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U.S. newsrooms wrestle with how best to reflect the communities they cover -Breaking

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© Reuters. FILE PHOTO. Gabrielle Petito (22), was reported missing after she traveled with her boyfriend across the country in a van. She never returned to home. This undated handout photograph shows Petito. North Port/Florida Police/Handout via REUTERS

By Dawn Chmielewski

(Reuters) – U.S. news organizations that grappled with issues of race and bias in their coverage after the killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 have had to confront them again amid extensive coverage of Gabby Petito’s disappearance this year.

Critics noted that young white women received more attention from the media than other missing females of color.

The 19th* co-founder Amanda Zamora and BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Mark Schoofs talked about these and other ways news organizations fall short on Thursday at the Reuters Next conference.

Zamora’s news organisation focuses exclusively on policy, gender and politics reporting. She said it was formed in response to sexist media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016. She said that legacy news outlets need to do more than just hire a diverse workforce if they want to be able to help their communities.

Newsrooms must “value their lived experiences, empower them to bring their identity to the table in conversations, as colleagues … to allow there to be tension?” Zamora said. “If you’re building a diverse and intersectional newsroom, there’s going to be these inherent tensions that are opportunities for growth.”

BuzzFeed’s Schoofs, whose newsroom pioneered a beat about the LGBTQ community, said his organization actively solicits community input with callouts on social media and invitations to readers to submit tips or additional information.

“It can be really inventive ways that you reach out to make sure that you’re including different voices, so that you’re actually asking people with different experiences to come and reach out to you,” said Schoofs.

“We’re specifically looking for people in particular communities that may not have interacted much with the press before, certainly not a national organization like BuzzFeed News or the 19th or Reuters, to see if we can bring them into our journalism.”

When Zamora was asked about reporting blind spots, she cited her recent Aspen Institute study on information disorder and the growing spread of misinformation, including disinformation, as an example.

“Sometimes we fixate so much on a surface level of political division and fighting that we miss what the underlying root cause of so much of that is – and a lot of it does come down to trauma between and among communities,” said Zamora.

Schoofs encouraged journalists to question their assumptions, and take things for granted. He cited the Belarus-Poland border crisis, which he described as “a manufactured crisis, very much focused on who is in and who is out based on their national identity, based on borders.”

To watch the Reuters Next conference please register here https://reutersevents.com/events/next/

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