New Approach to Increasing Cultural Diversity in Journalism, Cover it like a Beat

Lots of reporters know how to cover beats like cops or City Hall. A crime happens, you call the police and victims to get the story. The city's council's weekly agenda comes out, and you attend the meeting and write a story about a new law being passed.

But not many reporters know how to cover culture as a beat. The amorphous, intangible subject scares many rookies and plenty of veterans. Reporters often forget or overlook the fact that culture is part of everyone's upbringing, so much so it is probably a large factor in a person's motivation, and can answer key questions. Why did the suspect commit the crime? Why did the city councilwoman propose the new ordinance? If reporters are attuned to asking culturally-based questions, they can produce richer stories that stand out.

You start covering culture just as you would any other beat.

Start small and write soft features that win you sources and their favor. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, many communities held vigils to honor the 3,000 people killed when terrorists targeted the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Washington. I then covered Fremont, Calif., home to many Sikhs. That religious community, known most visibly for men who grow full beards and wear colorful turbans, was quite vocal about promoting their vigils. So I went to their event, with readings and burning candles. It wasn't much different from the other vigils, but their motivation was very different: Many Americans were confusing the turbaned Sikhs with Islamic radicals. The Sikhs especially wanted to show that--though their traditional dress was not Western-they were not Muslim and not like the Sept. 11 terrorists (who, incidentally, didn't wear turbans). This led to several stories, including one about how American Sikhs were trying to distinquish their religion from Islam and another explanatory piece about who wears turbans and who doesn't. The vigils created a connection to the Sikh community for me and led to other stories about aspects of the community: their temples' vegetarian kitchens, a group building the nation's largest gurdwara (temple) in San Jose and a van that carted around the faith's holiest book. Now, whenever there is a story developing at our newspaper that involves Sikhs, reporters and editors come to me for my sources, whose number began to grow exponentially after I covered a simple vigil.

Look beyond news releases. As every good reporter knows, a news release is usually just the basis for what could be a far better story. Soon after I started on the cops beat as a rookie reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, the police department issued a news release stating they had arrested some young Indian-American men on gang crimes. I had heard of Latino gangs and Vietnamese gangs in our area, but not Indian-American ones. They defied a stereotype that all Indian-Americans are wealthy, good students and essentially "perfect." I set out to explore these gangs, and discovered that several less-affluent immigrants from the Indian state of Punjab had come to Silicon Valley. Because both parents in these families were often working low-paying jobs, and sometimes a grandparent wasn't around to babysit, some boys were falling into trouble. They weren't hard-core gangs, but sort of wannabes fighting over girls: the newer immigrants vs. the earlier arrivals. This turned into a front-page enterprise story no other newspaper had ever covered.

Go to meetings. But don't just show up at City Hall. Ethnic minorities often meet in living rooms and temples or at festivals. If you go, not only will you be able to deliver a light weekender in a pinch, but these are the places you meet sources. You'll gain their trust when you attend their gatherings. They'll begin to see you as a reporter who cares about their community and they'll call you with ideas, or help you when you need to find an expert, a victim or a perpetrator.

Finally, when you've completed the basic steps of building any good beat - establishing a calendar of events, growing a good source list, lining up enterprise features - you must avoid lapsing into superficial or trite reporting. Really understanding a group's culture will allow you to report, ask questions and write seriously-nuanced pieces interest mainstream readers. And you and your newspaper will earn respect within the culture you're writing about.

For example, I wrote about the unspoken rift in Silicon Valley's Indian-American community between longtime immigrants who own restaurants and mom-and-pop businesses and the newer wave of arrivals who came to take well-paying technology jobs. The two groups have different management styles, and the new guard, who had recently built a magnificent India Community Center that cost millions, ignored or looked down on earlier immigrants, whose main communitiy activity was an annual parade. I first began hearing about this divide several years ago while covering that parade. After a long time hearing the whispers - there was never a news release or announcement - I began forming my own thesis and interviewing sources to explore test it. To be sure, many community members were extremely angry when I exposed this rift. But I also heard from other sources who said the article did more to mend the community than anything else: Being embarrassed in the newspaper forced the leaders of the two groups to put aside their differences.

Another story I did was about a local Afghan television host who was quite controversial. Instead of simply surveying the proliferation of ethnic faces on public access TV, I exposed a deep anger between the host and leaders of the Afghan community in Fremont. The host was preying on the community's longstanding fear of Communism and loyalties to the Taliban, which are particular points of contention today for still-warring Afghan tribes. I know Afghanistan well, from having covered it, but I'm not fully understanding what you mean. I think you also should qualify the statement so as not to suggest every member of the community has the same views. I think you need to draw both parts of the sentence out more, to explain the context. eg, "Many members of the immigrant community feared communism, because of the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and many favored the former Taliban regime, which the US ousted in 2001, because the Taliban restored order.

So when I was recently handed a story to write about a singer performing for our local Croatian community - a group I knew nothing about - I didn't despair. I wrote the piece, gathered 10 phone numbers, and now I can't wait to learn more about a group of people whose culture is bound to have stories that I will strive to bring to the front page.

Lisa Fernandez is a reporter at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. She covers everything from crime to community, and believes that a person's cultural background is often a key motivating factor, but is sadly overlooked by the mainstream media. She has a degree in anthropology from McGill University in Montreal and a master's degree from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago.