Thinking beyond ‘DEI’ to make equitable media

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What does equitable local media look like in a “post-DEI” era? This is a question I’ve been struggling to think through, having spent the past few years following how local news organizations have attempted a range of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, to varying degrees of success and with varying levels of commitment. 

While recent partisan attacks on DEI (and corporate responses to them) are deeply troubling, many news organizations underwent a de facto rolling back of workplace diversity initiatives before the 2024 elections. These were not usually framed as a shift in direction, but rather as casualties of budget tightening, with people of color or of marginalized genders disproportionately impacted by layoffs plaguing the industry. This repeated a historical pattern documented by those chronicling efforts to diversify newsrooms. More recently-hired journalists of color were often first to be laid off — be it in the 2000s or the 2020s.

Even when post-2020 DEI efforts were in full swing, they had their critics, as I encountered while writing my book, Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News. These were not critics of the goal of equitable journalism (though those certainly existed), but rather of how news outlets pursued this goal. For example, in 2020, the Philadelphia Inquirer undertook a massive “Inquirer for All” initiative, involving some 80 employees in a range of committees addressing longstanding grievances with their internal culture and coverage of communities of color. The organization set and advanced towards a number of goals, including some that responded to recommendations shared in a content audit I co-led with colleagues at Temple University. However, critics grew frustrated with what they saw as a lack of transparency and a refusal to engage publicly in a dialogue about progress and what areas still needed work.

Likewise, in my research following efforts at the public media station WHYY that started in 2017, I found that even initiatives that made significant advances in increasing the diversity of the newsroom and developing community engagement programs could be vulnerable to shifting priorities that accompanied personnel changes if they didn’t become baked into accountability infrastructure within the organization. 

Looking at newer, smaller local news startup organizations, I was more optimistic about how they were able to build from scratch more equitable internal cultures and produce more community-centered content as a result. However, two of the organizations I followed in my book, Resolve Philly and Kensington Voice, have subsequently grappled with major financial struggles — underlining the critical need to address questions of sustainability among local news nonprofits. They continue to center equitable practices — rather than shedding them quickly as many larger outlets did. But the industry’s lack of a reliable business model for local news means that even when organizations prioritize the right things, it is still an uphill battle.

So, what now? In this moment, as many of us are scrambling, while feeling a bit scrambled and overwhelmed ourselves, I find myself circling back to where I started. I’ve been thinking back to conversations I had with two residents of the Philadelphia region. One, from a majority Black neighborhood, complained about disproportionately negative coverage that did not reflect their* lived experience: “We’ve gone to plenty of events where we’ve seen people from all different walks of life, all different economic backgrounds, all living in Germantown, all striving for the same goal, but you don’t ever see that reported on TV.” Meanwhile, a resident of a majority-white suburb, which was essentially a news desert, had come to associate news so closely with bad things happening, often in the city of Philadelphia, that they had internalized a logic of “no news is good news.” They said, “Normally, I never hear of anything going on around here. Which is nice, you know. There’s nothing negative.” 

For both residents, what they saw as “news” was not serving them well. The news created what scholar George Lipsitz might call racialized “spatial imaginaries” that distorted how both Black and white audiences saw the communities around them. Calling for coverage to more fully represent communities, including communities of color, is not just about making journalism better for people of color. It’s about making better, more accurate journalism for everyone — including white audiences. 

I understand the value of giving labels to approaches to journalism that challenge historically harmful dominant norms and practices in the industry. For example, in my journalism classes, we regularly explore approaches such as solutions journalism, solidarity journalism, service journalism, and of course, community-centered journalism and antiracist journalism. But I’m less concerned with advancing any one of these forms of journalism than with reimagining how these approaches can all be part of how we think of “good” journalism and civic media that is accurate and relevant. 

If we no longer have a climate that welcomes discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I wonder whether we can focus on a deeper, more basic ask: How can we advance civic information and narratives that accurately share the wholeness and complexity of our communities and societies? And how can we do this in ways that are actionable and accessible to people (including those who have turned away from “mainstream” media) — and may take forms that don’t look like what we think of as “news”? There are already many local civic information providers out there, formally and informally convening their communities in person and online with care and a spirit of mutual aid. More research is needed, and I’m personally invested in listening more to community members and media makers in the months ahead as part of this. 

I hope, in this moment of overlapping crises, we can carve out space for reimagining what an equitable, cooperative, and sustainable local media system can look like. The alternative is obsolescence. 

*The author uses they/them pronouns when describing research subjects in order to maintain anonymity for participants.

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Andrea Wenzel is an Associate Professor and faculty advisor to the Center for Community-Engaged Media at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication; she is the author of Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust, and of Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News.

This piece was guest edited by Bettina Chang. Copy edits by James Salanga. Fact-checking by Bashirah Mack.