Since being named director of inclusion and audience growth for the American Press Institute in 2021, Letrell Crittenden ’01, ’06 MA Com has dedicated himself to helping newsrooms across the country better listen to and report on underserved communities and racial and ethnic minorities.
“I want to see journalists produce honest, fair, and robust accounts of these communities,” he says.
Two years ago, Crittenden created the API Inclusion Index, an intensive research program for newsrooms to get a holistic summary of how they cover marginalized communities. The index rates media outlets on the level of diversity within their news coverage, how they conduct their newsgathering practices, how often they listen to their communities directly—and how safe and hopeful their employees of color feel in their own newsroom.
The API debuted this program with four Pittsburgh area outlets—the Tribune-Review, the Pittsburgh City Paper, the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt News, and online outlet PublicSource. Crittenden and his team ran surveys and interviewed reporters and editors to determine how they scored on DEI-related factors, then laid out a plan for each outlet to improve. The Tribune-Review, for instance, launched a diversity scholarship program for college students.
In the spring, Crittenden—a former communications professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois—helped develop a community advisory committee for Pittsburgh newsrooms by critiquing their content and providing tips for stories in traditionally underserved communities. He realized the need for such changes early in his journalistic career. As a budding crime reporter for the Utica Observer-Dispatch in central New York, he wrote articles about communities of color that, he says, focused solely on “the worst days of someone’s life”—fatal shootings and the like. “I realized I was part of a system that perpetuated negative narratives about marginalized communities,” he says, “and I did not want to do it.” —David Silverberg
