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The hope is to help journalists to improve the way they conceive stories, report them fully and tell them in all their complexity and intrigue.
This project was designed to help the public think critically about choices in story frames, sourcing, interviewing and language use. The editors — Keith Woods, dean of Poynter Institute, and Alice Irene Pifer, director of professional education at the school, and I, associate dean at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, selected 15 award-winning stories from the “Let’s Do It Better!” Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity for the anthology.
The workshop, which I direct, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The Authentic Voice project was co-sponsored by the school with grants from Ford, Kellogg and McCormick-Tribune foundations.
I first conceived of a text book idea on race coverage when I was a Media Studies Fellow at the Freedom Forum at Columbia in 1996. The “Let’s Do It Better!” project grew out of a collaboration with Sig Gissler, a professor of journalism at Columbia who is now the administrator of the Pulitzer Prize.
I joined the Columbia staff in 2000 to take over the project after a 31-year career at The Philadelphia Inquirer where I was honored for my commitment to newsroom diversity.
During my days as a recruiter for the paper I saw how poorly journalists — no matter their race or ethnic background – were prepared to cover what I think is one of the most important aspects of life, not only in the United States but in the world.
This book is our attempt to do something to prepare students and professionals to report and write more authentically by using best practices, rather than stinging criticism.
The anthology is presented in a unique text book, DVD and website package, which offers stories that the authors felt consistently rose “above average storytelling on the subject, informing, challenging and even provoking readers and viewers.”
Poynter Institute Dean Keith Woods conducted the unrehearsed interviews for the DVD with the workshop’s award winners who deconstructed their stories with a “director’s cut” approach.
The interviews include Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC’s Nightline; 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon; ABC correspondents John Donvan and Lynn Sherr and a team of reporters and editors from KRON-TV in San Francisco. The newspaper interviews feature Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Gabriel Escobar; New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito; Elizabeth Llorente of The Record in Bergen, N.J., Jodi Rave, the Indian Affairs correspondent from Lee Enterprises; Allie Shah, a reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Associated Press team of Dolores Barclay, Todd Lewan and editor Bruce DeSilva.
These interviews open a window “onto the kind of decision-making that journalists must do daily to tell stories, big and small, about race and ethnicity,” as well as represent a “cross-section of the people who make up America’s ever-changing demographics.”
The Authentic Voice package was designed to work equally in a traditional classroom setting, with small discussion groups or for individual, self-directed learning.
Each section is designed to provide a number of entry points to stories and the website www.theauthenticvoice.org offers chapter by chapter teaching guide.
Journalists, educators, diversity trainers and even community leaders can use the project “to explore everything from storytelling structures to strategies for respecting and reporting through cultural roadblocks.”
The DVD features a cross-reference section that, with a click, links users to a number of issues that consistently come up when reporting on matters of race and ethnicity.
Those issues include:
- How to get people to talk frankly about race and ethnicity,
- How to handle race and ethnic identification, and
- How to write stories about racial and ethnic perceptions,
- How to illuminate and inform the role a journalist’s race and ethnicity plays in decision-making.
Users of The Authentic Voice can discuss the stories individually; deal with topical issues like those above, or do both. Alice Pifer, who oversaw the production of the DVD, brought 20 years of experience as an ABC producer to the project along with a lifelong commitment to an accurate portrayal of race.
The DVD also features discussion questions to animate, celebrate and scrutinize the ideas, sources and word choices of the journalists.
Keith Woods succeeds in the DVD interviews because he was able to “challenge the work and, at the same time, reveal the beauty, breadth and depth that were ingredients so critical to the good work our honorees produced.”
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