Diversity, equity and inclusion within the 2025-26 Daily Nexus content
By:
Meher Indoliya
October 11, 2026 at 8:00 am
The Daily Nexus remains fully committed to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion as a cornerstone of our coverage. We initiated our first diversity, equity and inclusion survey in 2018, and have continued to expand these initiatives in the following years. This report has been annually published since 2023 and serves to analyze and reflect on the Nexus’ efforts and coverage over the past academic year as well as highlight potential areas of improvement. By publishing this data, we aim to make our activity available to the public for the sake of transparency and as a way to hold the Nexus accountable in our journalistic practices and decisions.
The Diversity Task Force was established at the Nexus in 2020 with three core tenets:
- Ensure that our editorial and general staff reflect the diversity of the UC Santa Barbara community.
- Strengthen representation in our coverage by improving relationships with the campus and community.
- Provide training on diversity and inclusion for all Nexus staff, including writers, editors, content creators, artists and collaborators.
Since this initial incorporation of a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) team into the Nexus and its subsequent evolution into its own section, we have made considerable progress in intentionally integrating key components of DEI values into the newsroom. The DEI team’s recent work includes collaborating with the Data section to conduct this annual report, reviewing and editing articles that pertain to this section to accurately represent various communities and holding workshops to present suggestions and guidelines for how staff should handle coverage in relevant areas.
Looking further back, one of DEI’s most prominent accomplishments was the creation of the Daily Nexus’ Spanish language section, La Vista, in 2022. Additionally, the creation of internal style guides designed for the Nexus’ writers over the past couple years in combination with the 2021 addition of the Community Outreach Beat within our News coverage marks significant milestones in DEI’s efforts at the Daily Nexus.
This article is a companion piece to our report on DEI within the 2025-26 Daily Nexus staff, which highlights the demographic breakdown of the editorial staff in our newsroom.
To measure the prevalence of DEI-related coverage from 2020 through 2026, the Nexus filtered articles through a list of relevant keywords and tracked their annual frequency per calendar year. Articles that included at least one keyword were classified as DEI-related coverage. This follows the same process implemented in last year’s analysis, ensuring consistency and comparability across years.
These keywords were carefully selected to reflect the wide range of language frequently used when discussing matters related to DEI and social justice. They included direct references to historically marginalized communities, terms denoting broader discourse surrounding DEI initiatives, terms associated with global conflicts and human rights and terms related to healthcare and justice.
The Nexus conducted a sentiment analysis of article headlines and content to better understand the tone and emotional impact of our reporting. Content from the Photo, Video and Nexustentialism sections were excluded; the latter section was not considered due to the fact that some standard sentiment analysis tools sometimes struggle to detect satire. To analyze headlines, we used the Natural Language Toolkit’s Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER). VADER is optimal for evaluating short-form content because it evaluates polarity (positive/negative), intensity (strength) and nuance of sentiment. By assigning each word a score and aggregating the results into a compound score, VADER classifies the text as positive, negative or neutral.
Title sentiment analysis
It is important to note that this sentiment analysis is influenced both by the subject matter of events covered and editorial framing choices. Sentiment analysis can misinterpret specific context or nuance, but produces a reliable overview of emotional trends across the articles.
Between 2020 and 2026, the sentiment of Daily Nexus article headlines generally leaned neutral, with a modest tendency toward positive sentiment. Examining specifically DEI-related articles in 2026, headlines equally reflected positive and negative sentiments as the primary tones.
This pattern may suggest that the Daily Nexus’s headlines when covering DEI-related topics may reflect events that are more emotionally charged or events that may be more often framed in either of these tones.
Content sentiment analysis
For a more in-depth sentiment analysis of content, the Nexus used the National Research Council Canada’s (NRC) Word-Emotion Association Lexicon. The lexicon consists of approximately 10,000 commonly used English words and their strengths of association with certain emotions. The eight emotions chosen include anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise and trust. The most commonly evoked emotions in the NRC’s lexicon are anticipation, trust and joy.
The Nexus calculated the average proportion of the total number of words associated with each emotion in each article and its title to the total word count of said article. Following the trend from the past two years of conducting this analysis, words associated with anticipation and trust were the most common throughout Daily Nexus content, regardless of whether titles and articles contained DEI-related keywords or not.
Moving forward into the 2026-27 academic year
As a new academic year begins on campus, the Daily Nexus continues to stand firmly dedicated to DEI values in the newsroom.
The past few years have seen pushback against DEI throughout the nation, attacks on journalistic integrity and targeting of marginalized communities.
Amidst these challenges, the Nexus remains committed to keeping our publication an open and safe space where every voice can be heard and where coverage is both sensitive and representative of the different communities we serve.
We also recognize the anxiety and uncertainty many in our community are facing due to increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) activity and the targeting of Latine, immigrant and undocumented individuals. Last year, the Daily Nexus launched the I.C.E. Sighting Tracker. This resource, created by former Editor-in-Chief Anusha Singh and former Lead News Editor Michelle Cisneros, aims to provide up-to-date and reliable information on relevant I.C.E. activity in Goleta and the Santa Barbara area and can be found on the Daily Nexus website. Additionally, the Daily Nexus will continue to publish biweekly updates on I.C.E sightings in the area.
By publishing this report, we hope our readers will be informed of newsroom processes, especially our efforts in providing fair and accurate coverage. In remaining transparent and reflecting on areas of achievement and shortcoming, we aspire for a year full of growth and careful consideration of how to ensure we can best represent and serve our diverse community.
Malia Guy contributed data collection and visualization to this article.
A version of this article appeared on p.9 of the Oct. 8 print edition of the Daily Nexus.