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SECTION-SPECIFIC GOALS AND RECOMMENDATIONS News The News section should pursue more investigative reporting and data stories relating to police accountability among both the Department of Public Safety and the Syracuse Police Department. Reporters should prioritize seeking the perspectives of community members when doing this work rather than relying solely on statistics and information from the police. The section should accompany stories about community members with visuals of these community members when possible, rather than relying only on file photos of general locations. The News section’s content diversity tracker was not fully complete for any of the weeks during the spring 2021 semester. To ensure that all sections are filling out the trackers for their stories, the management team will enforce filling out the trackers as a mandatory job responsibility among all sections and will check in with each section editor and section’s staff every week or every two weeks if there are missing stories for that week. News should broaden its coverage of the city of Syracuse and should pursue more stories that examine the relationship between the university and the city, such as this story about SU’s Steam Station, which is located in a community bordering Interstate 81 and provides heat to all buildings on the university’s Main Campus. In order to tell such stories thoroughly and with context, reporters should develop an understanding of Syracuse’s history and build trust with Syracuse residents.
Opinion The Opinion section should continue its International Voice, Black Voices and Absence of Light projects, building relationships with those involved in the projects and coming up with new ideas. For International Voice, which highlights the perspectives of International students through a collaboration with the student organization WeMedia Lab, new Opinion staffers should meet with members of WeMedia Lab to introduce themselves and seek feedback on how The D.O.’s Opinion section can better support the project and improve the editing and publication process.
