If you’ve been visiting The Lance recently, you will notice that several people you’ve never seen before are making appearances on the front page. This is due to Lancer Media’s new initiative to represent the entire study body and all groups of people by the end of the school year.

Before our major push to diversify, beginning in early November, we had managed to photograph and/or interview about 170 different people since early September.

These are good numbers… but they’re not great. I knew we could do better.

To draw inspiration for our campaign to diversify, I took a look at how other branches of journalism are diversifying. Motherboard, a news site featuring articles about technology and science, published an article about the need for scientific reporters to increase diversity by interviewing female experts. John Platt wrote, “If journalists don’t ask the right questions of the right people, they’re missing at least half of the story.”

With this quote in mind, on November 9th I upped the stakes and challenged Lancer Media to talk to 225 different people, which is 16% of the school, by the end of the semester. The reward for achieving such a feat was a fresh baked apple pie.

Being cognizant of the need to represent everyone forced traditionally shy reporters to become more proactive and talk to students who are strangers.  In particular, the Lancer Candy Lane article seized the opportunity for diversity when reporters included a gallery featuring photographs of all the various groups of students running the stations.

With people adamantly focused on branching out to speak to new people, it came as no surprise to me that we reached our goal a month before the end of the semester.

As we savored our tasty reward, we set a new goal to talk to 300 students by the end of the semester. This is a tall order considering that there is only a month of the semester left. However, without trying to diversify, we could not call ourselves Lancer Media. Representing one population of people does not count for the entire school.

At this rate, who knows, maybe you’ll be the next person featured in The Lance!