America’s racial reckoning has not overlooked legacy media: Newsrooms across the country are re-evaluating how their coverage has historically ignored or even exacerbated racist policies and practices. Some, like the Kansas City Star, have taken the extraordinary step of apologizing to that city’s Black community for years of oversight and neglect.
Yet even as news outlets have struggled to improve diversity within, newsroom leadership to this day is predominantly white, creating blind spots and gaps in understanding that leave many community members – particularly in communities of color – on the outside looking in. Inequities abound in justice and education systems, but they’re also prevalent in the environment, where stories of racism are also stories of poverty, public health, policy, business and more.
To rise to the moment, newsroom leaders need to understand what has gone wrong, and how to fix it. To that end, the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources will hold a five-hour workshop for editors [1] on March 3, 2021, 11:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. ET, to explore questions of environmental racism, social equity and the problematic lenses through which these stories get told.
The application period is will close on Feb 17.