We become suspicious these days when people ask us for our personal details, trained as we are to be wary of identity theft, and that’s about to make life more challenging in our newsroom. For two weeks starting Monday, we’re asking reporters to gather some personal information from every source they speak with for their stories. It’s for a good cause. As we continue working toward having a staff that reflects the community we cover, we want the sources for our content to do the same. At intervals over the next year, we will audit the sources in our content, and to do that, we need to know more about them. Reporters will ask anyone they speak with how they define their gender along with their race and ethnicity and the year they were born. I expect the most trouble will come with that last one. I was a reporter for 20 years, and age was not something that many liked to share. I suspect I would not have liked asking these questions when I was a reporter. The chief pursuit reporters have when they speak with anyone is information to inform their stories. Reporters seek to understand complex issues and have conversations with experts, leaders and people from all walks of life to expand that understanding. Having to stop to ask awkward questions can get in the way. Asking the questions early in an interview could chill the discussion, impeding efforts to collect facts. Most will ask at the end, but the interviewees, if they are uncomfortable, can easily end the discussions without answering. We hope they won’t do that. This is important. We are working with the American Press Institute, which assists news organizations in auditing content. The institute has developed a program called Source Matters with a system and formula that has been used widely, because it works. They help provide scientific rigor. We have challenges in our goal of diversifying sources. With a lot of stories. reporters have no control over race, gender and age of the sources. There’s only one mayor of Cleveland, one coach of the Browns. We can’t do anything to bring diversity to those interviews. But we can with a city council, where you might have five, 11 or 17 members -- of different backgrounds. And we have choices in enterprise stories we publish. Audits like this can reveal if reporters unintentionally go to the same sources a lot of the time, limiting diverse viewpoints from reaching readers. By having the reporters ask these questions, we put front of mind the need to seek diversity in our sourcing. We’re diversifying our staff. We’ve diversified our roster of columnists. Now, we want to ensure that the people we quote in stories are diverse as well, with a multitude of voices that matches the community we serve. If you find yourself in an interview in the next two weeks, please be accommodating. Separately, I have two updates. First, thank you to the many people who responded to last week’s column about the returned table. Unlike many responses to the first column on the topic, last week’s responses were overwhelming and moving. I estimate I received more than 200, and people put a lot of thought into them. Some agreed with the premise and some did not, but winning agreement was never my aim. I hoped people would consider the decision from the columnist’s perspective, and many did. Thanks for being open to the discussion. Second is a comics update, which I dread, as anything related to comics is controversial with readers. The Amazing Spiderman is ending soon. It will no longer be available. A lot of our comics readers hate change, but we have no control here. Based on the many requests we received after we ended Dilbert, we will replace it with Hagar the Horrible, which is the best of the offerings from the syndication service that provided Spiderman. We still hope to eventually ad another page of comics to the Update section in the online version of The Plain Dealer, which would substantially increase our offering. I’m at [email protected]. Thanks for reading. | 