August 2021
Dear Mount Holyoke community,
It has been a little over a year since Mount Holyoke News released its anti-racism plan with the intent of completing our goals in May 2021. In this following letter, we will walk through our successes, shortcomings and steps taken to diversify MHN and dismantle the systemic racism within our institution.
To our constitution, we added this encapsulation of our values. It is from this statement that we build our goals for the following year: “Mount Holyoke News is committed to publishing strictly anti-discriminatory and transparently-produced content. We have a zero-tolerance policy on harassment, both inside and outside of the organization. All content affiliated with the Mount Holyoke News and its staff must be free of discrimination including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.”
Our original list of actions for the 2020-21 academic year was as follows:
Diversifying MHN
Training new members and editors
Amending the MHN constitution to include a statement about MHN’s commitment to publishing anti-racist and transparently-produced content
Providing an educational journalistic resource to the college through a mentorship program run by the executive and editorial board members.
Changing the editorial process by lengthening the span of the news week
Transparency in the executive board
Updating the MHN’s AP Style specifics and copy editing process
Reevaluating what it means for something to be “newsworthy”
This plan was originally written in July 2020. During this time, we all still believed that we would be returning to campus and in-person publication for at least some point in the 2020-21 year. Additionally, this plan was written and released before any members of the executive board had attended the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training required during the 2020-21 academic year. A key goal for the end of 2021 is to have all members of our executive board attend this training. We will also be reevaluating our anti-racism plan more fully in September with our entire staff once we are able to meet in person.
We are proud of the work we have done so far and the steps we have taken to accomplish the beginnings of our goals. We are also committed to reevaluating and reorganizing our goals for the betterment of the Mount Holyoke News as a paper and as a community in the 2021-22 academic year.
Places of success
This year, we succeeded in reevaluating what it means for a story to be newsworthy. This was most notable in the Arts & Entertainment, Environmental and Books sections. In these sections, we made efforts to cover not only breaking news, but human interest pieces, fun reads and more art, especially made by the MHC community. This type of reporting brought us closer to accurately representing the Mount Holyoke community, because we were focusing on more aspects and more demographics of it. The Books section, for example, highlighted more writers of color than ever before.
Setting the tone for this reporting year, our first term of summer reporting centered around the Black Lives Matter Movement and COVID-19. These focal points showcased our values in action.
Additionally, we began work on eliminating as much bias as possible during our copy editing process. This happened first with updates to our style guide, which was for the first time made viewable on our website. This is important because it publicly shows how MHN uses language and meaning, and what words and grammatical structures we use to discuss topics. For example, in 2020, we made it our official style to capitalize the names of races, such as adding a capital “B” to “Black.”
Using Google Docs this year also allowed for greater transparency in the editing process, enabling org members to see all changes made to articles, as well as who made them. Moving forward, we hope to expand our use of Google Docs, allowing copy editors to work collaboratively and check each other’s work for biases.
Another success this year was increasing transparency between the executive board and the rest of MHN. To do this, we opened all meetings to the entire staff and sent our meeting minutes each week detailing who spoke and what was discussed.
Also, on the executive board level, we updated the constitution to include our anti-racist statement (as seen above), which was a goal listed in the original plan. We additionally added a list of values for our organization to follow, beginning with anti-racism. Our working list of values is as follows: Inclusivity, Diversity, Fair representation, Anti-racism, Education, Transparency, Integrity, Excellence in reporting, Equity, Accessibility, Anti-discrimination and Accountability.
Places of continued work
Our efforts this year to diversify MHN were a strong start, but there is still work to be done. At the beginning of the year, we advertised all open positions to cultural houses and organizations on campus. This diversified the demographics of those who applied during this year by both race and ethnicity. Additionally, for the first time, MHN accepted all applications that came into our inbox with the goal of training those who applied to our staff in hopes of making MHN more accessible and less daunting to join. We are committed to being a welcoming place where students can come to write, edit, draw and get a feel for the news world.
Continuing to diversify MHN is our main goal for the fall 2021 semester. Over the final weeks of the summer, we are planning to continue reaching out to cultural houses and organizations as well as finding more ways to get in touch with the entire student body at Mount Holyoke.
In our original plan, we discussed updating the publication schedule to expand the length of our news week. This would allow for more time and discussion between the editor-in-chief, managing editor of content, editors and writers. This did not happen during this past academic year because of how strenuous the year was, owing to our unusual schedule. Starting in fall 2021, we will be lengthening our news week by one day. We are still working to strike a balance between the work put in by the editors and writers throughout the week and the work done by the publishing team on publishing nights. Ultimately, we are all students at the end of the day, and a shift in timeline needs to be beneficial across the board, to both the writing and the people within our organization.
In light of the limited availability of journalism education at Mount Holyoke, we hope to make MHN an educational resource for the community as well as a publication. In the chaos of this year, we are still trying to navigate how to best become a resource for the MHC community while also balancing our own lives as students. We hope to tap into alum resources more during this coming academic year. While continuing to accept all applications, we hope to be able to educate anyone interested in journalistic practices.
One aspect of education at MHN is editor training, which we are continually working to adjust and expand. During this coming semester, a tentative goal is to provide anti-racism training to all members of the editorial board. We also will be working to create training materials for all sections and all roles on the paper. This will be a long and ongoing process, but with the work of the full organization, it should be in reach for the following year. Training responsibility will be shared by all members of the paper, which will make Mount Holyoke News a more collaborative, accessible and community-oriented work environment.
While this letter does not address each point made in our original plan, it talks through a majority of our original ideas and where they now stand as far as becoming a reality. Mount Holyoke News is fully committed to continuing our anti-racist work through the 2021-22 academic year. A full update to our anti-racism plan will be released by the end of September, and will be published in the following edition as well as updated on our website.