Let's Do It Better! Workshop on Journalism, Race & Ethnicity

Race remains our nation's most enduring dilemma.   Journalism, as a special calling, has a responsibility to help society deal more honestly and effectively with racial and ethnic issues.   The Let’s Do It Better! Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity was developed in 1999 as an innovative idea to prod better performance in hiring but especially to establish benchmarks on how to tell all of America’s stories.  

Arlene Morgan and award-winner Henry Louis Gates, Jr.


Let's Do It Better! panel
Photos/Rebecca Castillo

The program was developed by Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler, then a professor of journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, with a simple premise: promote best practices on the coverage of race and ethnicity to provide editors with guidelines on how to tackle society’s most complex topic.

The Ford Foundation, under the leadership of Jon Funabiki, the former deputy director of media and culture programs, bought the idea, enabling the school to develop a two-step process that involves both “best practitioners” and “gate keepers” in recognizing achievements that were worth teaching.  

The first workshop was attended by 17 "gatekeepers" and 15 "best practitioners" plus an assorted number of facilitators who had worked with Gissler to develop the program.   Some of those facilitators and subsequent advisers—Walt Swanston, diversity director of NPR, Victor Merina, a fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute on Juvenile Justice, Keith Woods, dean of The Poynter Institute, Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, and Charlotte Hall, editor of the Orlando Sentinel – are still stalwart supporters of the program.  

Since that initial workshop, more than 40 percent of those gatekeepers have subsequently led their newsrooms to produce award-winning work in the competition while other stories went on to win some of journalism’s most prestigious awards.   One story, “The Tale of Two Cultures” by Elizabeth Llorente of The Record in Bergen, N.J., was the focus of a Michelle McQueen Martin segment on ABC’s Nightline.   The “Rim of the New World” series by Anne Hull of The Washington Post was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Stephen Magagnini’s “Orphans of History” won the ASNE Writing Award for Diversity.   Another series, “Enrique’s Journey,” won the Pulitzer for Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nazario, while “The Troubles at King/Drew” captured the Pulitzer’s Public Service Gold Medal in 2005.  

Based on the success of the pilot, Ford continued to fund the Let’s Do It Better! program, making it the crux of the school’s new Continuing Education division.   Arlene Morgan, former assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer who worked with Gissler in developing the program, joined Columbia in August 2000 to direct and expand the project into a more formal awards competition.  

Let's Do It Better! panel
Photo/Rebecca Castillo

This workshop has fulfilled the dream that Gissler and Morgan envisioned of providing a “safe space” for journalists to focus on improving their story telling—an ingredient that is often lost in industry diversity training programs.   While the newsroom numbers are vital for change, the job of the journalist is to tell the story—completely and accurately.   This can only be accomplished when journalists reach out beyond their own comfort zone, to listen to and find compassion in people who are not like them.   The Let’s Do It Better! program illustrates that this type of story telling, one that covers multiple perspectives, is everyone’s job, no matter what race, creed, class or ethnic background.  

Arlene Morgan,
Director
The Let’s Do It Better! Workshop On Journalism, Race and Ethnicity

The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity