Broadside News Group

Our Commitment

The communities we serve are diverse. Our contributor network should reflect that diversity — in who reports the news, whose stories get told, and whose voices are heard. This is not a peripheral concern. It is not a box to check or a statement to issue once a year. It is central to our editorial mission. A news organization that does not look like the community it covers will produce coverage that does not serve that community. It will miss stories. It will misunderstand context. It will default to the perspectives of those who have always had access to the press, and it will leave everyone else to be spoken about rather than spoken with.

We did not arrive at this understanding theoretically. Broadside News Group was founded in Denver — a city where the Chicano movement reshaped politics, where immigrant communities built neighborhoods from the ground up, where Indigenous peoples' history predates every institution that now claims authority. We started in a place where the gap between who holds power and who gets covered has real, daily consequences. That experience informs everything we do.

Diversity in journalism is not about optics. It is about accuracy. It is about the difference between a newsroom that understands a community's internal dynamics and one that parachutes in with assumptions. It is about whether a reporter knows which questions to ask and which sources actually speak for the people they claim to represent. When we say diversity is an editorial imperative, we mean it literally: without it, the journalism is worse.

In Our Contributor Network

We seek contributors from the communities we cover. We prioritize local knowledge and lived experience alongside — and often above — traditional credentials. We recognize that the conventional pipelines into American journalism have systematically excluded communities of color, Indigenous communities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, and people from low-income backgrounds. If we engage contributors only through those pipelines, we will replicate those exclusions.

The principles that guide how we build our contributor network:

• Seeking contributors beyond traditional channels. We seek contributors through community organizations, cultural institutions, tribal colleges, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, disability advocacy networks, and immigrant services organizations — not only through journalism schools and industry networks.
• Editorial culture that works for everyone. Engaging diverse contributors means nothing if the editorial culture drives them away. We are committed to listening to contributors about what is working and what is not, and acting on what they tell us.
• Mentorship and development. We believe in pairing newer contributors with experienced people who understand both the craft and the institutional barriers that contributors from underrepresented backgrounds often face. We invest in people, not just output.
• Compensation equity. We do not ask contributors from marginalized communities to accept lower pay in exchange for the opportunity to tell their own stories. That is exploitation dressed up as inclusion.

We do not claim to have solved these problems. We claim to be working on them honestly, with the understanding that the work is never finished.

In Our Coverage

Diverse contributor networks produce better journalism, but only if diversity also shapes editorial decisions — which stories are assigned, whose perspectives are centered, who is consulted as an expert, and how communities are described. These are the principles that guide our coverage:

Source diversity. We pay attention to who we are quoting and why. If our coverage of housing policy quotes only developers and city officials, we are not covering housing policy — we are covering the developer's perspective on housing policy. We seek sources from the communities affected by the issues we report on, and we treat lived experience as a form of expertise.

Story selection. We pay attention to whose stories are told and how. Too many newsrooms cover communities of color only in the context of crime, crisis, or cultural celebration. That is not journalism — it is a pattern of dehumanization dressed up as news judgment. We cover communities in their full complexity: their politics, their economics, their internal debates, their achievements, their ordinary daily life.

Language. We use the terminology that communities use for themselves. We do not impose labels. When there is genuine disagreement within a community about terminology, we explain the disagreement rather than picking a side. We avoid euphemisms that obscure power dynamics and jargon that excludes non-specialist readers.

Context. We provide historical and structural context, not just event coverage. A story about a school closure in a low-income neighborhood is incomplete without the history of redlining, disinvestment, and policy decisions that created the conditions for that closure. Context is not editorializing. It is the difference between journalism and stenography.

In Our Leadership

Diversity commitments that do not extend to leadership are decorative. If the people making strategic, editorial, and financial decisions do not reflect the communities being served, then the commitment is performative — regardless of how many contributors come from underrepresented backgrounds.

We are committed to building leadership that reflects the communities we serve. Our founder's roots in Denver's Chicano and Latino political community, in North Denver's working-class neighborhoods, and in decades of community organizing inform our understanding that representation without authority is tokenism. As we grow, people from the communities we cover must have decision-making power — over coverage priorities, over resource allocation, over the direction of the organization itself.

We also recognize that leadership diversity requires intentional structural support. We are committed to creating pathways for contributors to move into editorial leadership, to compensating editorial decision-makers fairly, and to never asking people from marginalized communities to carry the additional unpaid labor of educating their colleagues about their own experiences.

Accountability

Commitments without accountability are press releases. These are the standards we hold ourselves to as we grow:

• Source diversity awareness. We are committed to paying attention to whose voices appear in our coverage — by community, geography, and expertise type — and to identifying when we are defaulting to institutional voices over community voices.
• Contributor network that reflects our communities. We are committed to building a contributor network that reflects the diversity of the places we cover — not to meet quotas, but because the journalism is better when it does.
• Coverage that goes beyond episodic attention. We aim to cover communities in sustained ways rather than only when crisis or spectacle demands it. We ask whether our coverage reflects the actual diversity of the places we serve or whether it defaults to familiar narratives and familiar sources.
• Community feedback. We welcome feedback from the communities we cover — genuine dialogue with readers, sources, and community leaders about whether our journalism serves them.

We welcome feedback on our diversity efforts. If our coverage is falling short — if we are missing stories, misrepresenting communities, or failing to live up to the commitments on this page — we want to know. Contact us at broadsidenewsgroup.com/contact.

This document is a living commitment, not a finished product. We will update it as our understanding deepens and our practices evolve. The date of the most recent revision will always be noted here.

Last revised: March 2026