Connecting with diverse perspectives

“To ensure that news reports have impact, we’ll need to connect with readers because we reflect the readers.”

If 2016 has shown us anything, it’s that journalists can’t afford to live in bubbles. We can be a self-reinforcing bunch, so we are surprised when “mainstream America” is unfamiliar with certain news events — or even something in the recent past that should still be part of the national consciousness. Just this month, we’ve seen some readers claim that Japanese Americans weren’t actually interned under harsh conditions during World War II.

doris-truongThat’s why, as an industry, we must do better at informing ourselves and providing proper context for our readers.

This means that news managers need to broaden their pool for hiring and promotion. We need journalists who can connect with readers in the heartland, not just because they are empathetic reporters but because they understand what it’s like to live and work there.

Diverse perspectives go far beyond race and ethnicity: It also means actively cultivating a newsroom whose journalists represent a broad cross section of America. We need more journalists who understand our military, more people who know about religions beyond Christianity, more people who know what it’s like to live in poverty. And we certainly need to continue to increase the number of journalists of color, particularly in top management.

Stories involving Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and immigration will have even more resonance as we transition to a new presidential administration. And stories from other parts of the world will need to be framed in a way that Americans will grasp their far-reaching relevance. When a seven-year-old girl in Aleppo becomes this era’s Anne Frank by using Twitter to share her daily struggles to survive, we see how social media, news, and ordinary people intersect.

More than anything, we’ll be faced with the reality that readers have evolved beyond one-size-fits-all news. To ensure that news reports have impact, we’ll need to connect with readers because we reflect the readers. And that starts with concerted efforts to hire, retain, and promote diverse viewpoints.

Doris Truong is the weekend homepage editor at The Washington Post.

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Trushar Barot   API or die

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist