In keeping with our commitment to becoming a more diverse and inclusive news organization, NHPR is making regular reports to the public on diversity in our journalism.
Our content teams – the NHPR newsroom and the people who make our podcasts – have been tracking the race/ethnicity and gender of the sources cited or guests included in their work. We began a new method of data collection in October 2021, and in doing so switched from tracking our sources’ gender to determining and tracking the pronouns our sources use to describe themselves. We are careful not to conflate the two, and we recognize that we cannot assume one from the other. But using the correct pronouns in our reporting is really important; misgendering does harm to our trans and non-binary neighbors.
We collect this data and publish it out of a recognition that, historically, our content has not adequately reflected the diversity of the people whose stories we aim to tell – of New Hampshire, in the case of the newsroom, and of the United States, in the case of our nationally distributed podcasts.
The point of tracking sources and voices is not to meet quotas – we have none – but to focus our journalists’ attention on steadily increasing the breadth of our coverage. Our hope is that the richer journalism we’re producing breeds deeper understanding of the challenges our state and society confront and helps build communities more able to address those challenges together.
If you have questions or suggestions, please contact jschachter@nhpr.org.
