Host staff conversations about how you cover tough issues

Published on October 1, 2025October 1, 2025 by Joy Mayer | Reading Time: 3 minutes

Over the last two editions of Trust Tips, we’ve talked about how to build connections and trust among your staff members and how to gauge your team’s comfort with speaking up around tough issues.

Those were a warm-up to today’s topic: talking as a team about how well you’re covering the most difficult topics of our time. 

Journalists show up to work as human beings, and we all live in a charged, polarized environment that too often dissuades us from interrogating our own assumptions or challenging orthodoxies. Yet as documenters and storytellers, we have an extra responsibility to see things clearly. We need to tap into our innate curiosity and engage with ideas respectfully — in service of more accurate, nuanced coverage.

Immigration. Political violence. Systemic racism. Guns. Transgender rights. Abortion. If your goal is to provide coverage that is hearable by people with a range of views, then you need teams who can thoughtfully discuss that range of views. You need colleagues who can flag problems and navigate the tension between ideas. You need people on your staff who will give each other the benefit of the doubt and listen as much as they talk.

What do these conversations look like?

Here’s an example from a recent newsroom workshop I led with Eve Pearlman of Spaceship Media. We tasked a small group in a large newsroom with assessing the staff’s coverage of immigration and deportations.

They were asked to discuss questions like these when considering their coverage:

• What experiences of people across our community do we find ourselves naturally reflecting well, and which might we be missing?
• On a topic that is too often painted as black or white, pro or against, how can we reflect a range of views? How can our newsroom strive for deeper, more nuanced coverage of the impact of the current administration’s immigration policies?

They wove in these questions about their newsroom conversations:

• What are the inherent tensions involved in this topic? What values come into play as we discuss them?
• How can we tap into the wisdom across our newsroom? What perspectives/experiences from the staff could and should be represented in the conversation?

The issues and questions in your newsroom might be different ones. It might also be that your coverage is focused on superserving a specific audience and you are therefore not as concerned with being relevant to or hearable by a wide range of people. This would look different for you.

But if your goal is to reach and serve as many people in your community as possible, it’s worth investing in discussions about how well you are reflecting their experiences.

Regular readers will have heard us say before that one of our core questions for journalists is: Who feels seen and understood by your coverage, and who instead feels neglected or misunderstood by it? If we want to perform a true public service — and if we want to grow our audience — it feels crucial for us to lean into curiosity about that.

And inviting colleagues to weigh in on each other’s coverage is a great way to take advantage of the experience of your team.

How can you host these conversations with your colleagues?

Think about how these conversations might happen in your newsroom. Who should be there? Specific beats or teams, maybe? Or just the leadership team? Are you set up for success, with some established, rehearsed rules of engagement and respect that will encourage an honest exchange of ideas?

If your team does this well, I’d love to hear about it. Please reach out and let me know what the ingredients for those conversations are. 

If you could use support, we can help. We can construct a safe container in which constructive dialogue is more likely to occur. We can lay the groundwork, moderate, and follow up. See our Dimensions of Difference training options for more information.

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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.