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Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at NHPR

NHPR’s mission commits us to telling the stories of our changing state. That requires our organization and our journalism to reflect – and embrace – the increasingly diverse perspectives of people across New Hampshire. It also requires us to model inclusion in our sources, in the voices we lift, in our reporting and in the conversations we conduct; in the makeup of our staff, Board of Trustees and Community Advisory Board, and in the ways we spend money and conduct our business. Equity and inclusion must be guiding values in how the people of NHPR conduct themselves and our operations.

Moreover, because NHPR produces content for national audiences, we must think beyond our state boundaries and aspire in our nationally-focused work to reflect and embrace the full diversity of America.

NHPR operates on the lands of the Wabanaki, Abenaki, Pennacook, Pequawket, Pentucket, Pawtucket, and Agawam peoples. For more information on and a map of tribal lands, visit Native-Land.ca.

Jump to staff demographics | Jump to source demographics

To these ends, NHPR recognizes six pillars of diversity in its work: cultural and ethnic diversity, generational diversity, regional diversity, socioeconomic diversity, gender diversity and diversity of perspectives. We actively seek Trustees, Community Advisory Board members and staff who embody all these aspects of diversity; they enrich our thinking and help ensure that our work reflects multiple perspectives.

To help realize this vision, it has long been - and remains - the policy of NHPR to provide equal opportunity, prohibit discrimination and combat sexual and other forms of harassment. We have further committed to becoming an affirmatively anti-racist organization. In all of these areas, we forbid retaliation against any member of our staff for raising concerns.

NHPR’s trustees and management pledge to hold themselves accountable to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion by establishing a DEI strategic plan and making regular, public reports of the organization’s performance.


NHPR Staff Demographics

Part of our commitment to increasing diversity at New Hampshire Public Radio is being transparent about our own numbers — not just the voices in our journalism, but the people who create and support it. It is important that the people of NHPR reflect the communities we serve; our journalism is only made better with a greater diversity of experiences and perspectives in the process.

In order to evaluate ourselves on our commitments – which pledge that NHPR’s staff will be at least as diverse as our state* - we need to know where we are. With that objective in mind, we have begun conducting biannual, point-in-time surveys of staff on selected demographics and sharing the aggregated results here. The most recent survey was conducted for staff employed at NHPR on July 1, 2023; the next survey will be conducted for staff employed January 1, 2024. The following chart compares data from July 1, 2023 (red) with January 1, 2023 (blue).

*For benchmarking, the 2020 U.S. Census found that New Hampshire’s population was 88.3% white, 5.6% multi-racial, 4.3% Latino or Hispanic, 2.6% Asian, 1.5% Black, and 0.2% American Indian or Alaska Native.


NHPR Source Demographics

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.

Note: This quarter (Q4 2023) introduces the category of "reporter/producer unable to ask." There are situations - public meetings, teleconferences, etc. - where the ability to follow up with a source quoted may not be available, and this new category provides a distinction from "reporter/producer did not ask."

To view past source demographic data, click or tap here.


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