CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR -- Some universities are developing new standards. The Diversity Style Guide was created by the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University and includes suggestions such as capitalizing the “b” in “black” for describing race and using “Latinx” as a gender-neutral term for members of the Latino community.
“When you’re presenting the opinions of people of color and you ... diminish their experiences in any way, it really diminishes the trust over time that they’ll have in your paper. That means being super cognizant [about] how you talk about diversity in your writing,” says Gabriel Schneider, the former editor in chief of the Triton, an independent newspaper at the University of California San Diego that incorporated the Diversity Style Guide into its editorial guidelines.