| 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 | 
