Ask these questions in your morning news meeting

Published on March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 by Joy Mayer | Reading Time: 3 minutes

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Picture the table in your newsroom around which coverage decisions get made. I have questions about it:

• How well does the group reflect the lived experiences, values and views of your community?
• How often does someone offer a personal or secondhand perspective that is truly surprising?
• How often does an observation lead to the rethinking of a story?

At our best, newsroom teams can challenge each other’s work, offer differing perspectives and sharpen our coverage through discussion and debate. At our best, we hold each other accountable for fairness, nuance and depth.

Those factors are central to trust. We want the people we aim to serve to be able to hear our stories — to find them accessible, accurate and fair. Our Dimensions of Difference initiative aims to help journalists continually improve their coverage so more people feel seen and understood by it — and so more people can find it relatable and useful.

We work on fostering newsroom cultures in which staffers feel welcome to offer their own views or point out assumptions or biases they see in each other’s coverage. 

One way to accomplish that is to interrupt our routines by inviting colleagues to answer new questions.

4 questions to start asking

Let’s go back to the morning news meeting and that table (literal or metaphorical) where decisions get made. As editors take turns describing stories that are in the works, try asking these questions:

1. Who might feel neglected by this story? Whose voices might the community notice are absent?
2. Who might feel misrepresented by this story? Whose realities might contradict the picture we’re painting?
3. Are we reflecting nuance, not lazy narratives or stereotypes?
4. Will this story be hearable by a broad audience? Is there anything we should do or avoid to make that possible?

Create an environment in which anyone feels comfortable — or even rewarded for — speaking up. 

Try the questions out on one story a day, or on a couple stories a week. If your morning meeting seems like too big an ask, try it with a smaller team of curious, open-minded colleagues. 

Think about stories where you think you have the most growth potential. Who are you not reaching because your coverage feels out of touch or inaccurate, and which stories might represent the greatest potential to reach them? With which ongoing issues are you afraid you might just be preaching to the choir of like-minded community members rather than feeling accurate and useful to a more diverse swatch? 

Now, inviting staffers to speak candidly — especially about their own values and views — comes with a host of potential pitfalls. The last thing you want is to invite bravery and dissent and then see people penalized for it. A real newsroom effort in this area requires attentive, respectful leadership that pays attention to who feels able to speak up in the newsroom, especially across fault lines of age, gender, race and level of authority.

Diving into your newsroom’s dimensions of difference

Our Dimensions of Difference work (a partnership with Spaceship Media) walks through steps newsrooms can take to approach this work with care. If you’d like to talk about your goals or challenges with a member of our team, please hit reply and let us know how we can help.

And if you want to hear more about the four questions we posed today and how we came to them, you’re in luck — we held a webinar about that last week. Here’s a 27-minute walk-through of the ideas.

At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. Learn more about our work, vision and team. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, BlueSky and LinkedIn.