Journalism’s great strength is in its ability to hold the powerful to account. For too long, however, that power has been tempered by the fact that communities of color are often simply written out of or represented incorrectly in news coverage. This great sin of omission is something that we are only now beginning to confront.
The Observer believes that we have a responsibility to do better when it comes to engaging with communities of color. And so, for the next 11 months, thanks to funding from the Google GNI Innovation Challenge, we’ll be working to try and fix that.
Our goal is to embed ourselves deep in eight communities of color across Texas. To do it, we’ll be reaching out to build relationships in places between newsrooms and residents that simply have not existed before. For starters, we’ll be in Bastrop, Nacogdoches, the Rio Grande Valley, and the Alabama-Coushatta Nation. We’ll be listening and engaging with local leaders and residents , to figure out what their media needs are, and, when we can, help spur broader factual information sharing within communities.
