|
Topics:
Civic Communication
New
Orleans Times-Picayune
Together Apart: The Myth of Race
In an exhaustive
series (totaling 166 pages in broadsheet reprint), the Times-Picayune
over six months chronicled race relations in stories that emphasized
personal experience, historical context (from the era of slavery
to the present moment) and the divergent cultures, lives and perspectives
on racism among blacks and whites. More than 6,500 people called
a voice-mail line to comment on the series, which ran in six installments
of four days a month. Development of the series took more than
a year, as a biracial team of 20 newsroom staff worked through
their own views on race. (Series development included two days
of diversity training for the series team and three months of
"process" that put the training into practice; during the course
of the series and its development, the entire newsroom went through
diversity training.) Coverage also was grounded in poll data,
quantitative measures of racial disparity.
A
case study by Project
on Public Life and the Press
New York University, Department of Journalism,10 Washington Pl.
New York, NY 10003, (212) 998-3793
©
Project on Public Life and the Press,1994 The Project is funded
by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
New
Orleans Times-Picayune (newspaper)
3800 Howard Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana 70140
Ownership
Newhouse Newspapers Group
No. newsroom employees: 150
Circulation
265,000 (daily)
320,000 (Sunday)
Circulation Area(population)
New Orleans SMSA (1.2 million)
Initiative
Together Apart: The Myth of Race
Dates
May-November 1993
Lead
editor
Keith Woods, city editor
Editor
Jim Amoss
When
and how did this initiative get started?
Planning began in March 1991 on the heels of David Duke's gubernatorial
bid, and gained urgency after a new city ordinance integrating
Mardi Gras krewes proved divisive in New Orleans.
What
are the goals of the initiative?
To encourage "honest dialogue (as) a remedy to fear, mistrust
and rage," according to an open letter to readers from Editor
Jim Amoss and Publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. In the words of Keith
Woods, the lead editor on the series, "To show in an honest way
why we're in the condition we're in, to speak honestly about the
role of white people and black people, to talk about it in terms
of action instead of in the passive way these things get talked
about today."
What
does the initiative entail?
Standard project reporting grounded in first-person accounts and
quantitative data, notable for context and breadth of coverage.
For example, every installment featured a "Children of History"
segment detailing an individual's experience as it was grounded
in history, touching on long-term effects of slavery, Jim Crow
laws and the experience of living as a minority in a predominately
white culture.
Stories
reflected broader-than-usual definitions of racial experience,
the outgrowth of a difficult, ultimately transformative series-development
process. When the team began working together, "we couldn't even
agree among ourselves on definitions of racism," said Keith Woods,
the city editor in charge of the project. "We were America. We
were no different that the people we were about to start writing
about. It was a pretty humbling experience for a group of people
used to grabbing a pile of books, a set of statistics, some interviews
and then you're done." Woods brought in a diversity training team
from Philadelphia for two days, then spent three months with the
project team integrating the training as the group came up with
story ideas and vetted them among themselves.
Before work
on the project had begun, newsroom managers already had gone through
diversity training. The project team was the first group of reporters
to do so. As the series was under development, Woods and another
newsroom staffer held a series of seminars focusing on race in
the news media, looking at questions such as when a mention of
race is and is not appropriate in a news story.
How
many people are working on it?
24 all together; 18 in core group that included 13 whites and
five blacks.
What
does it look like in the newspaper?
Consistent 1A play. Long stories broken by subheads. "Speaking
of Race" sidebars with direct-quote narrative from one black,
one white. Periodic reading lists. Innovative graphics (example:
12 color mug shots asking, "If you passed these faces on the street,
what race would you say they were?" Answers on next page told
how featured individuals characterized their own racial identity).
Extensive quotes from reader voice mail. (Over six months, 1,000
comments on 58 open pages.)
Response
to the Initiative
In
the newsroom:
"We were not that well equipped in the first place, so it was
very clumsy to handle. There were a lot of trampled feelings (about
race)," Woods said. "...There was in fact a tremendous amount
of strife that emerged as a result of diversity training and the
race project. A lot of emotions because people were feeling put
upon - every time you turned around, somebody was talking to you
about this."
Elements
incorporated into regular newsroom routines and/or culture:
"We didn't all emerge singing 'Kumbaya' and holding hands," Woods
said. "But I think we are wiser, and, I daresay, a little better
at handling race in pages. I shudder less often when I read our
newspaper."
The project,
the diversity training and the seminars changed the paper's overall
orientation on matters of race, Woods said. The Times-Picayune
has rejected the AP Stylebook charge to mention race "only when
relevant, " deciding that race is so often a factor in everyday
life that a mention often can be essential in writing a story
fully and accurately. "It's relevant all of the time or none of
the time, depending on the situation," Woods said.
In
the community:
Tremendous response as demonstrated by the thousands of calls,
and lots of conversation in the community about the series. "When
this series was running, very few things happening in the city,
state or country got more discussion," Woods said. "I think for
a lot of people there were little epiphanies of understanding...but
it's nothing you could chronicle."
A multiracial
community group, Eracism, formed, but though it meets monthly,
it has produced no action in the nine months since the series
ran.
Among
political leaders:
Virtually no reaction, which was a disappointment to the project
team. "You didn't have leadership like the mayor, the city council,
standing up to say 'Here's what I'm going to do,' " Woods said.
What's
next:
More discussion in the newsroom about the role of the paper in
the community, particularly given lack of visible action in response
to the series, and newsroom surprise that the Akron Beacon-Journal
was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer public service award for its race
relations project. (See separate summary. The Akron project was
by any measure less extensive in coverage than the effort in New
Orleans, but also the Akron work included newspaper sponsorship
of explicit efforts to help the community bridge its racial divide.)
"We're essentially
talking about redefining the role of the newspaper...not just
in doing big projects, but admitting that especially in urban
America, (newspapers) have power, and because of the power, responsibility,"
Woods said. "On the topic of race, newspapers have served some
of our instigating roles, instituted, aggravated, participated
in creating the problems that we have. Putting together a project
is a response, not just sitting idly by, but... you can't hold
the ivory tower position and print it and say, if we wrote it
and they read it, fine."
"We have
the power to do things, and Akron showed you that," said Woods.
"I think it's a challenge to the journalistic community right
now to meet that responsibility and to find something to do with
that power. I think we will spend the next five or 10 years experimenting.
With Charlotte, with Akron, I don't know if I like it, I don't
know if I don't like it, but we're going to spend a lot of time
trying to figure this out."
Case study
written by Lisa Austin, Assistant Director of the Project on Public
Life and the Press, July 1994. Lisa is also a member of the CPN
Journalism editorial team.
More Information
Project
on Public Life and the Press
New York University
Department of Journalism
10 Washington Pl.
New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-3793
Back
to Communication Index |
