The Arizona Republic is committed to diversity, both in its coverage and its newsroom
In 2021, The Arizona Republic launched an initiative to reach more bilingual readers and households where residents prefer news in Spanish. We’ve long had a product for these readers, La Voz and TV Y Mas, but we weren’t reaching enough online. We knew that many of the people we hoped to reach were not just Spanish-speaking, but they were bilingual, digitally savvy and passionate about their communities.
We wanted to move these stories front and center, and have the faces in The Arizona Republic better reflect the faces of the state of Arizona. We started by moving stories from the La Voz team to the front of azcentral.com. Today, we are one of the few English language new sites in the U.S. to daily publish news in Spanish on its homepage.
To lead this project, we hired Joanna Jacobo Rivera, who had written and edited for La Opinión and Excélsior California.
Jacobo Rivera and the rest of the La Voz team have focused their efforts on bilingual households and areas in Phoenix. We’re tracking our progress in terms of not only telling more stories from those areas, but also telling more stories that matter to those communities, such as Angela Codoba Perez’s reporting on undocumented students with a lack of resources.
Here's what to know:We are opening up access to more of our journalism at azcentral.com
We’ve held listening sessions and have launched a survey to better understand the Latino/e populations of our home state. We have long translated stories from English into Spanish, but we now also write in both languages. La Voz stories are often more than translations, they are stories told bilingually from the start, such as Javier Arce’s story on two Mexican journalists seeking refuge in Phoenix.
Our coverage goal is to encompass the experience for bilingual residents of Arizona, not just the issues, but the culture, like Nadia Cantu’s stories about a ballet folklórico dancer.
After all, inclusivity is as much about the storytelling we do as it is about the faces of those telling the stories. At The Republic, our commitment to more accurately represent our community has meant looking carefully in the newsroom, but also at the stories we tell.
Representation is why we started Faces of Arizona, a project that highlights community members like Blu Erran, who was profiled by reporter Raphael Romero Ruiz. Representation is why we moved La Voz to our homepage and why we have focused on telling more stories of Phoenix’s diverse communities, including areas such as south Phoenix. Representation is why we worked to hire two Report for America fellows to cover the rural parts of the state. It’s why we have a team of reporters covering Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribes, including Arlyssa Becenti and her recent coverage of an Indigenous band trying to make it to the Hollywood Bowl and Deb Utacia Krol, whose stories on threats to sacred indigenous spaces informed the federal government’s decision to enact new protections.
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We are all Arizonans. That is the tie that binds the journalists at The Republic and you, our audiences, together. No matter where we all come from and what we do, we live and work in the same community. That binding relationship is important, Jacobo Rivera said.
“We are a part of our communities, and therefore we are a part of these stories, the same stories that we work tirelessly to produce,” she said. “So when we talk about representation, it’s not just to benefit our readers, it’s to benefit every single person in our newsroom as well.”
For The Republic to succeed, we must have an inclusive and diverse workplace where employees are valued and feel empowered. We must create a newsroom that reflects the communities we serve.
As part of our commitment to reach parity with our communities by 2025, we annually publish the makeup of our newsroom staff. This public review is done in concert with USA TODAY and more than 200 local publications in the USA TODAY Network.
As you’ll see in this latest report, The Republic has made significant progress.
In July, journalists of color made up 45% of the staff, up from 20% in 2016. In the newsroom, 58% of the journalists are women and 54% of the managers are women.
Just three years ago, 15% of our staff was Latino. Today, 23% of the journalists at The Republic are Latino, a figure that ensures we can meet the growing expectations of one of the most diverse regions in the country.
There are communities that we hope to cover more deeply, and represent more deeply, in coming years. Many of them go beyond race and gender, to identity and family. Phoenix has a bustling LGBTQIA+ community. The state also is home to many veterans and currently serving military families. These communities deserve representation, too.
We are proud of our progress. We also know it is one step in a journey in inclusivity.
The American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau asks two separate questions, one about Hispanic origin and one about race, allowing individuals to self-select from multiple options. However, to compare with internal Gannett employee information that asks individuals to mark only one option, we used the following categories: Hispanic or Latino (for ACS, regardless of any other race selected), White (not Hispanic or Latino), Black or African American (not Hispanic or Latino), Asian (not Hispanic or Latino), American Indian or Alaska Native (not Hispanic or Latino), Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (not Hispanic or Latino), or two or more races (not Hispanic or Latino). All information on racial identity is provided voluntarily by employees. Gannett also allows an individual to not disclose their race or ethnicity. The chart combines Maricopa, Pinal and Yavapai counties as a community comparison.