1st Edition
Reporting Inequality Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity
Under increasingly intense newsroom demands, reporters often find it difficult to cover the complexity of topics that deal with racial and social inequality. This path-breaking book lays out simple, effective reporting strategies that equip journalists to investigate disparity’s root causes.
Chapters discuss how racially disparate outcomes in health, education, wealth/income, housing, and the criminal justice system are often the result of inequity in opportunity and also provide theoretical frameworks for understanding the roots of racial inequity. Examples of model reporting from ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the San Jose Mercury News showcase best practice in writing while emphasizing community-based reporting. Throughout the book, tools and practical techniques such as the Fault Lines framework, the Listening Post and the authors' Opportunity Index and Upstream-Downstream Framework all help journalists improve their awareness and coverage of structural inequity at a practical level.
For students and journalists alike, Reporting Inequality is an ideal resource for understanding how to cover structures of injustice with balance and precision.
Introduction
PART I: A New Framework for Covering Race
Chapter 1 The Individual in Context
Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner
Chapter 2 Structural Racism
Alden Loury
Chapter 3 The Accumulation and Disaccumulation of Opportunity
Michael Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David Oppenheimer, Majorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman – An excerpt from White Washing Race.
Chapter 4 Implicit Bias
Satia A. Marotta, Simon Howard and Samuel R. Sommers
Chapter 5 The Colorblind Conundrum
Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner
PART II: How Opportunity Works
Chapter 6 Reporting the Story Upstream
Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner
Chapter 7 The Opportunity Index
Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner
PART III: Best Practices
Chapter 8 Interviewing Across Difference
Omedi Ochieng
Chapter 9 Avoiding Stereotypes and Stigma
Sue Ellen Christian
Chapter 10 Using Fault Lines in Reporting
Marquita S. Smith
Chapter 11 Building Relationships in Under-covered Communities
Keith Woods
Box: The Chicken and the Listening Post
Angie Chuang
PART IV: Case Studies
Chapter 12 Case Studies Introduction
Case Study A Reporting Opportunity in Health
Sally Lehrman
Case Study B Sometimes School Segregation Comes From Race Neutral Policies
Venise Wagner
Case Study C Exploring the Wealth/Income Gap
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
Case Study D When Housing Separates Us
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Case Study E Gaps in the Social Safety Net
Karen de Sá
Case Study F The Path to Legal Status Isn’t So Clear Cut
Susan Ferriss
Resources
Index
Biography
Sally Lehrman is an award-winning reporter on medicine and science policy with an emphasis on race, gender and social diversity. Her byline credits include Scientific American, Nature, Health, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Salon.com and The DNA Files, three public radio series distributed by NPR. Honors include a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, and the JSK Fellowship at Stanford University. She started and leads the Trust Project, a global network of newsrooms that is addressing the misinformation crisis through transparency.
Venise Wagner is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, where she has taught since 2001. She has a 12-year career as a reporter for several California dailies, including the Orange County Register, the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle. She has covered border issues, religion and ethics, schools and education, urban issues and issues in the San Francisco Bay Area's various black communities.
