Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Woman standing next to a large globe
Kyndell Harkness, the Star Tribune’s first assistant managing editor for diversity and community
In the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Star Tribune named 20-year veteran photographer and photo editor Kyndell Harkness the newsroom’s first assistant managing editor for diversity and community. “What we want to do at our newspaper is be better about that sense of belonging,” she says, “so that everybody, no matter who they are or where they come from, that they feel they belong here and are being seen and heard, and it feels fair to them.”
Harkness describes her new role as having three main thrusts: hiring, retention, and coverage. Hiring includes making sure that the Star Tribune’s internships draw from a more diverse array of schools. Retention includes ensuring equitable advancements in the newsroom. Coverage, meanwhile, is about fairness. “Everyone has a role in our shifting culture—do they recognize themselves in the stories we tell?” wonders Harkness.
Speaking of roles, how exactly did a photographer end up in this role? “On the surface it seems like a big leap, but photographers are really in the center of everything in a newsroom. Reporters get in our cars and talk to us. Editors and designers talk to us. I tended to be the person everyone would come talk to after experiencing stuff in the newsroom,” says Harkness, who moved to Minneapolis after growing up in Harlem and stints working at other papers, including the Los Angeles Times. “I’m just sort of a sociologist/anthropologist type of person by nature. I love how people connect or don’t connect. When I was a kid, I’d take the bus downtown from Harlem and see where the first white person got on, where they sat, how they sat, if they sat. As a photographer, I did that and, when that moment of connection came, pushed the shutter.”
Harkness’s attention to moments of connection grew into an ability to give advice to colleagues on how to turn moments of talking past one another into real connection. “I’m one of those annoying people who always sees the good in other people. Everybody has complex bullshit which has brought them to whatever they’re doing right now, so I don’t take much personally. Ninety-nine percent of what goes wrong between people is family history, some pattern; now you’re not speaking the same language. I ask: ‘What words can I use that will make you hear me?’ That’s how I basically became the Star Tribune’s in-house therapist and life coach. I was always saying, ‘If you guys would do this, maybe if we had a little training, we could create a system to help people be able to talk to each other.’ Now all the stuff I did on the side is my job.”
