#Broke is a show about why you don’t have money, and what you do to get it.
But it’s also way more than that.
You see, I’ve been listening to and making radio for a long time.
A really long time.
Long enough that I’ve noticed a couple things: numbers are usually boring, music is usually old, and subjects are usually white.
Especially in public radio. For example, in a recent review of source diversity, over seventy percent of National Public Radio’s sources during "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" in FY 2015 were white.
NPR’s analysis reveals that while there the percentage of Black sources doubled since 2014, there was no notable increase in Latino sources.
I came to grad school wondering how this could have happened. Aside from all the moral and progressive reasons to diversify coverage, wouldn’t large media organizations realize that it’s a fiscally smarter move to diversify content -- and therefore audience -- too?
But in one of my first journalism classes, a white male professor told me that sources need to speak perfect english or look "exotic" if you are to have them on the air. If not, your audience will find them “boring,” he explained.
When I pushed back, asking if that leaves out a certain segment of the population who deserve to be reported on too, he replied: “Of course it does -- but that's just how it is."
That was the day I came up with the concept of #broke: looking at issues through the experiences of young people of color.
Some @USCAnnenberg think stories about $ for young people of color are “boring.” Let’s prove ’em wrong. Tweet me yours / carlajavier @ gmail
— Carla Javier (@carlamjavier) February 22, 2016
As a young girl, I would run to the radio or the television to check on the news, hoping one day I would get to tell stories about people who looked and sounded like me. I found that professor’s view problematic and I decided to experiment: #Broke is that experiment.
This a podcast, not a radio show. I make the distinction because while #broke leans on the basics of radio reporting, it breaks a lot of the rules. The actualities are longer, and are more in-depth. Music is not just for scoring -- it also becomes part of the discussion. That being said, #broke is a mix of best practices from some beloved radio shows and podcasts (“Death, Sex, & Money”; “The Dinner Party Download”; “All Things Considered,” and "Marketplace," to name a few).
The goal? Find a not boring way to talk about how numbers and the economy effect the people young people of color — and other folks you don’t often hear about in traditional radio and economics reporting.
I asked every person profiled in the show what they wish the media would do differently, and all of them said the same thing: diversify.
“I wish the media would stop writing us off as millennials,” researcher and young worker Reyna Orellana explained recently. “We’re not just paying for our cell phones and going out.”
Young workers like Orellana are the ones most affected by things like the minimum wage after all. Why aren’t they the center of our reporting focus?
A lot of #broke will sound familiar to the average public radio listener: non-narrated pieces, cut-and-copies, interviews. And some will be new — social media callouts, Spotify playlists, infographics, and Twitter robots. Why did I choose to do it this way? I want #broke to be economics told in a way that young people can understand. That way, they can be informed.
The way we’ve been covering young people of color is broke. Let’s fix it, together.
How does #broke address the lack of diversity in radio reporting?
All four of the pilot episodes of #broke feature economic news, as told through the perspective of young people of color. All subjects profiled were under 30 years old. Two identified latina, one identified as Black, and one identified as Asian. Two men and two women were featured.
Hover over the episode cards below to read how the subject of each pilot episode of #broke describes their ethnicity.
What about newsroom diversity?
I didn’t try to tackle newsroom diversity, but people like Stephanie Foo (“What to Do if Your Workplace is Too White”) and Doug Mitchell (“Intentionally Accidental“) have already written great things and implemented great programs to address the ever-present, #JournalismSoWhite problem.
