Most Sacramento Bee sources are white and male, audit finds. How we’ll reflect our community better

An internal audit of stories published over a three-month period by The Sacramento Bee found its sources were disproportionately white and male, compared with the demographics of the paper’s coverage area.

Of the sources for whom race or ethnicity was known, most were white, even though white people make up less than half the population in Sacramento County and in California as a whole.

Men and boys comprised about 75% of sources, while women and girls made up about 25%. There were no known non-binary, gender fluid or gender non-conforming sources. Data for transgender representation was inconclusive.

The audit was identified as a newsroom priority in 2019 to evaluate the diversity of The Bee’s sources. Using the audit results as a guide, the newsroom is working to make its coverage more representative of the region it covers, including by setting new coverage goals and expanding coverage of communities.

The results of the audit were shared internally with The Bee’s team of reporters, editors and photographers earlier this year. Bee journalists also shared the results publicly in a forum with the social justice non-profit Sol Collective and planned further public sessions before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

With national attention once again focusing on inequities within our region and nation, The Bee is sharing the results with readers as it values transparency. The newspaper is in the beginning stages of a second audit in the months ahead, to track progress against initial findings.

What the source audit shows

Bee journalists audited stories published on randomly selected days from January through March of 2019, encompassing 230 published text stories and 84 videos and photos. Auditors compiled data on sources’ identities, including their race, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation and geographic location. They also analyzed which types of stories those sources appeared in and what role the sources played in the stories.

The audit revealed how The Bee has fallen short in representing the diversity of the community we cover.

For example, white people make up about 44% of the population in Sacramento County. But most sources were white in almost every story theme category. The only exception was stories on race and immigration, where most of our sources were Black.

For arts and entertainment, all sources categorized as the subject of the story or the person doing the action in the story were white.

In crime and breaking news stories, most of the doers and subjects were Black, while most experts and commentators were white. All of the sources categorized as “affected” in those stories were Black or Latino.

Most of the doers and subjects in our sports stories were Black, while most of the experts and commentators were white. Sports stories had the largest gender representation gap, with only 5% female representation compared to 95% male representation.

About 68% of sources for whom political party was known were Democrats, 20% were Republicans and 10% were registered without party preference. In California, about 45% of registered voters are Democrats, 24% are Republicans and 25% are registered without party preference.

How The Bee is working to improve

As part of its effort to improve the diversity of its coverage, the newsroom has established a Community to Newsroom Pipeline aimed at publishing the work of young people from underrepresented communities. The Bee secured a $21,000 grant from Facebook to support that project, which will ensure that writers, editors and others working on the project are fairly compensated. Through the project, The Bee has published first-person accounts of the protests after George Floyd’s death and partnered with emerging news organization Black Zebra to cover the protests.

The Bee has also been working to improve the diversity of its coverage through its Tipping Point series, which covers how Sacramento is changing as it grows and economic inequality widens.

In July, The Bee announced the formation of the Community Voices Lab, which is a team of four journalists focused on equity issues in the Sacramento region.

“Sacramento is among the most diverse cities in the country and that should be reflected in its leading news organization,” Bee President and Editor Lauren Gustus said. “In the last year, at least half of The Bee’s hires were diverse or female. And we remain committed to adding valuable, varied perspectives to our newsroom leadership team and in our reporting.”

Methodology

To ensure accuracy of the data, auditors followed a no-assumptions policy. Auditors were asked to mark identifiers as “unknown” if there was no clear proof in the story or secondary research as to how a source identifies.

For example, auditors did not assume a source’s race based on their appearance, instead relying on information in the story or other reliable sources, such as the source’s professional biography or social media accounts. If no race was reported in the story or elsewhere, auditors categorized the source’s race as “unknown.”

Overall, auditors categorized about half of all identifiers as unknown.

Former Bee staffer Akira Olivia Kumamoto launched the audit in 2019. An initial group of 20 staffers and interns spent several months auditing stories for this project. The Bee will train reporters to audit their own work.