Letter from the Publisher

WELCOME TO THE FOURTH ISSUE OF 603 DIVERSITY.

Representation in media matters. It’s one of the reasons we launched this magazine: to amplify that representation of members of our state’s diverse communities, both as subjects of our stories and tellers of those tales.

Two stories in this issue represent both sides of that coin simultaneously. Because the subjects of those pieces, WMUR’s Monica Hernandez and NHPR’s Daniela Vidal Allee, are relatively new members of New Hampshire’s media world, and both represent firsts in their roles.

Monica is the first Mexican-American woman to anchor a News 9 broadcast. (See page 26.)

Daniela is spearheading NHPR’s innovative new Spanish language programming, delivered on the website and the WhatsApp messaging platform. (See page 30.)

Monica told our writer, “It is meaningful to me to be able to help represent, in kind of a microcosm, what is going on in greater New Hampshire, to represent diversity here. It’s something that makes me feel very proud now. If there are little girls that look like me and have a similar background, I want them to see that anything is possible, you can be anything that you want to be.”

Daniela, reflecting on the impact the original Spanish-language reporting her team was doing had, said it “creates representation for communities that aren’t as visible.”

I’ve spent the majority of my career in local media. When I think about representation in media, one of the first things that comes to mind is how important it is to find diverse storytellers when it comes to getting a full picture of the reality of a place. We can only see what we can see, hindered by both our advantages and limitations, our biases and preconceptions. The more stories we can draw from the lived experience of our communities, the truer the picture becomes.

Not long ago, I was emailing with local writer and podcaster Anthony Payton. He was working on a piece on diversity in media and asked me for some comments. I hope it’s not bad form to quote myself from a quote I gave another writer, but I think I got it right the first time, and it sums up what we’ve been talking about here pretty well:

“Diversity of all kinds in media on the storyteller side is critical to providing comprehensive, insightful and empathetic coverage of communities. At the same time, diversity represented in those stories is also crucial to feelings of inclusion, to the understanding of shared identity, to a sense of belonging in a place. There’s a current cynical perspective that suggests somehow that representing as many members of a diverse community as possible in each of their uniquely splendid truths is divisive, when in fact it is deeply uniting. We better understand our shared universal story when we’ve dived deeply into our individual ones.”