Counting on Diversity: Approaches to Tracking Sources in U.S. News Organizations

Growing numbers of U.S. news organizations have begun systematically tracking the diversity of the sources quoted or featured in their coverage in efforts to address long-standing problems of inequity in their newsrooms and reporting. These efforts have received only limited attention from scholars. This descriptive paper takes stock of these initiatives and offers a typology of three approaches to source tracking: what we call retroactive source auditing, real-time source tracking, and automated source monitoring. We discuss practical and analytic trade-offs associated with each approach including the characteristics that can be tracked, how well integrated approaches are with newsroom workflows, how each involves different considerations with respect to how data are handled, and the actionability of that data on news production practices. As more and more newsrooms consider implementing initiatives designed to track diversity in sourcing patterns, we argue for the importance of further scholarship evaluating the impact these approaches may have on journalistic practice as well as the content of news coverage.