D&C builds commitment to serving the whole community

In a recent Democrat and Chronicle, our three Revisiting the Rochester Narrative summer fellows from Rochester Institute of Technology introduced themselves and their mission to our readers.  

It’s been a joy to see how Madeline Lathrop, Justice Marbury and Genae Shields have committed their summer to conducting conversations with members of marginalized communities and exploring the hopes, dreams and challenges facing persons living in neighborhoods such as along Joseph Avenue.  

The three of them have filled whiteboards in the D&C offices with flow charts and ideas and illustrations of the coverage they’re seeking to deliver on social media channels and on our website and in the newspaper. We’ve invested in a giant laminated map of the city so they can “connect the dots” on matters such as the scarcity of healthy food over large swaths of Rochester neighborhoods. 

This is the second summer of Revisiting the Rochester Narrative. In summer 2021, Cornell University student Caroline Johnson and RIT student Marili Vaca looked at the history of disinvestment and broken promises in the Bull’s Head neighborhood of the city, telling the story through copious amounts of research and through interviews with present-day stakeholders who are dedicated to building a bright future in Bull’s Head. 

That work bore great fruit. Caroline and Marili not only jointly won the New York News Publishers Association Distinguished Community Service Award for their Revisiting the Rochester Narrative efforts last summer but both were subsequently hired by us – Caroline in Ithaca as a food, drink and culture reporter and Marili in Rochester as a social media storytelling reporter. 

Now that the Revisiting the Rochester Narrative project is in Year Two, we realize it is a foundation upon which we can build greater connections with residents of underserved communities. These connections in the near term, based on deep listening on our part, can help fuel coverage relevant to the residents in places like Bull’s Head and along Joseph Avenue. And over time, that relevance can help groups of people who have had no reason to trust us to begin to value us and ultimately subscribe digitally to our journalism. 

D&C updates diversity employment numbers

The Democrat and Chronicle has been striving in recent years to become relevant to all who live in Greater Rochester, particularly the Black and Latino communities our coverage has neglected or mischaracterized historically.

Succeeding in this ongoing effort is vital. It will create better journalism, strengthen our business and foster greater economic and social health for the highly segregated Rochester region.

More:Gannett newsrooms making steady progress in overall diversity

Becoming a better news source for Greater Rochester requires we build and sustain a workforce that is reflective of the diversity in the communities we serve, and that we operate in as inclusive a manner as possible so that all employees feel valued and empowered.

As the newsroom diversity census figures we publish today demonstrate, the D&C is making progress in better reflecting the local population, even as more steps and adjustments will be needed in coming years to ensure we mirror and understand and cover well the full diversity of Greater Rochester's residents.

That’s a long-term process, of course. But it is one the D&C is committed to, given the population trends in Monroe County. With close to one-third of the county made up of Black, Latino, Asian or persons of two or more races, it is vital we reach and serve those segments going forward if we are going to succeed as a source of news and information and as a business. 

No significant change in an organization such as ours occurs without a deep commitment from our staff, which we greatly appreciate. Last Thursday, a large contingent of D&Cers attended a special tour of the Clarissa Uprooted exhibit at the RIT City Art Space near the Liberty Pole. 

Learning about how “urban renewal” of the 1960s did anything but renew in the historically Black neighborhood along Clarissa Street was moving and humbling, particularly because the D&C did not chronicle particularly well at the time the impact of displacement on the community’s longtime residents. Now, seeing photos of families and stores and of the famed jazz club The Pythodd, it is painfully evident that what Rochester leaders deemed progress scattered neighbors to different corners of the city and disrupted generations of lives. 

This is part of the deep listening committed journalists must pursue if we are to learn and to incorporate our learning into our news stories. The tour included a roundtable led by young people from Teen Empowerment who helped develop the Clarissa Uprooted project. They guided us through some introspection and insights that will serve us well as we pursue further news stories on disinvestment and on growth and development in Rochester and in surrounding communities. 

Beyond the commitment of our staff, outside support is helping the D&C foster change in our work. Three shoutouts: 

• To the Rochester Area Community Foundation, whose generous grant is supporting the Revisiting the Rochester Narrative effort this year as well as related efforts tied to serving diverse segments of the community more effectively. An enormous thank-you to the Foundation’s President and CEO Jennifer Leonard, to its Executive Vice President Simeon Banister and to its Programs and Distributions Committee members. 
• To Trusting News, a national-level effort aimed at bridging the gap between news organizations and communities that don’t feel well-served by them. A thank-you to Trusting News’ Mollie Muchna, who is guiding us through the ins and outs of conducting community conversations to learn about the perspectives of neighborhood residents regarding how news is reported and how it might be reported more effectively to build trust. 
• To the Solutions Journalism Network, which has supported our efforts the past 2 ½ years to write about caregiving in communities of color. We’ve made numerous connections in diverse communities through this effort, which has included collaboration with The Minority Reporter, WHEC and WXXI. 

Finally, none of this happens without the D&C’s current Emerging Audiences Editor Maryann Batlle and its previous and pioneering Emerging Audiences Editor Cynthia Benjamin, who now works for Gannett corporate news scaling diversity and inclusion efforts companywide. Nor does it occur without others I’ll single out including Matthew Leonard, our special projects and investigations editor; Len LaCara, our content strategy analyst; and Tracy Schuhmacher, our food, drink and culture reporter. 

So much work ahead for the D&C, and for news media in general, to serve the whole community and not simply the segments we’ve served historically. Showing the way this summer are our three Revisiting the Rochester Narrative fellows Madeline, Justice and Genae. They keep their good work up, we’ll have to invest in more whiteboards! 

I pledge to you this: The D&C team will do its best to serve Greater Rochester and each of our readers every single day. 

Michael Kilian is executive editor of the Democrat and Chronicle. Reach him at mkilian@gannett.com.