknowledge the role that plays in what they cover and how they cover it, because whiteness becomes “just the default. It’s just like this is normal. This is the way things are, and then everything else is the deviation from that. That informs everything.” This view of objectivity as color blindness reinforces whiteness as the norm and people of color as “other.” These values are directly addressed by Critical Race Theory as perpetuating racism and stereotyping.
Demby used the example of a pattern he has observed in coverage in which a reporter essentially asks, “Is X racist?” In these scenarios, Demby said, a reporter’s sense of “balance” is to ask whether racism is a problem. “The way it’s I think dismissively characterized, and big journalistic outlets are often guilty of this, [is] ‘On the one hand this. On the other hand, this,’” he said. “Racism literally with a question mark in the headline in a lot of cases. ‘Was X racist?’ First of all, besides that question being useless in a lot of ways, there’s often a flattening of the consequence” of the impacts of structural racism. Interactive Race Beat reporters were critical of the notion that reporters should not be influenced by their own lived experiences. They also asserted that racial coverage that tries to be “objective” privileges a dominant perspective. In this view, objectivity takes the harmful form of questioning the existence of racism.
Objectivity is a journalism word. It doesn’t mean everybody has a point, which is what people think that it means. Objectivity means I go into a story and I find out what’s going on, and I don’t go in there and say, “I’m going to go in there today and I’m going to prove that X is X.” I’m going to go out there and I’m going to find out what’s going on. I’m going to check it out, and I’m going to tell you to the best of my ability what I had learned. At least in the case of political reporting.
...Honestly, this is one of the things where it’s like, this concept, which is so basic to doing the job of a reporter, honestly, if you don’t care about being objective, you don’t go on the journey. You do something else. You literally would go into advocacy in some way, or you’d go work for a political party or for a candidate or something like that.
McMorris-Santoro’s description of his concept of objectivity began with the broadest question of “What is the story?” rather than “How do I tell this story without relying on my own understanding, opinions, and experiences?” To ascertain what the story is, McMorris-Santoro said he uses a system that relies somewhat on his professional experience as a political reporter, but that is also heavily informed by grassroots sourcing—more in person than on social media—and vetting his ideas with colleagues who are people of color. By his definition, his insights lead him to rely on opinions and experiences outside of his own. Thus, his definition of objectivity is contingent on multiple sources at the phase of deciding what the story is and then ensuring he has a wide variety of perspectives speaking to the issues. He also said he values the lived experiences of people with marginalized identities as a benefit, rather than something that should be avoided. McMorris-Santoro, who identifies as white, includes journalists who are people of color in determining his story angle, thus drawing on rather than attempting to exclude their lived experiences.
Daileda’s response was in opposition to that of the Post’s Thompson, who said that type of writing was only appropriate in first-person pieces. Daileda’s response showed how he seeks to connect with the audience in a way that conveys “We believe you,” rather than, as Demby said Traditional narratives ask, “Is X racist?” Sands, the only journalist of color interviewed in the Journalism 3.0 model, talked about objectivity in terms of journalists’ self-reflection and critique, in line with the way it is discussed in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics—but then explored why that is a problem and how the code’s message actually gets in the way of what it seeks to accomplish.I think that some of these outlets like Mashable or Mic…do get to the issues of this righteous anger where we’re preaching, or in our case, often yelling to the choir.… I just wonder who we’re talking to and why we’re bothering if we don’t—if it’s clear by our tone that we think no one will read this unless they certainly agree with what we’re trying to write.
I do think that we at least try to convey that we are on the side of those who have less power in our society… I think we try to take on those perspectives as best we can. At least I certainly do, and if that means sometimes reflecting a sorrow or an anger a little bit more in the writing than you might see in a traditional news outlet, then that’s what happens.
Sands’s example showed how objectivity defined as ignoring one’s own lived experience—living as someone’s neighbor—facilitated stereotyping rather than helping avoid it.We’ve had conversations where I’ve said, “Why are we using this photo here?” It can be an old photo of the kid, but he’s menacing. I remember we’d done a story about Jamar Clark before I actually went to Minnesota. It was a photo of him with his [dread]locs, and he wasn’t smiling. I think he might’ve had a peace sign up or something. It was just like, “Why? What is the decision that goes into using this photo, and why? We have other ones, where the stereotype of a young thug or whatever isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.”
…I was talking to [former Massachusetts Governor] Deval Patrick about this. This was around the same time that all the stuff was happening. I’m like, “What would you do? What’s your remedy?” He was like, “The problem is that we don’t live together.” There’s all sorts of different reasons why we don’t, right, that go way further back than 2014. If we did live together, which we don’t, if Jamar Clark was your next-door neighbor, and he helped you rake your leaves every two weeks, you wouldn’t want to see a picture of him when he was shot by a cop that he looks menacing in. Right? Because that’s not the Jamar Clark that you know. That goes for the people in his family. That goes for the people that he knew in his community…
…As a news organization, you’re surveying people who that person knows, and just because our nation is fucked up and we don’t live together, that doesn’t mean that we can automatically seek to characterize him a certain way. …
Despite the fact that most Traditional journalists still cling to the notion of objectivity, the reporters interviewed who cover racial issues soundly rejected it and pointed to it as part of the problem. Journalists across all three paradigms showed firmly Constructionist values regarding objectivity. This is a particularly compelling finding in the Traditional paradigm, which is said to value “detachment.”
Journalists Across Paradigms Forge New Paths
This book asks whether coverage of racial issues in US journalism is changing—not only in formats afforded by new technologies but also in terms of fundamental norms, values, and routines. The voices of the journalists in this chapter represent a stark contrast to those of journalists in previous studies. These findings show how Traditional journalists who cover racial issues are breaking from entrenched routines and values that have held sway in newsrooms for decades. The findings also indicate reporters in the Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 paradigms, all but one of whom in this study previously worked in Traditional newsrooms, are not carrying Traditional rules and values into new environments (if, indeed, those journalists ever embraced those rules and values). They are forging new paths in new paradigms.
Influences on reporters’ routines and values by paradigm
Paradigm | Individual | Routines | Organizations | Social institutions | Social Systems |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Constructionist | Rep. Lib. to Constructionist | Constructionist | Rep. Lib. to Constructionist | Constructionist |
Inter. Race Beat | Discursive | Discursive | Constructionist | Discursive | Constructionist |
Journalism 3.0 | Constructionist | Constructionist | Constructionist | Constructionist | Constructionist |
Using the Hierarchy of Influences Model shows several patterns. At the individual-level of influence, examined in this study as career path and desire to be a journalist, Traditional journalists talked about their paths in Constructionist terms. This was reflected in the journalists’ desire to increase representation of people of color both in the newsroom and in the stories they thought weren’t being told. Their explanations, however, went beyond representation to view journalism as an agent of change. This was reflected in The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery’s powerful description of using journalism to shine a light on racial violence. Traditional journalists’ responses did not reflect the Representative Liberal sense of “detachment,” which would have been simply to report the news or to inform the audience. Rather, they represented career choices with a Constructionist sense of showing the experiences of the oppressed.
Interactive Race Beat journalists were more aligned with the Discursive paradigm and described seeking jobs that allowed them to pursue complex, “messy” issues that would start a dialogue among audiences and facilitate a depth of conversation they said was lacking. Journalism 3.0 reporters forged career paths that aligned with new types of technology focused on meeting the audience where they were (on their mobile phones). Both Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 journalists expressed individual values that aligned with their paradigms. Only reporters working in Traditional journalism shifted into another paradigm.
At the level of routines, Traditional journalism was again the only paradigm to move outside of its paradigm, although not completely. Traditional journalists expressed a mix of Representative Liberal and Constructionist values in deciding what to cover, finding sources, and interacting with the audience. Some of this was attributable to Traditional journalists’ self-reflexivity about producing news that fell into old paths of event-driven, context-poor coverage. The move toward Constructionist values was seen in routines that leveraged social media to find new points of view and sought sources from marginalized communities to show how structural racism was manifest in their lives. Interactive Race Beat reporters were consistently operating within Discursive paradigm values in seeking out stories without easy answers and delving deeply into complex racial issues, including a commitment to exploring issues intersectionally.
Journalism 3.0 reporters were consistent with Constructionist values of taking a grassroots approach to finding stories by going to the scene and talking to everyday people.
The level of media organization was one of two levels in which reporters across all three paradigms expressed Constructionist values, though opinions differed about whether news organizations should have reporters devoted to coverage of racial issues. That represented a shift for both Traditional and Interactive Race Beat journalists. This level of influence was among the most difficult to characterize because many of the participants had “on one hand, on the other hand” views rather than firm opinions. Most said that every reporter should understand the dynamics of race in America and that should be part of every story, but they also realized that might not be a realistic expectation. Reporters across all paradigms expressed concerns that without a reporter dedicated to covering racial issues, those issues might not be covered.
Traditional and Interactive Race Beat reporters both said deep knowledge about how race functions in the U.S. is a specific and valuable expertise. All reporters concluded that although newsroom diversity is important, it is not in and of itself the answer to better racial coverage. (This mirrors the finding of the Ferguson Commission detailed in Chap. 2.) This level of influence was also the most difficult to interpret because the individual reporters had conflicting views about how things should be structured. I categorized these responses as Constructionist because of the strong feelings that the voices of the oppressed should be included in coverage and because, regardless of beat structure, all the reporters said that the entire newsroom staff should be accountable for awareness of diversity issues.
At the level of social institutions, which asked reporters to explain what constituted good and bad coverage and whether they had seen changes in the field, Traditional journalists again expressed a mix of Representative Liberal and Constructionist values. All the journalists interviewed said they thought coverage of racial issues had changed for the better, particularly over the past five years, and all identified social media as playing a role in that shift. The Times’s Eligon noted coverage was taking a “more critical eye toward race issues” and showing more willingness “to call racism ‘racism.’” That, coupled with Traditional journalists’ statements about the importance of listening to “everyday people” and putting issues into context to show systemic racism, represented a shift away from the Representative Liberal paradigm’s elite dominance and detachment and toward Constructionist values. Interactive Race Beat journalists noted more detail and complexity in contemporary coverage of racial issues. This aligns with Discursive values. Journalism 3.0 reporters noted a move away from coverage about people being angry and toward a broader understanding of injustice. This aligns with Constructionist values. At the level of social institution, data again showed Traditional journalism retaining some vestiges of the Representative Liberal paradigm and some movement toward Constructionist values. Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 reporters’ statements remained within their paradigms’ values.
Finally, at the level of social systems, journalists in all three paradigms expressed Constructionist values, which represented a shift for both Traditional and Interactive Race Beat journalism. The question at this level of influence was about how reporters conceptualized objectivity, one of the longest and most tightly held Traditional journalism norms. Reporters in each paradigm said objectivity was not possible and was a dangerous goal when writing about racial issues. Objectivity ignores whiteness as an identity, casts it as normative, and positions other racial identities as aberrant. This hides the structures that perpetuate racial oppression and it furthers stereotypes in news coverage. Thus, the level of social systems has a dire impact on coverage of racial issues. For Traditional journalism, rejecting objectivity is a remarkable shift. In the two emerging paradigms, the norm appears to have never taken hold.
Journalists’ responses show important patterns across levels of influence. First, the interviews show how Traditional reporters are thinking differently across all five levels of influence. This represents a disruption in Traditional journalism routines and values that have been in place for decades.17 In coverage of racial issues, Traditional journalism may be breaking with norms about what makes a story, who gets to tell it, whose perspectives are represented, and how racism is presented not as a question but as a part of structures that affect everyday life.
Traditional journalists noted the influences of reporters’ lived experience (including more diverse newsrooms), new technological tools used to monitor the social media conversations (where the conversations are more diverse than in most newsrooms), news organizations’ increased attention to racial issues, an understanding of “good” coverage as stories that highlight structural racism, and a willingness to reject objectivity because it perpetuates racial stereotypes and racist ideals. Taken together, this shows a significant shift in Traditional coverage of racial issues that goes beyond a “moment” to constitute a “movement.”
It is also significant that reporters in the Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 paradigms, all but one of whom previously worked in Traditional newsrooms, did not carry Traditional norms and values into the emerging environments. This could indicate that these reporters never ascribed to those Traditional news norms and values. It could also indicate that elite-centric routines and professional norms such as objectivity are beginning to be more critically examined—and rejected as outdated. Interactive Race Beat reporters described their routines and values primarily in Discursive terms and sometimes in Constructionist terms.
Journalism 3.0 reporters were strongly and consistently Constructionist in discussing their routines and values. That suggests that these emerging platforms are charting a new course outside of the long-standing norms of the field. Journalists working in the Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 paradigms described themselves as “journalists” without any qualifiers. They did not, for example, call themselves “online” journalists or “BuzzFeed journalists.” Their statements reflected how all journalists should reject objectivity and all news coverage should call out racism.
To assert that Traditional journalism is changing because of the influence of new paradigms is potentially overreaching, but it’s fair to note that Traditional journalists are influenced by the new paradigms, particularly because they said they pay attention to and admire coverage in Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 news outlets. Those paradigms embody the values Traditional journalists said they admire. The digital-first news organizations’ break with Traditional institutional rules raises compelling questions about how these new paradigms created different cultures. Journalists in both the Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 paradigms pointed to newsroom cultures that put a premium on creating and maintaining diverse staffs and allocated resources to covering racial issues.
The data show how leading Traditional journalists who cover racial issues are thinking and working differently than their predecessors and the two emerging paradigms, which enjoy the fastest growing and youngest (read: future) audiences and are charting their own courses. The final chapter in this book puts the narrative analysis into conversation with the journalists’ voices to explore these phenomena.