Efforts to diversify The Augusta Chronicle newsroom, news coverage continue

Two years ago, I told you about the Kerner Commission report from the 1960s and the opportunities created nationally by the racial gap between newsrooms and the communities they covered.

It was part of the announcement of a commitment from The Augusta Chronicle and its parent company, Gannett, to have our staff reflect the community it serves by 2025. Along with that commitment was a promise for a yearly update on our progress.

We still have much work to be done before 2025 to reflect the Augusta area.

Our newsroom is still whiter than the general population of our area – more than 80% of the Augusta newsroom is white, outpacing the area’s demographics by more than 25%.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Augusta MSA is 34.1% Black, 7.1% Latino or Hispanic, 2% Asian and 54.6% white.

The snapshot of our newsroom on July 1 shows we are 83.1% white, 5.6% Black, 5.6% Latino and 5.6% Asian.

Women make up 33% of our newsroom (Augusta-area population is more than 50% female), while accounting for half of its leadership team.

More:A look at the makeup of the Augusta Chronicle's staff

More:Gannett newsrooms making steady progress in overall diversity

But that promised reflection of the community was not just about the race and gender of the news organization’s workers. It is about being able to do a better job covering the wide variety of people that make up our area. That also includes divisions on age, income and sexual orientation. Is it about us getting a wider lens and more voices and perspectives in the news we report.

At this check-in last year, I celebrated our newsroom's successes with our Justice In My Town projects, highlighting our efforts in those stories and others to shine a light on the historically underserved in our community. These larger pieces of journalism reminded me of the work we needed to do to diversify our sources in daily stories. 

In the past year, we have written fewer stories with officials as the main or only source.

We have shifted our crime and public safety coverage, publishing fewer mugshots and police report-centered articles. We’ve written more follow-ups with added context, perspective and a focus on the people impacted. We have actively sought and included more voices of people of color in our everyday reporting.

That focus on the people impacted is where we are centering our efforts for the coming year. We have realigned our beats – newsroom jargon for how reporters center their news gathering efforts – away from the institutions and those that occupy them toward the people whose lives are made better or worse by those institutions.

Like most other businesses, The Augusta Chronicle continues to change as new people are hired and others leave. But even as our newsroom changes, our commitment to reporting our most important stories remains.

Reach John Gogick at jgogick@augustachronicle.com or (706) 823-3450.