Commitment to Diversity

commitment
to diversity

1. A mission for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Editorial Policies

At the start of the school year, while brainstorming goals for our newspaper, I wanted to make our paper more inclusive and diverse in our coverage, and I wanted to reflect that in our Editorial Policies, which would dictate our vision and goals. As a result, I added the section titled Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

Reporters and photographers make genuine efforts to include sources and subjects for photographs and articles who represent all parts of the Lynbrook population. Diversity includes, but is not limited to: ethnicity, age, gender and social group. Boys and girls sports and activities should be covered equitably. The staff strives to provide inclusive coverage to all school sports, clubs and groups. The Managing Editor will keep a “blacklist” of previous interviewees accessible to all staff members after each issue in an effort toward diversity.

This listed our goals to make sure that we have “diverse” coverage of everything on campus and that we strive to cover every group “equitably.” Finally, we pledged to be “inclusive” when covering sports and groups, meaning that we treat each other with the same standards as each other. By particularly listing out those pledges and including examples, I wanted to set a goal that others on staff and those not on our staff can point to hold us accountable. Additionally, it also listed out concrete actions that we would do to achieve those goals, the most important because keeping track of how inclusive and diverse our coverage has been through having an interview blacklist, which will be covered later.

Our Ed Board has pioneered DEI efforts, whether it be updating our editorial policy, seeking inclusive coverage of school groups or proposing solutions to promote diversity in STEM classes.

2. Taking Action

New Recruitment Plan

Briefly mentioned in the Marketing and Audience Engagement section, I pushed for a revitalized and reimagined new recruitment plan, which strives to diversify our applicant pool and hopefully staff.

When I entered staff, I was one of the only 6 boys out of a staff of 38. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it did mean that we didn’t have the diversity of experience and opinions that a more gender-balanced staff. This challenge has been an issue in our publication and many others. It was initially very difficult for me to adjust as I constantly experienced imposter syndrome, feeling that I didn’t belong on staff and wasn’t qualified because I was a guy. However, those feelings were completely untrue. As a result, I wanted to be there for others in my shoe, so they don’t feel left out or misplaced on staff. To do that, I made a special effort to check up on people who may feel left out, whether that be related to gender or not.

I also strongly believe that with more diversity on staff, the problem will solve itself. Because I wasn’t on the Ed Board last year, I wasn’t involved in the recruiting effort, but as I am now leading it, I have planned to make our recruitment more diverse, so we have a more well-rounded staff.

The most important step that I am taking is to actively seek diversity and not wait for it to show up in our footsteps. We previously asked applicants to reach out to their literature teacher for a recommendation. However, it didn’t really play a role in our application and didn’t help us make a decision. To make better use of teachers’ experience, we plan on reaching out to all 9th and 10th grade English, Social Science, Photography and Art teachers to recommend students, but especially male ones. That way, they actively think about both and are able to recommend guys to apply as well. We don’t get enough male applicants, and as the general applicant pool, there are some who wouldn’t be the best fit with our publication. With a smaller pool, though, it would be more challenging to get more male admits. This program would make sure that we are able to identify a broad and qualified applicant pool for all genders. To encourage these people to apply to be on staff, we will administer special recruitment programs like emailing them, distributing invitations to apply/attend our informational session and assigning a staffer to initiate personal outreach. By interacting more with potential applicants, we are increasing the likelihood that we have a qualified and diverse pool, increasing our staff and coverage diversity.

A project plan I created to get more people to apply.

My friend Elliu Huang and I are the only guys from our grade who are on staff.

At JCamp, I saw tremendous diversity, something I want to further foster.

Admitting Staffers

When selecting students on staff, we consider their application strength, interview, personality fit and other factors. Some of those include what experience they hold and what special things they will bring to staff. Sometimes, it is a cultural or gender experience that would be unique. Other times, it is an academic or extracurricular interest that we don’t particularly know or have staffers interested in. By considering all kinds of diversity, we are selecting a staff that has broad interests, allowing us to better cover a wide range of topics that generally reflect the student body.

To promote our staff’s gender diversity, I admitted a record number of male applicants to the Epic staff, and as I work to select next year’s staff, I will continue to push for gender diversity, as the first male Editor-in-Chief in five years.

In January 2022, I was interviewed by Devin Gupta, who is the Managing Editor at Monta Vista High School’s El Estoque, and shared my perspectives and experience with gender disparity on staff. It is an important problem in many papers, and I hope that more papers, like his and mine, take a look at this issue and be part of the change to encourage more gender diversity in scholastic journalism.

Interview List

Our staff has a tradition of keeping a blacklist of all the interviewees that we have talked to. We keep track of everyone we interviewed, whether we included their quotes or not. This is to make sure that we have a record of everyone we talked to and wrote about, so we don’t over-interview them. By having the spreadsheet, we make sure to not interview people again and find others to interview. I often check out the spreadsheet to see who we often talk to, and when writers plan on reaching out to them, I can tell them to find someone else and recommend other sources as a substitute.

Our interview list that keeps tracks of people we have interviewed.

Interviewing Superintendent Polly Bove (third from left) with editors from Cupertino H.S.'s The Prospector (second from left) and Fremont H.S.'s The Phoenix (first from right).

Sources

In addition to that, I make sure that our sources include a variety of perspectives and individuals. At the top of every document, we require everyone to include an interviewee list, which is the first thing I see when I open the document. I make all staffers write out those they plan on and have reached out to, including students’ grade levels. As many of our staffers are upperclassmen, people reach out to fellow upperclassmen, which decreases the voice of underclassmen in our publication. As a result, I make all our writers especially find and reach out to 9th and 10th graders. Another important aspect is gender diversity. As our staff is predominately female, our interviewees are too. That is why for every story, we try to find both female and male interviewees, increasing our diversity of coverage.

3. Stories

Editorial: Publication’s Diversity Audit

At the start of the school year, we learned about NorCal’s Media Week, and one of the activities that caught my eye was conducting a publication diversity audit. Having always wanted to make our paper more diverse and wanting to know about how we were doing, I initiated our paper’s effort to do an audit. Because a full audit would take too long to complete before the deadline, we didn’t submit it for the media week, but we decided to make it our Staff Editorial for Issue 2.

We decided to focus on 5 main elements: Staff Demographic Diversity, Student Interview Diversity, Teacher Interview Diversity, Club Coverage Diversity and Sports Coverage Diversity.

I personally worked on the Staff Demographic because it was most important to me. To do that, I analyzed our staff’s gender and racial distribution since the 2017-18 school year. By data crunching, I helped our paper discover that a mean of 84% of our staff identifies as female, an overwhelming majority. Additionally, I also was able to compile the racial differences between our staff and the Lynbrook student body. There were some differences, but it wasn’t necessarily apparent in how we cover stories and represent issues. By working on this section of the project, I was able to transfer my observations into numbers and a presentable format. These numbers really shocked me and our paper, which pushed us to especially seek a more diverse staff.

For other sections of the paper, it was more difficult to collect data because the data set wasn’t just 30-40 students each year. To do that, we organized a long-term data collection project with staffers going into every single story of every single page of every single issue for the past 4 years. Our staffers read every story and found every interviewee, every club and every sports team we covered. Then we categorized all the information and organized it passed off of its respective categories. For students, we organized it by gender and grade. For teachers, we organized it by gender and academic department. For clubs, we analyzed how many times we covered each one. For sports, we analyzed our coverage distribution by sport, gender and season.

This all accumulated to a massive Editorial for our paper in which we analyzed ways to improve and proposed solutions that we implemented. Some solutions include:

the Epic staff is composed of more females than males, largely because we receive more female applicants. To account for this, we will continue to advertise the application to our publication through annual presentations to freshman and sophomore literature classes and social media posts in hopes of attracting a larger male audience.
This year, we will work to better represent the Lynbrook population by being more mindful of interviewing students of both sexes and contacting potential interviewees. For example, we plan to post Instagram polls about future story topics and direct message students who voluntarily respond. This way, we can quote anyone who demonstrates an interest in giving their opinion on the subject and wants to have their voice shared through the Epic.
Although some clubs naturally contribute more toward campus culture or generate more newsworthy events, we strive to increase coverage to less widely known clubs by emphasizing “beats” to stay in constant contact with officers from every club on campus. To compensate for any further disparities, we will increase social media coverage for these clubs in the form of quick turnaround media.
This year, we are continuing to step up our equitable sports coverage by creating a recurring sports photo spreadsheet to provide continuous coverage of Lynbrook athletics, both online and in print. We record dates of games and tournaments for each sport upon release and encourage staffers to photograph and interview players.
Through concrete methods such as maintaining an interviewee blacklist, implementing a post-issue diversity analysis at least once a semester and holding open critique sessions to attain candid feedback from students and staff on campus, we will continue being transparent with our dedication to reporting on the Lynbrook community.

Our staff editorial took up a whole page because we felt there was a lot to cover.

Staffers hanging out during our Staffed social. People ate pizza while compiling data from previous issues.

More staffers hanging out during our Staffed social while eating pizza. Our Design Editor Lillian Fu (far right in blue) likes giving me weird facial expressions when I take photos of her.

Affirmative Action

One of the stories I covered about diversity was about Affirmative Action. For details about the project, check out the “Web and Social Media” section. One important reason why I chose this is story because affirmative action has been a key part of different schools and companies’ efforts to promote diversity. It has been controversial in application in my community, so I wanted to provide a comprehensive and impartial analysis of this public policy that strives to promote diversity in different areas of our society.

A person who opposed Calif.'s Prop 16 speaks at a "No on Prop 16" rally in Cupertino.

The cover photo of the story.

Kamala Harris

When Harris was nominated to be Joe Biden’s vice president, it was the first time that a Black American and person of South Asian descent has joined the presidential ticket. As she was a Californian who grew up in the Bay Area and had the same ethnicity as many in our school, I felt it was very important to cover this major milestone. To connect it to Lynbrook, I included students’ perspectives and analysis, which highlighted its potential impact on the election and diversity in politics.

Unfortunately, this page was created on Adobe Spark, which has been discontinued.

The cover photo of the story.

STEM Column

To me, diversity isn’t only about race or gender; it is also about a diversity of ideas. In Lynbrook, most people are interested in STEM subjects, which is great, but there aren’t that many other academic interests that are prioritized and emphasized, except business at our school. As a result, I wanted to share my perspectives and experience loving politics and government and how that contrasted with my peers and family’s hopes and expectations. It was a very difficult and personal column to write, but I wanted to show others in similar situations as myself that it is okay to pursue untraditional Lynbrook subjects, maybe even inspiring them to do the same!

Editorial: ASB Inclusivity

In my sophomore year, I decided to write our staff editorial with my future co-editor Mei Corricello about breaking down the exclusivity of ASB and its events. Our paper highlighted the issue of ASB elitism and called for transparent communication and inclusive activities. Interviewing a few students who felt excluded, I heard back from countless others who thanked us for articulating their feelings.

Despite critiquing student government, we also encouraged people in ASB to share their side of the story. By doing so, I better understood both sides of the issue, crafting realistic call-to-actions, and surprisingly strengthened our groups’ relationship. ASB embraced our story and implemented suggestions, creating web pages that update students on pending projects and unexpected challenges. More significantly, they introduced special programs recognizing the under-appreciated: niche clubs, artists, and more.

Seniors dancing during their Homecoming skit themed, "A Magical Finale."

I saw the positive impacts of inclusive reporting, so now, as Editor-in-Chief, I mentor writers to consider and analyze all perspectives when covering stories. I hope that my work can inspire future generations of the Epic staffers to preserve the impartiality and trust of scholastic journalism.

“Training for Transitions” students working at the Viking Vault student store.

Viking Vault

At the start of my sophomore year, our student store opened after the completion of our cafeteria, and as the beat of the Special Education department, I became the first one to learn about it because the Special Education students run the store. While the story could have been just about the store opening, I thought that the angle about those who take the “Training for Transitions” course running the store was very unique and important to showcase to the larger student body. I never knew that there were was a program that aims to prepare students for the workforce, so I told the story from the angle of students running the store and how that shapes their future career goals. Writing the story opened my eye to how our school has many different types of academic programs, and by sharing this with the student body, I helped them see that the traditional A-G requirement coursework wasn’t the only high school journey that people take.

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