Commitment to Diversity
Diversity as both guiding practice and ingrained philosophy.
When it comes to managing The Standard’s commitment to diversity, I have come to view diversity as both a practice and a philosophy. In The Standard, we are aiming to amplify diversity in a community that lacks diversity in many ways. This takes not just representation, but active empowerment, involving raising the voices of our staff and seeking diversity in our sources and community engagement.
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When it comes to DEI, the first step is internal - we need to constantly ask ourselves how we can foster an environment where our staff members feel their identities are valued. This will not only impact the individual members of our staff and community as a whole but also our coverage - if people feel safe, they will be more open to writing about issues, identities, and communities that are important to them. Throughout my time as EIC, our staff has published stories on misogyny, anxiety disorders, immigration, the Israel-Hamas war, Latin-American culture, and socio-economic status within our community; stories writers were passionate to write, and felt safe reporting on, increasing the diversity of our coverage from within.
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Next, is awareness and action. Data collected by our DEI Editor has allowed our managing team to analyse patterns of representation and create tangible goals for our publication when it comes to diversity. This is a conscious awareness of what we are covering and who we are featuring. It takes personal reflection and reflection as a staff, and then active empowerment, covering groups and amplifying voices that are underrepresented in our community.
As a reporter, editor and now editor-in-chief, I am constantly viewing stories through the lens of diversity - understanding what perspectives are missing, how accurately they are being represented and what the implications of the story will be. I wholeheartedly believe diversity cannot be removed from journalism; in order to practice true journalism, one must practice diversity. If journalism is to attempt to capture and reflect an accurate and holistic picture of the world, that mission cannot be fulfilled by exclusion or selectivity. Truth cannot exist in exclusion.
In my time as a student journalist, I have often written pieces that require me to reflect on what voices are present and what voices are absent. As an editor, there have been many times when pieces are submitted to me with an imbalance of genders, perspectives, ethnicities or ages. Whether this is a result of writers simply overlooking their source diversity, convenience interviewing, or an unconscious bias, it is my role as an external perspective to highlight these gaps and make sure all of our content is respectful, accurate, and reflective of our communities and the multiplicity it contains.
Diversity through coverage
This piece was inspired by a notable gap in our publications coverage. I had realized that The Standard hadn't published an interview-based story on the LGBTQ+ community in five years, the last piece published on the topic having been written in 2020 on the school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance club. Never had we written about homophobia, a shocking fact considering how often we write about sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination present at our school.
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This story included 10 sources, including faculty, administration and students from all grade levels. Through this piece, my editor-in-chief at the time, Oskar, and I, worked to represent and give voice to the stories of a severely underrepresented community that has often experienced exclusion and discrimination in the High School, and is rarely included in our coverage.
This piece was published in our Election Special print edition, before the 2024 presidential election. Our school was experiencing high tensions and a lack of productive dialogue around current events. Political discussion was highly taboo in our community, as we had a history of teachers and students being penalized for expressing their political opinions.
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Through this piece, we wanted to put voice to an active silence and self-censorship present in our community. At our school and within our publication, conservative-leaning voices are less represented than liberal perspcetives. In this piece, we interviewed students from all over the political spectrum on their experiences expressing their opinions. Through seeking out these diverse perspectives, a story was formed, sharing how self-censorship and backlash prevails in our community for people of all political leanings: conservative students feeling like a silenced minority, experiencing intense reactions at their opinions, and liberal students feeling belittled and diminished; both the victims of stereotypes representing larger polarization and lack of healthy dialogue at the school.
These stories were a series of profiles, including a piece on Social Studies Teacher Shrita Gajendragadkar, and her experience excavating in Athens in reflection with her South Asian culture; Social Studies Teacher Yonsoo Kang and his podcast AuthEthnicity, discussing the experiences of Asian Americans and social justice; English Teacher Alissa Mears and her persuit of feminism through writing; and Science Teacher Kara Anderson and her experience being both a mother and a scientist.
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These stories were a joy to write. Learning about these often unexpected experiences deepened my appreciation for my teachers and solidified my belief that everyone has a story. It was wonderful to share a slice of these narratives with my community and to highlight the often-overlooked context and complexity behind the faces students pass in the hallways every day. These profiles reflect the diverse range of life-experiences and identities that make up our community.
Attending a private school can often feel like certain opportunities and privileges are normalized, creating a culture of expectation for those without the financial means to access them. My editor-in-chief at the time and I wanted to write a story that addressed both this exclusion and the myths and stigma around private university counselling at our school. While writing this story, we interviewed students of a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and experiences, giving voice to demographics and conversations that often feel stigmatised or shameful in our school.
In my freshman year, the school went through a period where 10+ books containing LGBTQ+ themes were removed from the library shelves in response to parent concerns. In light of this, I wrote an opinion advocating for student allyship with the LGBTQ+ community at my school, a community often ignored, excluded and now attacked. I felt a deep personal connection with this story. This piece was the first piece on LGBTQ+ topics published in The Standard in three years. In Grade 9, it was my first time using The Standard as an outlet to use my voice for advocacy, and it felt deeply empowering to publish a piece that gave light to a subject that was so underrepresented and excluded that I cared for so strongly.
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Diversity through practice
Community Feedback Survey
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, my co-editor-in-chief and I sent out a community-wide survey to gain feedback on our publication before making changes for the 2025-26 school year. Included in this survey were questions on diversity and representation. Our goal with this survey was to be able to recieve feedback on our role as a publication aiming to amplify student voice and accurately reflect our community's diversity, and then implement new practices to make sure we are fully aligned with this mission. From this feedback, we gathered that many of our journalistic practices are in line with making our community feel accurately represented, while there is still room for improvement. We worked to improve our representation of student diversity and student voices by expanding our DEI initiatives.
One way I lead our staff in alignment with our commitment to diversity was co-ordinating quarterly Diversity Reports. My co-editor-in-chief and I manage a DEI editor, who collects data on our coverage and sends out source intake forms to all of our sources for feedback once an article is published. I help organise a review of these analytics on a quarterly basis, where they are presented to our editorial board. After viewing this data, we can identify any patterns - for example, an imbalance between the grades or genders of sources, and set goals for addressing any issues as an editorial board to spread as a publication. This type of self-reflection and constant adaptation of our practices is something I believe is wholeheartedly critical to a publication if it aspires to accurately reflect and serve a community, and is a practice we have adopted to keep diversity at the heart of our work.
Rainbow list and source diversity
Along with our quarterly diversity reports, we maintain a rainbow list to assist us with source tracking. In the past, we have noticed certain students being interviewed numerous times on various topics, while a majority of our student population's voices remain notably absent from our coverage. In order to maximise our coverage and include a wider and more encompassing variety of voices in our publication, we use the rainbow list to make sure certain students aren’t being overly-interviewed. As a reporter, I consistently refer to the rainbow list, ensuring my sources have not been extensively interviewed in The Standard and actively looking to interview people who's voices are less visible in our publication. As editor-in-chief, I use this list when editing, making sure each piece is working to better represent the diversity of experiences and perspectives present in our community.
Editing for diversity
Each piece published in our print publication goes through a round of DEI edits by our DEI editor, managed and facilitated by me and my deputy editor-in-chief. At the end of these edits, our DEI editor sends us a summary of the major style and inclusion-related edits she made. I use this feedback to not only reflect on my own editing and learn for the next time I have to edit a story, but also to help us grow as a publication to be more efficient at covering topics relating to DEI thoroughly, respectfully and accurately. At the end of each print cycle, this feedback is relayed to our section editors, so they can grow to become stronger at identifying DEI-related style edits and grow the awareness and reflection strong DEI work requires.
Diversity through dialogue
As editor-in-chief, I have worked to foster publication-wide dialogue to encourage self-awareness and consistent reflection on diversity and inclusion. Our newsroom is constantly discussing various ways to increase our impact and ensure we are accurately reflecting the rich diversity of our international community. One way we practice this is through progress checks post-print distribution, where two of the standards we hold ourselves to are “content variety,” which includes source and coverage diversity and representation, and “impact.” During these reflections, I facilitate dialogue among our 18-member editorial board and encourage each of their unique perspectives to be shared and grown upon. Through this discussion, we have celebrate ways we approached this goal and acknowledge areas for future improvement. ​
Editorials
Further, our editorial board looks to amplify the voices of students, hold members of our community accountable and encourage discussion around social issues through our editorials. Throughout my time on the editorial board, we have written editorials on socio-economic exclusion, on celebrating diversity of cultures in our community and on youth activism. These pieces bring light to issues of exclusion or the presence of bias within our community, and provide a platform for the students on the editorial board to voice their observations and bring light to issues that are not getting coverage or are not being represented in our community.
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Moreover, facilitating these discussions on social issues that prevail in our school has allowed me to create a space for the board to practice healthy dialogue, a skill necessary for a publication looking to carry out diverse, equitable and inclusive practices. Through our editorial board discussions, we carry extra conciousness and consideration of our role and power in the school community, and bring attention to how we can use this voice to emphasize underrepresented groups or issues.
Recruitment
As editor-in-chief, I have had the pleasure of running the The Standard Club - an extracurricular club that allows any and all students to be trained and publish content on our website. As The Standard is a curricular program, there is limited space in our classes, and thus, not all students can be on our staff. This lack of accessibility was at odds with our values of inclusion and diverse participation - after all, diversity comes from within a staff, and limiting who can participate in our publication felt both undemocratic and counterintuitive to our mission.
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Running the The Standard Club this year, I have been able to work with students from across all four grades to teach them the foundations of journalism and equip them with the skills necessary for them to express their interests and explore our school as reporters. These students have gone on to publish pieces - opinions on hobbies they are passionate about, feature pieces on student groups and reviews of books they are loving, for example - that add to the richness of our coverage and the diversity of our staff. Making our publication open to anyone was a critical step in ensuring all voices are welcome and have access to our platform.