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Part 1: Introduction
 
Part 2: Pre-Planning
 
Part 3: Getting Started
 
Part 4: Structuring Stories
 
Part 5: Discussing Key Journalistic Themes
 
Part 6: In the Midst-Reporting
 
Part 7: Writing the Stories
 
Part 8: Coordinating the Series
 
Part 9: Editing the Stories Days
 
Part 10: Wrap-Up
 
Part 11: Maximizing the Impact and Follow-Up
 
Additional Resources
 
Broadcast Option
This handbook is based on a print model because the original project in Macedonia was carried out in the newspaper publishing sphere. However, it can be adapted to broadcast media: the issues are universal, and the teamwork among reporters will be required regardless of which medium is embraced.
 
Dialogue and Change
Long after the initial Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project is over, its aftermath will continue to be felt among local journalists, ethnic, and mainstream media outlets, ethnic organizations, and the general public. Clearly, one month of extensive work with local journalists cannot turn around distrust honed over years of conflict. But by developing reporters who can move easily across ethnic lines, the project sets the groundwork that begins the dialogue toward change.
 
Open Doors
By engaging a cross-section of leading ethnic minority organizations directly in a feature reporting proj-ect, the team reporting project will open new doors for those organiza-tions and provide important insight for the organizations in working with the media on a daily basis to get out their messages.
 
The Long Term
Since the initial projects in Macedonia, reporters from ethnic media who had previously interacted rarely with one another have discussed embarking on joint reporting projects. They have started sharing sources and serving as background sources for each other. They have learned and practiced Western-style methods of interviewing sources, plotting out stories, and writing them. They have worked across ethnic lines. And they have gained access to people, places, and scenes that would normally be off limits to them based on their individual ethnicity.
 
The Blueprint
Every country has distinct needs and concerns when it comes to the role of improved media coverage in helping resolve ethnic tension. Because Ameri-cans created the Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project, this handbook offers a blueprint based largely on journalistic theories and conflict resolution tools that have been researched, field tested, and found successful in U.S. newspa-pers. (While the project organizers are aware that the United States is far from solving its own problems with race and media representation, they believe in this model and know it best.)
   
 
How to Conduct a Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project
Part 1: Introduction
By Denise Hamilton
Center for War, Peace, and the News Media
Copyright © 1997 New York University
Summary
Multi-ethnic team reporting: what is it?
Project background
What are the project goals?
Who does the project target?
 
 
Summary
In the post Cold War era, ethnic conflict has become the biggest threat to world peace and economic stability. From Chech-nya to Bosnia, from Rwanda to Sri Lanka, ethnically mixed commu-nities that once lived in relative peace are exploding into violence, and entire nations can break up, as did Yugoslavia. A Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project can contribute to inter-ethnic and interracial understanding and bridge-building by practicing objective, fact-based reporting that avoids stereotyping or stirring up rumors.
 
The mass media have a tremendous potential to contribute to inter-ethnic and interracial understanding and bridge-building by practicing objective, fact-based reporting that avoids stereotyping or stirring up rumors.
 
Too often, however, the media play a more negative role, feeding the violence by highlighting differences, promoting stereotypes, empha-sizing extremism, exacerbating tensions, minimizing constructive ini-tiatives, and simply ignoring whole communities. In the years leading up to the breakup of Yugoslavia, for instance, propaganda campaigns waged by government-controlled Serbia TV and Radio forged a con-sensus of nationalism and twisted moral justification for the carnage of the Bosnian War.
 
Dozens of other conflicts simmer around the globe, and the problem isn't unique to developing nations. In 1995, separatists in the French-speaking province of Quebec nearly succeeded in splitting off from Canada. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 left more than 50 dead and ex-posed racial and economic tensions that smolder beneath the sunny Hollywood fantasy.
 
One attempt to build bridges is the concept of the Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project described in this manual. For a fixed amount of time, such a project brings together several journalists from different ethnic and racial backgrounds to work cooperatively on concrete reporting projects and produce a series of feature articles that will be printed in its entirety in all of the participating newspapers.
 
A coordinator leads the project, teaching American and Western Euro-pean standards and methods of journalism in hands-on lessons that blend theory and practice. Reporters learn to interact professionally and publicly across ethnic lines, and they take those skills back with them into the newsroom, making their subsequent coverage more bal-anced and inclusive and creating an opportunity for follow-up proj-ects. The project has ripple effects as well-on individual reporters, journalists with whom they interact, the general public that reads their stories and global organizations engaged in conflict resolution and media education work.
 
This handbook provides a constructive way for the mass media to promote understanding across ethnic and racial lines through con-ducting a Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project. In detailed, step-by-step instructions, the handbook explains how to plan, organize, and execute such a project and how to maximize its impact with a series of follow-up steps. It is a hands-on training manual that focuses as much on the learning processes journalists undergo as the finished product they create.
 
In addition to serving as a day-by-day primer, the handbook discusses basic journalism theory, and it includes examples of other media and conflict projects, appendices with background information, a resource guide, and a bibliography for further reading. It also contains firsthand accounts of the inaugural team journalism project undertaken in 1995 in Macedonia, cosponsored by the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media (CWPNM) and Search for Common Ground, a conflict resolution organization with offices in Macedonia.
 
Four reporters participated in the inaugural, month-long project. It looked at how people of all ethnicities in Macedonia were faring under the difficult economic, political, and social conditions that gripped the country in 1995 as a result of the Bosnian war, the slow shift from a socialist economy to a capitalist one, and the emergence of Macedonia as a new, independent nation. English was the main project language, with supplemental translation into Macedonian and Albanian by an interpreter who was present on a daily basis.
 
Despite their common profession, the team was exceptionally multi-cultural. Two of the reporters were Macedonian, one was Albanian, and one was Turkish. Three were women. The Albanian and the Turk reporters were Muslims, the Macedonians Orthodox Christians. Ini-tially, the four reporters distrusted one another as well as the project coordinator. Several times, the project nearly collapsed in seemingly petty squabbles. But with daily discussions and mediations, the team ultimately reached consensus on every point and became imbued with a sense of mission and pride in the series, which focused them on the common goal: finishing the project.
 
The CWPNM and Search for Common Ground have now carried out three successful team reporting projects in Macedonia and implemented similar projects in Russia.
 
Completing the Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project is a success in itself. The ability of the reporters to put aside their differences and work together for an intensive month of cross-cultural journalism is an enormous practical accomplishment and one that has an important impact on supporting more constructive approaches to reporting. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the process is the project. But as the project ends, it is also possible to measure success in other ways.
 
The actual production and multiple publication of the series brings a fresh approach before readers. Broader publicity generated by the project further disseminates the results of this constructive approach to journalism, facilitates a broader community dialogue on the issues, and can inspire similar follow-up initiatives.
The degree to which the project fosters greater local understanding and support for more ambitious initiatives in multi-ethnic reporting and more insight into the actual mechanics of organizing such projects is another important measure of success.
 
 
Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting: What is it?
The Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project brings together journalists from different ethnic and racial communities on concrete reporting projects that highlight common problems and solutions. Specifically, the project assembles a team of newspaper reporters representing dif-ferent ethnic-minority-oriented newspapers to collaborate on a series of stories about an issue of overarching public concern such as public education, health care, or unemployment.
 
The project focuses on ethnic and minority-oriented publications because it seeks to give reporters from those media a unique op-portunity to:
(1) work outside their usual environments, and
(2) interact with reporters of other ethnicities in a way that they might not be possible regularly at their own publication.
Likewise, the project targets an issue of general public concern because it seeks to address topics that all groups will find compelling, rather than those that only affect one particular group of people.
 
The project emphasizes grass-roots perspectives, concerns, and pro-posals for change from citizens from multiple communities and the breaking down of stereotypes that all too often pervade news coverage in all media. It requires extensive cross-cultural and cross-racial re-porting, pairing up journalists from different religions, cultures, and ethnic groups and sending them out to interview people of all classes, religions, and ethnicities. This exposes journalists to ideas and experi-ences they are unlikely to have in day-to-day reporting at their home papers.
 
The participating newspapers commit to printing the stories prior to seeing them based on the descriptions provided by the project organ-izers. The stories, which are published in all of the participating news-papers at the same time, thereby give the readers in the different com-munities a more in-depth view of popular concerns across ethnic and racial lines than is normally presented.
 
Besides providing journalists an opportunity to work together across ethnic lines, the Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project offers an oppor-tunity to learn and apply new journalism skills by blending theory with hands-on practical experience. In addition, although the hand-book is structured around a one-month print journalism project, it can be adapted to other mediums and time frames. It can also be tailored for use in the developing world, the former Communist Bloc, or inside the United States.
 
While of limited duration, the project is open-ended, designed to pro-mote ongoing collaborations, reader feedback, community forums, and follow-up series as the team reporters take the skills they have learned back to their respective newsrooms. Also, the project offers possibili-ties for journalism roundtables, mentoring, reporter swaps, citizen panels, and a multi-ethnic journalists' club, as well as press confer-ences and radio and TV talk shows with audience participation.
 
Project Background
The concept of multi-ethnic team reporting was developed by the Center for War, Peace and the News Media and first implemented in Macedonia by Denise Hamilton, then a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Macedonia, the poorest republic of the former Yugoslavia, was chosen because it was ethnically diverse and rife with tension, although it had escaped the fighting that ravaged nearby Bosnia.
 
In light of Macedonia's volatile situation, the project organizers felt that a multi-ethnic team reporting project would be especially valuable in that nation, building bridges across ethnic lines and teaching journalism skills that stress objective and non-inflammatory reporting and writing.
 
In partnership with Search for Common Ground, the CWPNM ap-proached a handful of newspapers in the Macedonian capital of Skopje with their proposal. Editors for three newspapers agreed to release one reporter each to work exclusively on the project for one month. The editors hand-picked participating reporters based on the information they received from the project organizers. The fourth team member was a radio journalist.
 
What are the Project Goals?
The Multi-Ethnic Team Reporting Project has ten goals:
1. To bring together journalists from different ethnic and racially ori-ented newspapers who would otherwise rarely interact on a profes-sional level and who represent communities in social and political con-flict.
 
2. To provide a hands-on learning and training workshop in which re-porters learn by doing.
 
3. To provide a neutral environment where journalists can interact with one another and the public across cultural lines with the help of a coordinator skilled at mediation and journalism education.
 
4. To organize a concrete reporting project that publishes in multiple outlets a series of stories that support greater inter-ethnic and inter-racial understanding by gaining broad readership across ethnic lines.
 
5. To demonstrate to journalists and the public a more constructive ap-proach to daily journalism than is normally practiced. The project il-lustrates to reporters via their daily reporting that an ethnically mixed journalistic team can gain access to places and people that might be off limits to them as individuals. When the reporters bring their newfound skills and sensitivity back into the newsroom, they will be better able to write more balanced stories that help defuse tension, build trust, and explain multi-ethnic issues to their communities.
 
6. To hone skills in feature news reporting through the guidance of a trained media coordinator.
 
7. To facilitate professional linkages across ethnic and racial lines that support ongoing cooperation and trust building and can be tapped, especially in times of extreme crisis and conflict. As reporters work to-gether, they develop a network of cross-cultural sources outside their individual communities. By fostering trust and respect among jour-nalists of different ethnicities as well as the general public, the project exerts a moderating and stabilizing force on the community.
 
8. To highlight universal concerns that all citizens share, regardless of their ethnicity. These include the need for better health care, clean air, and a stable economy.
 
9. To generate public responses via community forums, reader hotlines and letters to the editor and professional responses via panel discus-sions, and workshops involving both the original participants and ad-ditional journalists.
 
10. To create a model of objective, responsible journalism that can be replicated on a broader scale.
 
Who Does the Project Target?
This handbook is designed primarily as a blueprint for the media co-ordinators who will lead multi-ethnic team reporting projects. How-ever, it is useful to a much larger group of people that includes:
 
1. Reporters who participate in multi-ethnic team reporting projects: The handbook shows journalists how to work together under intense and close quarters for one month. It helps them bond as people and profes-sionals, exposes them to Western-style reporting, and teaches them to work across ethnic lines.
 
2. Media professionals who train local coordinators: The handbook offers a "how-to" blueprint that outlines out daily discussions and step-by-step progress.
 
3. Other journalists: Even those who don't participate actively in the project may find it useful to read the handbook and gain exposure to Western-style journalism. In addition to a daily chronology, the hand-book offers discussions on how to conduct interviews and structure stories and the importance of multiple sources. The appendix, resource guide, and bibliography may also prove helpful to local journalists.
 
4. The reading public: The benefit to the public is twofold. Individuals may be curious about the project's genesis and can learn its goals and the reporter's daily activities by reading the handbook. Second, the public benefits indirectly when the handbook leads to an innovative journalism package for publication in various ethnic media in the city or country of origin.
 
5. Individuals and groups involved with media, diversity, democracy-building, and conflict resolution: Other groups can adapt the highly de-tailed handbook and its journalism lessons for their own needs. They also may want to consult the appendix, resource guide, and bibliogra-phy for potential partnerships, ideas, financial aid, and administrative support.
 
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Click here for Part 2

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