Three years later: How KUOW is tracking source diversity
Three years later: How KUOW is tracking source diversity
In 2021, Impact Architects worked with Seattle-based radio station KUOW to help develop a sustained source diversity tracking process as part of the outlet’s efforts to include voices from communities across the Seattle area. This work included a retroactive source diversity and content audit to provide a baseline of sources and topics included in KUOW’s content.
The 2021 work highlighted areas where KUOW was succeeding in including diverse voices in their coverage, opportunities, and the topics that appeared most frequently in reporting. The audit helped IA identify communities that were underrepresented in the sample content relative to Seattle and King County Census data, such as Hispanic and Latino sources. It also indicated how representation fell across different topic areas, such as how Black sources made up 13% of sources in the sample, but were concentrated in content focused on specific topics — namely, in arts/culture/sports and racial justice stories.
In 2024, we again partnered with KUOW to explore the station’s existing best practices and processes for source tracking in order to make recommendations for streamlining the process and adding additional tracked content categories. While we conducted a retroactive source audit of stories from a six-month sample of 2024 newscasts, a content category for which the station does not currently track sources, this was to help inform our recommendations for adding newscasts to the categories of tracked content rather than to establish a robust baseline.
The analysis of this data, in conjunction with conversations with KUOW staff, enabled us to provide suggestions for further development of source tracking at the outlet. First, we identified common questions about the tracking process within the newsroom and compiled a list of potential topics to address in newsroom guidelines and goal-setting. We found that staff had questions about specific tracking scenarios, such as whether to track secondary sources or whether to track source information for anyone that informed a story, even if they were not ultimately quoted. Second, we redesigned the internal Looker Studio Dashboard of source data to make it easier to create crosstabs and compare to regional demographics.
Overall, this re-engagement, three years later, highlighted the importance of updating guidelines and best practices to increase consistency and revisiting visual presentation of data to ensure greater usability. It also outlined the shifting role of retroactive source audits in our work — rather than just providing a snapshot or baseline of sources, they can help inform an expansion or new phase of sustained source diversity tracking at an outlet already engaged in that work.
Identifying source demographics can help newsrooms understand things like the voices they rely on most in their coverage, how representative their sources are when compared to the makeup of the communities they serve, and what communities are underrepresented in their content. This kind of work is especially important for newsrooms working to amplify the stories of underrepresented communities and outlets focused on community-centered storytelling. We’re excited to engage in similar partnerships in the future, utilizing retroactive source diversity audits to inform recommendations and updates for newsrooms with established source-tracking processes — or to help outlets launch new, sustained source-tracking efforts.