An episode for your weekend: Jada Vasser, Diversity Manager, The State News (Michigan State)

The biggest point of emphasis for Jada in her role: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Journalism needs more people doing what Jada Vasser is doing. Jada is a senior student journalist at Michigan State University, who took it upon herself to - with the support of colleagues- create a position at her student newspaper (The State News) doing supportive work with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Jada talked to us about the work she’s doing in this area. The interview also includes her sharing her explaining the other primary function of her role (handling conflicts), her experiences with an award-winning podcast about Black life, her time in an internship with Planet Detroit, and her New York Times Corps mentorship, in which she’s been mentored by a Times reporter.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity and length.

 What's an example of you encouraging a reporter to speak to diverse sources?

I stay in contact with their editors and I try to throw things in our different Slack channels that I think would fit to their beat. So for example, at The State News, we have beats like student affairs and student life.

Student life is the social events or the things that organizations have going on. I try to make sure that we're hitting a lot of African-American organizations, Asian organizations. We have a lot of different heritage months that I feel like we didn't hit on enough in the past.

And with me being a communication arts and sciences student, a lot of those events happen at my college building. So I try to make sure that I'm also in the loop there.

We made a book called the black book, a kind of resource book of all these people that you should know when coming to Michigan State. So I also present that book to them and we go through it together and we see who fits where in terms of their story and what they really want to cover.

I want to make sure that people there know exactly what's going on on campus because sometimes it takes more than just them going out, because their group of friends and their community doesn't really hit this community that could be all the way over here.

So I try to be the eyes and ears for a bunch of different things for them.

What kind of training do you do on language sensitivity?

I did a training in the semester that just passed and in all of 2024.

I gave each desk in The State News a word. I tried to pick the word based on what desk they were. So, If I remember correctly, campus got 'belonging' and multimedia got 'respect.'

I gave them that word and I had them give me the definition of the word and examples. So we went through each desk and I tried with my trainings to get. conversation going, because I always hate the person that just sat up there and talked for 20 minutes or talked for two hours and you didn't retain a thing from what they said.

So I try to make sure that I get them as engaged as possible with my trainings, because yes, some of the topics are a little uncomfortable and maybe they’ve never spoken up like this or in a setting like that about these different things. But I always tell them that, hey, this is a safe space. This place is here for you to grow. I've done a lot of growing here and as journalists, we need to stay up to date with the things that's going on, and here's how we do so.

All the desks went through those words, and we had really good conversations about them, what we felt they meant. I gave my own examples of things, and I gave examples from my community and I tried to branch out from different communities to give them those different perspectives.

 what's the biggest public misconception about DE&I that you'd like to correct?

I would hope people understand that DE&I doesn't mean just Black. Yes, Black people in the Black community is a very big part of that. I feel like it still needs to be talked about talked about as someone who is a part of that community.

I would love for people to realize that they could be a part of the I in DE&I and not realize it. It actually has everything to do with you because we should all be fighting for this together. That's the biggest thing I wish people would relearn about DE&I.

We're seeing a lot of large corporations saying that they're going to reduce their DEI efforts. And you're seeing Supreme Court decisions against affirmative action in education and college admissions. How does all seeing all that stuff make you feel?

As someone who's about to graduate and graduate into the world like this, it's really scary. I'm not going to lie. My initial reaction is scared because, like you said, anything can happen in these next few days, and it can happen tomorrow. You don't really know what else is going to be signed, what other company is going to back down.

But I think that's what fuels my passion to keep doing work like this and I think that's what continues to show that this issue is important because of how many people are turning their backs or turning away and just looking as though they're okay with telling people that they can be denied just because of their skin color, or telling people that they can be denied just because of the gender they are, or the religion they practice, things that we shouldn't have to deny people for, we now can.

These are serious issues and these issues and these reversal policies affect real people. These are real lives we're talking about.

What benefits have you seen from from working in the DE& I space?

Doing DE& I at The State News. I've seen more collaboration. There used to be a time where people only talk to who was on their desk, or if you were new, you were only really talking to your editor and you wouldn't really branch out to anybody else.

Doing my trainings and bringing people together and keeping the company on what we're trying to fight for, which is continued diversity and continued coverage of all of the students at Michigan State is definitely leading to more collaboration, good collaboration, people wanting to double byline with each other and people wanting to speak more about their stories and people wanting to talk to so many different kinds of people.

And even though they may be a little nervous to do so, or don't know how to send that first email, they want to try. They still want to do it. There's a passion behind the stories they want to write and the things that they want to do. That's the biggest change I've seen is that there's now a fire ignited in them to do these type of things It's not like me going over them and telling them, no, you have to you got to do this, do that.

They come to me and say how do I do this? How can we get started? What's my first step?

I encourage you to listen to this interview. It’s an important time to be focused on this subject.