KUOW: Source & Content Diversity Audit
KUOW commissioned Impact Architects to conduct a retroactive source and content diversity audit in an effort to set a baseline of voices, perspectives, and topics covered in its reporting and content. The findings and recommendations will be used to inform ongoing KUOW editorial strategy as well as to contribute to planning for ongoing source diversity tracking.
The audit included six programming areas over the 2020 calendar year: The digital presentation of News/Enterprise stories from the KUOW newsroom, Seattle Now, The Record, Speakers Forum, and the podcasts Radioactive and The Wild. The audit coded each story’s topics and sources based on standard demographic categories, together with the addition of a “community” category, which included populations with a significant presence (>1%) in the Seattle area (i.e., Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Horn of Africa). This was particularly important to KUOW as the organization strives to include perspectives and experiences from across Seattle, including immigrant communities that would be lost in basic coding for race and ethnicity.
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Full Report: KUOW Source & Content Diversity Audit
We conducted a source and content audit for KUOW public radio in Seattle, WA. This work created custom categories for source diversity, including community of belonging, to deeply understand KUOW’s coverage and inclusion of community members across greater Seattle. -
Blog: How KUOW and IA created “community of belonging” for a source and content diversity audit
While a “community of belonging” research category resulted in interesting findings, just as important is the fact that it surfaced new ways for the KUOW team to think about reporting, going forward.