Professor Kanigel: Increased Incidents, Hate Crimes Pose Challenges for Student Journalists

COLLEGE MEDIA REVIEW -- Rachele Kanigel is a professor of Journalism at San Francisco State University and the editor of The Diversity Style Guide, a free online resource with more than 700 terms related to diversity. The book version of “The Diversity Style Guide,” which includes chapters on covering often underrepresented and misrepresented communities and sensitive issues like suicide, mental illness, immigration and drug use, will be published by Wiley in January 2019. Sections of this article were taken from “The Student Newspaper Survival Guide” by Rachele Kanigel. Editors reporting on bias incidents sometimes have to handle dozens or even hundreds of letters and comments. “When Golden Gate Xpress, the student newspaper I advise at San Francisco State University, covered a videotaped confrontation about cultural misappropriation between a black woman and a white man wearing dreadlocks, the newspaper’s website received 131 comments on the original story and dozens more on follow-up stories.”