We know that who we talk to in our reporting matters. That decision determines whose voices get heard, whose stories get told and, ultimately, who the news is for.
When we visited neighborhoods throughout San Antonio on our community listening tour last fall, participants told us that local news often overlooks or mischaracterizes certain communities. In our industry’s history, newsrooms have often fallen short of telling the full picture of their communities — but now we have a chance to do better.
That’s why we are participating in a cohort of news organizations selected by the American Press Institute to track the demographic backgrounds of people quoted in stories using a tool called Source Matters. This practice, often called a source audit, helps newsrooms establish a baseline for who they interview for stories and why, then set goals and work toward those goals.
We began this process at the beginning of 2023 and we are starting to see the results.
In our source audit, we are tracking who we quote by race and ethnicity, age, gender and City Council district residence — as well as how we select sources for our stories — to gather data and find gaps in our coverage. We’re doing this because we don’t just want to listen to our community’s concerns — we want to show through our actions and coverage that we take them seriously.
After two initial tracking periods, just 27% of our sources identified as Latino in a city where more than 60% of the population is Latino — so we set a newsroom-wide goal to significantly improve that metric.
Our goal to increase Latino representation in our stories is based on our journalistic responsibility to accurately and thoughtfully portray our community. While who we quote and use as news sources is often affected by structures of power and influence in our city, that doesn’t mean our work has to reflect those structures.
Some of the strategies we are using to improve how accurately we tell the story of San Antonio include seeking more Latino experts to offer insight, being more present in more of our city’s neighborhoods and covering more stories that matter to Latinos in San Antonio.
Since starting our final tracking period on Aug. 1, we’ve made great progress toward our goal with 41% of our sources identifying as Latino.
Though we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, we know there’s still a lot of work to do. We want our journalism to better serve San Antonio and we know that means doing the work to make sure the people we talk to for our stories reflect our city.
Our team has committed to the process and we are using real metrics and proactive strategies to make progress in the way we cover this city.
We will continue to emphasize spending time at community events and neighborhood meetings that deepen our understanding of this city and we will continue to listen to the needs of our community. If you know of a story we’re missing, we encourage you to reach out to a San Antonio Report journalist and tell us about it.
This work is not just the right thing to do, it is a real step toward fixing some of journalism’s biggest problems, including the fact that news outlets have not always accurately reflected the communities they are tasked with serving.
As a nonprofit newsroom, we have an incredible opportunity to think about the news differently, including our responsibility to produce coverage that is not just factually accurate but is also demographically representative. If you only cover a neighborhood when a crime or similar event happens, it’s no surprise you have a hard time building trust — a common refrain we heard on the listening tour.
There are powerful stories taking place all across this city every day, in every zip code, every council district and every community. At the San Antonio Report, we are trying to tell as many of them as we can.
