Conventional coverage of race, gender, class, and sexuality does not actively engage readers in other forms of media outside of traditional long form of journalistic writing, making it easy to ignore.

What's Being Done?

The news sites that you look to include these types of issues, participate in marginalizing the voices of people of color, women, LGBTQ community, etc., using labeled categories as a form of othering. For instance, the Huffington Post gave us Huff Voices. It is a designated section on their website specifically for these marginalized groups under the category ‘Communities’. They have sections such as Black Voices, Latino Voices, Asian Voices, Queer Voices, and Women. While this gives a space for these groups to critically engage in conversation on these issues, it does so in a way that isolates these pieces from being featured with the regular news content.

Real-World

One good example is the podcast ‘Still Processing’ created by the New York Times, described on their website as “A culture conversation with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham.” It is run by two people of color, and tackles a myriad of issues outside of just race in an unconventional way.

Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham of Still Processing by The New York Times

This ethical problem creates a lack of representation outside of traditional forms of media. If we are ever going to be able to bridge the gap and understand people outside of our race, gender, sexuality, etc. we need to be able to have the proper representation where it matters most.

Entertainment media (ie. movies, television) has made more progress with this than journalism has. We as journalists need to catch up on representation through alternative forms of media because we set the example for what people view as the truth.

HuffPost Communities Section

We realize that the journalism industry has already begun to address the problem that we’re attempting to solve. There has been a small increase in representation of unique and marginalized stories being told at different publications.

Our solution to the overwhelming lack of representation in mixed media forms of journalism, is a series of podcasts on a news publication website that discuss more nuanced and complex aspects of social issues. Our solution will take the form of a website that includes original content that we will collect, as well as featured podcasts that already exist and are in the genre we mentioned. This site will function as a bit of a tool or resource primarily for young people with an interest in consuming news in different ways.

Our site will be targeted to people from ages 18 - 25 that are very curious and engaged with the world around them. Visitors to our site frequently use social media and are very conscious about their news diet and consumption. Our audience is people who are actively participating in social justice or have interest in it, as well as people who want to learn more about other cultures, gender bianaries, races, etc. This site will help bring podcasts that are tackling issues of culture and society in new ways to a wider audience. We are hoping that this will bring a better understanding between people from different backgrounds or groups and give a voice to the people who are typically cast into these marginalized groups.

Spotlight Podcast logo

Check out Spotlight right here

The title of our podcast is “Spotlight” to emphasize this as a platform that gives a stage to marginalized groups. Each podcast episode focuses on a different topic, and will feature one guest so that we can have a critical conversation that digs deep into the subject matter.

We want to emphasize the fact that one person’s story may not be the case for everyone, even within their community. With this in mind, some topics may come up again throughout the series because we want everyone to be able to be heard.

The homepage of our website will feature our logo/image for our podcast. Directly following that will be the general list of all of our podcasts that visitors can scroll through. The navigation bar will host a link to our about page, and a topics page where users can click on different tags and see what episodes are available within that topic.

Once you click on an episode, you will be directed from the homepage to the specific page for that episode. The title card will change to match an image that represents the topic we are discussing. The section underneath the audio will show a featured list of other podcasts that visitors can click the links to. This list will be featured on the homepage as well. The episode pages can also be reached from the Topics page as well, not just the homepage (as mentioned above).