The Inner Circle Round Up: Media News You Can Use March 2021
Written By
By Anna Connelly
March 2021 marks a full year since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A long-lasting quarantine forced the world to recognize overlapping economic and public crises—with a focus on societal inequities.
In the past year, the pressure to authentically diversify organizations and serve equitable causes skyrocketed for the better. Many organizations have since recognized the importance of elevating the experiences of marginalized communities, and thus have developed new services, resources, and initiatives to fulfill this dedication to equity. This month, we’re highlighting some of the latest diversity-focused tools and resources fit for media professionals.
A new partnership between Chalkbeat, a non-profit that reports on childhood education inequities, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism are working together to “efficiently track the diversity of our sources over time, and hold ourselves accountable for representing diverse voices from the communities we serve.” The ultimate goal for this collaboration is to establish a free, nationwide database that “any journalism organization can use to track and improve source diversity.” This project is still in its infancy, but the organizers are asking reporters everywhere to share what an ideal end-product should include to maximize value.
The Inner Circle Take: Auditing your past, present, and future sources on a basis of diversity can ensure that your organization is actively representing the voices that match the communities you serve. A resource of this nature could also be useful for identifying the demographic trends of other outlets that you commonly follow.
Athletic superstars Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel and Sue Bird all recognized that there is a severe lack of media coverage for women in sports, so they launched a new media platform called Togethxr to uplift “stories of women and girls in the sporting world who aren’t getting the attention their skills merit.” Through its work, Togethxr hopes to validate and support women in the athletic world, and “create a lot of those see-it/be-it moments now for the younger generations.”
The Inner Circle Take: Increasing visibility for women’s hard-earned talents is crucial for dismantling discriminatory biases and inspiring new generations to try new things. If you’re looking to gather media exposure for a project that defies gender limitations, platforms like Togethxr would be useful for your efforts.
The Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and the Boston Globe have announced a timely partnership for the development of a contemporary news platform entitled The Emancipator. The newspaper is to feature “original opinion and ideas journalism” that is widely available and free to access. This collaboration will also produce a biweekly newsletter called Unbound to "blend conversations on racial justice from The Emancipator's editors, columnists, and contributors with context, news and perspective."
The Inner Circle Take: This perfectly timed venture is a wonderful opportunity to not only increase your own organization’s education with anti-racist literature, but also a great option to keep in mind for media lists and future collaboration.
Recently, a new relationship between Latinx Newswire and News Direct was made to increase the reach of their content to “U.S. Hispanic and Puerto Rico media and digital influencers.” For free, the partnership allows “users' content [to] be placed automatically on more than 130 news and content aggregator sites, including Google News, Yahoo, and AOL,” and “lets users target audiences by geographic region as well as by news category.”
The Inner Circle Take: This partnership acts as a great resource to better reach Latinx audiences with content that impacts them, and enables PR professionals to more easily engage with the topics that are most important to the Latinx community.
