Commitment to
Diversity
My approach to diversifying our newsroom
Newsrooms must reflect a range of backgrounds and perspectives, ensuring stories about communities are not overlooked.
When I first joined Wingspan, the staff consisted of 12 students, including one male student and an otherwise entirely white female team. While our coverage was well-intentioned, our story selection often centered on topics that appealed to teenage white girls, such as social media trends, lifestyle features and activities staff members’ heard about through their friends.
After I became editor-in-chief, our staff was expanded to 15 members, nine of whom were new to the publication. I used that transition as an opportunity to invite a wider range of story topics, encouraging each staff member to bring their unique ideas, interests, communities and perspectives. At mid-year, the staff had grown to 18 students, including four students of color and six male students. We were closer aligned to our school body which is approximately 84.3 percent identifying as white, according to the U.S. News & World Report.
While I cannot take credit for the increased diversity of our newsroom, my work fostering an environment where students can discuss news openly, respectfully and without dismissal has played a role. Wingspan has expanded its coverage of underrepresented groups and provides readers with a more representative view.
I’ve also encouraged my team to write about their unique experiences through leading by example. Last year I wrote a website column about my struggles with apraxia of speech and how I found my “silent community.” The day after I turned in that website article, our website editor came to me and told me about a similar experience he had. We connected about finding communities when we least expected it and what it means to have a disability.
This experience did two things. One, it pushed him and eventually more staff writers to write about themselves. Two, it showed me that diversity isn’t always visible. Not only does our team look more diverse, our way of thinking and ideas are as well. This has made Wingspan a better publication.
Wingspan’s general policy
Mission Statement: The Wingspan is dedicated to covering a wide variety of topics that are timely and beneficial to students, including a range of editorials, news stories, features and sports stories.
The Wingspan is a magazine produced four times a year by the Advanced Journalism class of Nixa High School. Sometimes, Wingspan receives story and photo contributions from Journalism I and Yearbook students. The student body receives copies of the magazine during STAR, completely free of charge.
Nixa High School student body is the primary readership of The Wingspan. Besides solely reporting news, The Wingspan is an open forum dedicated to inform the school and community of current events and issues in an entertaining manner. The Wingspan also strives to appeal to an extended readership of administrators, faculty, parents, community members, advertisers and other high school journalism programs throughout the country.
Covering diversity in news
My commitment to covering diverse news means I’m constantly questioning simplified narratives and adding local context to national issues. As a good journalist and leader, I’ve brought these values into my team and we’ve expanded our news coverage to include underrepresented stories.
In my article “Race in the Ozarks,” I investigated the lynchings of three Black men in southwest Missouri in 1906. Local newspapers sugested that the lynchings directly caused our region’s lack of racial diversity today. While researching those horrific and consequential events, I found that the population data showed that the Black population did not significantly decline following the lynchings. Instead, the disparity came from the increasing white population, which began decades prior to the lynchings. That distinction mattered. It reframed how our community understands our history.
That approach of focusing on diverse communities has guided our coverage of many other topics. Last summer when ICE became a larger concern, a staff writer reported on immigration, focusing on the experiences of students and families directly affected. We’ve also covered community responses to polarizing political movements, including a local vigil following the death of former Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, along with student efforts to bring Turning Point USA to Nixa. Most recently, another reporter and I covered changes in legislative language surrounding birth control access as abortion bans expand.
While it is easy to restate information already available through national news outlets, I believe student journalists can and should add something new. The one thing all of these stories have in common is the first question I asked when they were suggested, “What are we adding to the topic?” In Wingspan, we aim to serve the student population while also creating a record that accurately reflects our community for future readers and historians.
Links to articles referenced:
Turning Point USA arrives at Nixa
"Starting Point," article about immigration was published in the Wingspan 2025 summer edition
Wingspan's column
I’m an avid reader of columns, specifically those written by high schoolers. I often compare student-written columns to ones written by professional columnists on similar topics to identify differences and similarities. While reading my favorite student columns last year, it dawned on me that Wingspan didn’t regularly publish columns. We have an editorial and if staff writers wanted to write a column they could, but only for the website.
This year I changed that. I worked with a staff writer who frequently writes our reviews. We carved out a page so he could have a recurring column. In his columns, he relates his experiences growing up in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and as the oldest sibling to broader, relatable moments common to many readers, such as Christmas and being part of the generation that will “save” the world.
I hope in the future the recurring column will expand with more voices and perspectives. It’s a good outlet to give Nixa students more perspectives into differences between students’ lives.
Already been interviewed list
Jackson Cantwell, a football player at Nixa High School, is one of the top high school football players in the country and was named this year’s Gatorade Player of the Year. While his talent led to a lot of coverage, nationally and locally, I realized how frequently we returned to the same high-profile students.
A publication should cover a wide variety of people and experiences. We’ve since increased our coverage of students through additional profiles and activity highlights. We have a rule that someone can’t be interviewed multiple times in a single issue, so I began tracking all interviews conducted during the year in a shared spreadsheet. Now when we start a story, we check the spreadsheet to make sure that we aren’t interviewing the same people. (We do make exceptions for editorial reasons, such as a psychology teacher who is also head soccer coach and needs to be interviewed for both a mental health story and a soccer story.) This system helps us to avoid relying on the same sources and has diversified the voices covered in our magazine.
