General goals and recommendations

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.

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

information in future reports will allow us to see which marginalized communities we have excluded or have misrepresented in our coverage.

The management team will ask both former and current staffers for feedback on the obstacles they faced in filling out the content diversity trackers and ways to improve the process of gathering information.

Accessibility

The D.O. should strive to become a more accessible workplace and should work to make its content more accessible.

Editors posting stories should include alt text for all images included. The management team and section editors should ensure all staffers who post stories know how to write alt text in posts and that doing so is a necessary part of posting stories. The D.O. should also begin adding alt text to posts on social media.

Students who start out as contributing and staff writers and photographers for The D.O. often go on to become editors in later semesters. But contributors do not receive pay for their work and may feel disconnected from the newsroom’s editing staff and its editing processes. The management team and section editors should work to better include and support The D.O.’s contributors. While individual sections hold meetings with editors as well as reporters, the editing staff should also frequently hold workshops and training sessions specifically for contributors from all sections to foster a stronger sense of community and involvement among editors, reporters, photographers and other contributors. Contributors should always be welcome and included in the newsroom outside of these workshops, and editors should serve as mentors for them. The D.O. could not function without the work of its contributors, including beat writers who develop sources on a specific topic that they report on over the course of the semester. Working as a contributor, however, is not accessible for all students, such as those who work other jobs on top of their reporting. The D.O. should actively work to support contributors who face financial barriers, including providing reimbursements for reporting-related costs such as gas, Lyft or Uber fees, ticket costs and FOIA/FOIL requests. Editors should make sure all contributors know that funds are available for reimbursing such costs.