In an effort to be transparent, we analyzed our coverage from the past semester and looked at the students we are covering.
In an ideal world, we would cover each school proportionally to its student body. However, our data shows that we overcover Pomona College and undercover both Pitzer College and Harvey Mudd College relative to their student body sizes. We cover Scripps College and Claremont McKenna College a proportional amount.
In comparing our coverage to the makeup of our staff, some correlations arise. Our staff is almost 41 percent Pomona students, which likely accounts for some of our overcoverage of them. However, even though almost 32 percent of our staff is from Scripps, we cover the school appropriately.
In the News section, we are overcovering Pomona, with 47 percent of students mentioned in all articles. This is somewhat due to an article about Sparkathon that mentioned 19 different Pomona students. Even without that article, we tend to cover Pomona more than we should. Now that we’re aware, we can make a more concerted effort to cover the other four schools next semester and beyond.
In Life and Style, we overwhelmingly mention Scripps and Pomona students. In Sports, we are covering CMS athletics slightly more than P-P. That is partially due to CMS winning the SCIAC in volleyball and football, while having a commanding season in men’s soccer. Nonetheless, our coverage should be more balanced.
In Opinions, we barely mention students from any school, and the results are statistically insignificant.
It’s important to mention that we are only looking at coverage from this semester, which comes down to nine weeks — of roughly 35 articles an issue.
However, it does give us a good idea of how we can better represent our community. We are committed to giving each of our college communities the coverage they deserve and will work to better do that moving forward.
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