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CONTENT DIVERSITY TRACKERS At the start of the fall 2020 semester, The D.O. created content trackers for its News, Opinion, Culture, Sports, Video and Podcast sections, modeled after the trackers in the Minnesota Daily’s 2019-2020 End-of-Year Report. All writers, whether they were members of the editing staff or contributors, were responsible for answering the questions on the tracker for stories they wrote. The trackers allow us to examine our coverage, including the racial and gender diversity of our sources and how frequently we tell stories that focus on topics relevant to marginalized communities. They also serve as an opportunity for each reporter to reflect on how they could have better included or represented marginalized communities in their reporting. Marginalized communities One of the questions on the trackers asked reporters if their stories highlighted marginalized community members or focused on a topic relevant to marginalized community members. A notes sheet with guidelines on how to fill out the content trackers states that we consider race, gender (nonbinary or trans), sexuality, ability, language, nationality, religion, age and socioeconomic class for our reports, but the sheet did not include guidelines on how to determine whether or not a story highlighted or was relevant to marginalized community members. Thus, individual reporters may have had different interpretations of whether or not a story highlighted or was relevant to marginalized community members, and it is unclear how they made this determination for their stories. Stories and sources Our content trackers included enterprise stories in which reporters interviewed multiple sources and coverages in which reporters interviewed or quoted at least one person. They did not include stories based on emails, press releases or information from spokespeople whom reporters did not directly interview, however. A change from last semester’s report, our source breakdowns excluded university spokespeople and officials. The D.O. decided to exclude these types of sources from our source breakdowns in order to focus on the diversity among the sources whom our reporters actively seek out and choose to speak to.
