Diversity efforts expand portrait

By Joe Spear
Free Press editor

Last fall The Free Press began an effort to listen to Mankato's diverse community about how we were covering them; we convened a meeting and heard a lot. We covered crime, but not the positive contributions they were making to the community.

Since that time, we have made efforts to cover the diverse community not necessarily more than we cover the white community but in a way that creates the same balanced picture we often give of the white community.

We realized that the stories we write on any given topic or any given community do not exist in a vacuum. Readers develop ideas of issues, communities, or events by how they are covered over time.

The picture readers gets may or may not be fair. The fairness of the picture is, however, usually in direct proportion to the "fairness" or "completeness" of the coverage.

So while there were not objections from the diverse community for covering crime that individuals in the community may commit, they did agree that we were rarely in their neighborhoods taking pictures or doing stories on things they do that related to them being part of the community.

One of our Free Press diversity group participants noted it would be tough for us to portray Somalis doing typical snow shoveling because we had not made an effort to find out where they live.

We took this advice to heart. To date, we have made extra efforts to show members of the diverse community doing typical community building things. We profiled a Hispanic man who rings the Salvation Army Bell. We profiled local Somali leaders in a story on their recent visit with the president of Somalia. We took pictures of children of color learning music along with white children.

We were hoping to paint a more balanced picture of these communities. Before our efforts, members of the diverse community showed up in a lot of crime stories. That somewhat "unbalanced picture" translated to the school children being ridiculed and created a lot of tension.

But recent stories have generated a somewhat different reaction. One profiled immigrant told us their children went to school and were able to talk about a positive feature involving some members of the diverse community: They were able to tell their classmates and teacher with a smile on their face: "Look, my mom is in the newspaper."