Giving everyone in Greenville a voice begins with a better reflection of our community

Everyone has a voice. Our voices together make a community. And The Greenville News has a mission to help all those voices be heard.

One way we fulfill that mission is by building a newsroom staff that reflects the people who live here – our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers – so we can better relate to their experiences, tell their stories and help them be heard.

We are not there yet.

A closer look:Here are the people who make up the staff of The Greenville News

But we are committed to looking more like this community and telling stories that reflect it. Here’s how we will get where we need to be.

Our newsroom will reflect Greenville

Today, we’re publishing the results of a newsroom census that speaks loudly about the diversity of our staff.

The tough news is this: we don’t reflect Greenville. Not completely.

The good news is, we have an opportunity right now to do better and a mission to succeed within the next five years.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Greenville County is 18% Black, 9.5% Latino or Hispanic, 3% Asian and 68% white.

Here’s what our newsroom looks like now: we are 9% Black, 6% Asian, 84% white, and we have no Latinos on our staff.

Here’s the immediate opportunity: we are in the process of hiring up to six reporters to cover this community, and we are talking to a diverse pool of candidates who will write stories about everyone in this community.

Look for announcements soon about these new staff members joining our newsroom:

► A breaking news reporter

► Someone dedicated to writing about downtown Greenville and nearby neighborhoods 

► A reporter who will cover growth and development across Greenville County, how county government is managing it all, and how everyone in the county is being affected

► An investigative reporter who will be a key person working to uncover inequities and injustice in our community and seek out solutions

Additionally, we are finalizing the creation of a new position in our newsroom and will have details to share with you soon.

Finally, we have applied for a grant through Report for America, an organization that places reporters in local newsrooms to focus on important issues. For us, that issue will be affordable housing and gentrification in and around Greenville, and how rapid changes in places like West Greenville, Southernside and Nicholtown are impacting families that have lived there for generations and the new residents moving in.

We will listen to you

We want to be part of every community in Greenville, to hear what’s important to you and to talk about what we do. This means that we are pledging to be in your neighborhoods, listening to you and telling your stories. We won’t just parachute in from time to time, but work hard to be invested in the things you are invested in.

Watch soon for information about virtual meetings and meetings in our community room at 32 E. Broad Street where you can tell us what's on your mind and learn more about how we do our jobs.

We also welcome opportunities to come to your community and neighborhood meetings to hear what's on your minds – send me a note if you are interested in inviting us.

And you can contact any of our reporters at any time using the information on our staff directory page.

Our stories will be your stories

We will continue to write about things that affect you.

When Greenville County voted to turn what residents thought was going to be a park into a bus garage, we wrote a story about how the Washington Heights community did not have an adequate voice in a dramatic change to their neighborhood.

Our coverage of protests in downtown Greenville this summer focused on the people who participated in the protests and the changes they were seeking here in their hometown and ours. 

We wrote about the struggles local churches are having figuring out how to hold services while keeping their members safe during the pandemic, and how businesses are being transformed by COVID-19. 

We will write for all of Greenville

People who live in overlooked communities are often overlooked by local news organizations. And although The Greenville News has covered overlooked communities in the past, we need to do better.

In 2015, our Unseen Greenville forum drew nearly 800 people to the Kroc Center and launched a conversation with and about people this community does not often see – the homeless, the under-housed, the poor and the under-employed.

To our discredit, that conversation faded. We gave voice to our invisible communities for a fleeting moment, then let that voice fade again.

We are talking about ways to resume that conversation and help those stories to be heard again. We welcome your input as we consider how we can once again give voice to these voiceless communities.

Our plans include reporting and better engagement with those communities, but could also include community meetings and forums and opportunities for community leaders and activists to share their voices on our website and in our newspaper.

We will make Greenville better

Regardless of who our reporters are, our staff has a mission to serve the community, to help make Greenville an even better place.

The reason is simple: all of us who work at The Greenville News have chosen to live here. Our reporting is done out of a commitment to our community and to our fellow humans. But we acknowledge that we can do better, and that we need to do better.

Because everyone has a voice, everyone has a story. It’s our job to tell those stories, to give a forum for those voices. And we are pledging to do that.

Steve Bruss is executive editor of The Greenville News. Email him at sbruss@greenvillenews.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveBruss.