COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY
It's vital for our paper to represent everyone, so we're always working to increase our coverage and diversity in both our site and our staff. We want all views, sides, and people to be shown and highlighted on our site.
PERSONAL EDUCATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
While I can support diversity all I want, it won't mean anything if I'm not staying educated and continually working to improve. As a straight, white student, I need to understand that I will never truly understand the struggles some people face. Despite this, I need to stay educated on the real problems in our world and identify my own ignorances and improve them.
With staying educated, I read article after article telling personal stories and what's going on in the world to learn about what people face every day. But what's mostly helpful is simply talking to those with personal experiences. Hearing stories and beliefs from people I know has been essential to me growing and learning about diversity and the real world.
STRIVING TO IMPROVE
In our effort to continually improve our diversity, I reached out to the sponsor of our school's Black Student Union to get advice from the club on how we could increase our diversity and better represent all students.
The club will discuss it at their next meeting, and we're looking forward to hearing their advice and improving with it.
ENCOURAGING STAFF MEMBERS TO SPEAK UP ABOUT DIVERSITY
Sometimes, I'm not the right person to tell a story. I can support the views and arguments shown in the articles below as much as I want, but it's just not right coming from me when I can't truly understand. Who am I to discuss Asian American discrimination when I've never experienced it? So, when staff members approach me with these articles asking me "can I cover this" or "would it be okay if I wrote this," and I'm sure that they can do the topic justice, my answer is always an immediate yes. I know that they are the right person to write this story based on their experiences and beliefs.
The articles below are not the only ones from our site covering these topics, but they are ones that I directly worked with staff members on whether it was encouraging them to pursue the article idea, giving them advice on their coverage, or editing it with them. I'm proud of our staff members for wanting to use their voice on the paper to show diversity and discuss real-world problems. Click on the photos below to view these amazing articles.
DIVERSE STAFF
While we want our staff to be diverse, we don't want it to be contrived. We don't want to encourage certain people to be on our staff to simply increase our diversity. We want people who have a love of journalism and want to publish on our paper, regardless of their views, race, sexual identity, gender, or anything else.
To do this, we've turned our paper into a club rather than only a class. This year, we've noticed a great increase in students interested in publishing. A student will talk to our adviser and come in during study hall where they will talk to me – or another Editorial Board member if I'm not available. We encourage everyone who comes in to publish, and for the first time, we've allowed freshman to publish on our paper.
Having our paper more open to new members like this has definitely increased the diversity on our staff while bringing in talented, driven students. I will admit that our staff is still mainly white girls, however, we've had an increase in diversity from last year to this year (while we've done this in a way that is natural, not contrived or fake).
Even now, in the middle of the year, we're still encouraging students to come by during study hall as we hope to increase the size of our staff and our diversity.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH PODCAST EPISODE
In our "HIstory's Forgotten" podcast (which I discuss more in the broadcast journalism section), we honored Black History Month by discussing Dorothy Height, a woman who dedicated her life to fighting for civil rights.
COVERING EVERYONE
I like to bring diversity to our site by covering groups that may be overlooked as well as those of diverse races. With such a large school, there are so many groups, clubs and people that go unappreciated and unnoticed, so I try to highlight some of them.
For example, I've extensively covered the engineering program along with the esports team when it started at our school this year. I've also published feature stories on a man's 9/11 story and an assistant principal at our school.
Click on the photos below for a few details about these stories:
EAGLE BRIEF
As our newspaper has gained popularity, we've received more and more requests for coverage from groups around the school. With our small staff, it's not possible for us to fulfill these requests, so we created Eagle Brief to inform our community about future events and highlight groups and students around the school. This has been a great way to honor everyone in our school to make sure everyone is represented on our site.
