Commitment to Diversity
Every year I've been on staff, I've watched myself focus more and more on the idea of representation. From being totally naive about the subject in my freshman year to carefully choosing the right stakeholders as a junior, I always consider whether my work is truly serving all of the CCHS and Athens communities.
01
Do Not Interview List
After every cycle, every member of staff takes part in an assignment where they put the name of every person they interviewed into a google form along with some of their traits (gender, race, prominence in story, etc.). We can then look at the data to see who and what we are covering too much – when someone appears too much on the list, we bar members of staff from interviewing them. This ensures that we are being diverse in our coverage.
02
JEA Diversity Audit
The entire ODYSSEY program participates in the Journalism Educators Association’s diversity audit, which works to understand whether publications are being diverse in their coverage as well as their makeup. As a class, we all take the audit and discuss whether we feel we meet the standards presented by it.
03
Middle School Outreach
On a more personal note, the members of the editorial board went to our feeder school Clarke Middle School to talk to students about what the ODYSSEY does. We helped them with their journalism projects and encouraged them to apply if they were interested. By reaching out to these students, we tried to increase the diversity of the program simply by increasing the number of students in ODYSSEY.
04
Diversity in Stories
When I was a Journalism I student, I wrote a story about local advocacy group U-Lead Athens, which provided access to college and scholarships to underdocumented students in the Athens community. While these students often do not have access to higher education, U-Lead offers help with financial aid as well as supporting these students to get the requisite documentation to go to many Georgia colleges. Click on the photo to read the story about U-Lead Athens.
