“You can’t move “to” if you don’t know where you’re starting “from,” and for most news organizations, their current reality, “from” is participation in community harm, neglect, or both.” — Cierra Hinton and Lizzy Hazeltine, from their Anti-Racist Table Stakes announcement.
Media leaders Cierra Hinton and Lizzy Hazeltine first worked together on the growth team at Scalawag, where they became enamored with scorecards, funnels and the other tools of performance-driven change in the first cohort of the UNC Table Stakes program, they recalled in joint Medium posts Tuesday. Now coaches in the UNC Table Stakes and other programs, Hinton and Hazeltine have shared an expansive view of those tools, one that tackles equity in local news: the Anti-Racist Table Stakes framework.
First presented to the current cohort of Table Stakes participants in May, these resources ask news organizations to center engagement with their entire communities as the key to success.
“We have outlined a process to those who are preparing to address their deficiencies in serving Black, Indigenous, brown, poor, rural, old, young, disconnected audiences and their own practices that harm their teams,” they wrote about the offering.
Below are the three resources to help teams better serve their communities using performance-driven change methods:
- The Anti-Racist Table Stakes, a more expansive view of the Table Stakes for Digital Transformation that shifts to a community-focused mentality rather than a user-first mentality.
- Aligned Behavioral Scorecard, a rubric for measuring your organization’s success in transformation.
- Additional tools for news organizations that support, coach or advise other news organizations, or who are working to identify organizational readiness within their own organization.
CISLM’s UNC-Knight Foundation Table Stakes Newsroom Initiative helps advance media organizations through digital transformation and development of sustainable business models. Based on the Table Stakes for Digital Transformation, the program uses performance challenges to capture a problem, provide a framework for actionable change, and measure success of transformation.
Dive into the resources and stay tuned for more conversations around the Anti-Racist Table Stakes. To learn more and get involved with media reparations work, check out Media 2070, created by Free Press. Learn more about the Table Stakes Newsroom Initiative.