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.
Creating the OMG Diversity and Representation Statement
Doing a Diversity Statement for the ODYSSEY was discussed as far back as the summer of 2023, when I was only just coming into a leadership position in the program. However, with the final policy not published throughout the entirety of the 2023-24 school year, I took it upon myself to get it over the line before the start of this year so we could more accurately represent the diversity in our community.
01
The origins
Several OMG editors including myself looked at and drafted an initial portion of the Diversity Statement. We looked at the few other high school publications’ statements for inspiration, choosing to delineate our statement under several domains for readability, clarity, and accountability.
02
Taking the reins
In the summer of 2024, I revisited the unfinished draft as Editor-in-Chief. Though we had previously gone with a by-committee approach, I wanted to take the responsibility of revamping and finishing the statement on myself to ensure its completion. I rewrote portions of the statement I felt were imprecise, expanded portions I thought readers would need, and created a section explaining not only our promises of what to do, but how we would hold ourselves accountable.
03
Seeking Feedback
The process didn’t end with me, however. After consultation with my adviser, I reached out to the recipient of the Journalism Educator’s Association Diversity Award Winner Sergio Yanes of Arvada High School in Colorado for his feedback. What he had to say was largely positive, and his comments helped polish the statement to be published.
04
Refining and Implementing
After making the final round of edits, we published the statement before the start of the 2024-25 school year, implementing all the measures to hold ourselves accountable to it. So as to allow community feedback, I wrote the staff editorial for Issue I of the ODYSSEY Newsmagazine about the issue of DEI in journalism, focusing on what professional publications get wrong and what we’ve tried to do instead.
Presenting on DEI
At both the National High School Journalism Convention and Georgia Scholastic Press Association fall conferences, I presented “Getting it Right: Accurate Representation” alongside Diversity and Representation Editor Peter Atchley – whose position I helped create – and adviser David Ragsdale. The aim of the presentation wasn’t to say that the ODYSSEY’s DEI work was the gold standard of scholastic journalism – we still have plenty of room to grow. However, my goal was twofold. First, I wanted to provide a degree of relatability to DEI, showing other students that it was possible to do the important work even at a high school level. Secondly, I wanted to broaden our audience’s perspective. So often when DEI is mentioned, it’s under the guise of race or sexuality, but from a journalism perspective, there’s so much more that falls under the umbrella that it’s important to consider. The NHSJC presentation was my biggest ever, delivered to a crowd of 125 student journalists and advisers.
Practicing DEI
In-house Diversity Audit
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.
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.
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.
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.
