41 where staffers put their mental, emotional and physical well-being first are ongoing goals for our newsroom. Management should continue to allow staffers to take time off, check in on how they are doing and listen to their experiences, recognizing the effect that the pandemic and events in the news may have on reporters’ ability to do their work and their well-being. This same attitude toward well-being and mindfulness should also apply to contributors to The D.O., and management should remind editors to be mindful of the well-being of the contributors they work with as well.
GENERAL GOALS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Building trust with the community The community is not just the subject of the stories we tell — it’s the reason we do this work. But if we are disconnected and out of touch with the community, we won’t be able to achieve this mission. The D.O. should continue to work to build trust and relationships with the community, both on campus and in the Syracuse community. Editors in each section of The D.O. should reach out to student groups and organizations each semester and should seek out groups, communities and topics that The D.O. has not frequently reported on. To encourage engagement with the community, The D.O. can hold office hours for students and community members to share their ideas and perspectives with reporters and editors outside of the context of interviews. The D.O. should use polls and other interactive posts on social media more frequently and should consistently ask readers what questions they have and what topics they would like The D.O. to report on.
Improving process of gathering information Continuing to emphasize and provide guidance to reporters on how to go about asking sources about their race and gender identity will allow us to collect more detailed data on source diversity. This will give us more insight into whose voices we are including and neglecting to include in our coverage. We will review the questions on the content diversity trackers to determine how we can collect data more thoroughly. A question on the spring 2021 trackers, for example, asked if the story specifically highlighted or focused on a topic relevant to marginalized community members, but it did not ask reporters to specify which marginalized communities the story focused on. Asking reporters to include this
