US newsrooms wrestle with how best to reflect the communities they cover

US news organisations that grappled with issues of race and bias in their coverage after the killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 have had to confront them again amid extensive coverage of Gabby Petito's disappearance this year.

Critics have noted that the young white woman received far more media attention than missing women of colour.

The 19th* co-founder Amanda Zamora and BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Mark Schoofs talked about these and other ways news organisations fall short on Thursday at the Reuters Next conference.

Zamora's news organisation is devoted to reporting on gender, politics and policy. She said it was formed in response to sexist media coverage of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in 2016. Legacy news organisations seeking to serve their communities need to go beyond hiring a diverse workforce, she said.

Newsrooms must "value their lived experiences, empower them to bring their identity to the table in conversations, as colleagues … to allow there to be tension?" Zamora said. "If you're building a diverse and intersectional newsroom, there's going to be these inherent tensions that are opportunities for growth."

BuzzFeed's Schoofs, whose newsroom pioneered a beat about the LGBTQ community, said his organization actively solicits community input with callouts on social media and invitations to readers to submit tips or additional information.

"It can be really inventive ways that you reach out to make sure that you're including different voices, so that you're actually asking people with different experiences to come and reach out to you," said Schoofs.

"We're specifically looking for people in particular communities that may not have interacted much with the press before, certainly not a national organisation like BuzzFeed News or the 19th or Reuters, to see if we can bring them into our journalism."

Asked about addressing blind spots in reporting, Zamora cited her work on a recent Aspen Institute report about information disorder, the increasing spread of false information including misinformation and disinformation.

"Sometimes we fixate so much on a surface level of political division and fighting that we miss what the underlying root cause of so much of that is – and a lot of it does come down to trauma between and among communities," said Zamora.

Schoofs urged journalists to challenge their assumptions and the things they take for granted. He cited the Belarus-Poland border crisis, which he described as "a manufactured crisis, very much focused on who is in and who is out based on their national identity, based on borders."