Diversity, equity and inclusion within the 2025-26 Daily Nexus editorial staff
By:
Kalyssa Chu
October 11, 2026 at 8:00 am
The Daily Nexus conducted an annual demographic survey of our editorial board for the 2025-26 academic year to gauge whether the diversity of our staff reflects the Daily Nexus’ diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
The commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the Daily Nexus traces back to the establishment of the Daily Nexus’ Diversity Task Force in 2020. The Diversity Task Force originally consisted of 15 editorial staff members who dedicated time beyond their primary roles to integrating DEI initiatives within the Daily Nexus newsroom. They sought to better consider the ways in which the Daily Nexus serves the communities of UC Santa Barbara, Isla Vista and surrounding areas.
The Diversity Task Force summarized its mission with the following pillars:
- Ensure that our editorial and general staff reflect the diversity of the UCSB community.
- Strengthen representation in our coverage by improving relationships with the campus and community.
- Provide DEI training for all Daily Nexus staff, including writers, editors, content creators, artists and collaborators.
In the over half decade since its establishment, the Diversity Task Force has evolved into a dedicated DEI section led by DEI co-chairs. The DEI team’s core responsibilities are reviewing identity and representation-based content to ensure faithful coverage and leading internal staff training on incorporating DEI practices into newsroom procedures. Alongside these core commitments, the DEI team continues to build upon its predecessors’ goals by implementing and maintaining evolving DEI initiatives — including continuing the annual DEI content report and staff demographic survey, a practice that began in conjunction with Data in 2023.
This article is a companion piece to our annual DEI content audit and report. The DEI content report, published with Data, highlights content, language use and representation in pieces published by the Daily Nexus during the 2025-26 year.
This year, 37 out of 56 individuals within the Daily Nexus’ editorial staff responded to an anonymous survey administered May 2026. Survey questions focused on staff demographics and identity. Respondents were able to select multiple responses or provide their own response if more than one response, or none of the responses, reflected their background or identity.
In this article, the Daily Nexus compares staff data with data from the general UCSB undergraduate population, based on the UCSB Office of Budget & Planning’s Campus Profile. We also analyze trends emerging from previous years’ data.
Through this assessment, we seek to aid in the following:
- Guiding future Daily Nexus recruitment efforts aimed at ensuring the voices of our student body are reflected in our newsroom staff.
- Tracking the progress and impact of past DEI initiatives or newsroom procedural changes.
- Informing the DEI team of organizational equity gaps to be addressed and achievements to be built upon.
- Promoting transparency with our readership.
Geography
Editorial staff at the Daily Nexus come to UCSB from a variety of hometowns. However, 95% of surveyed editors reported being from California. Of the surveyed editors from California, 51% are from the Bay Area.
The remaining 5% of editors from outside California are from other states within the United States. No respondents reported being from a hometown outside of the United States.
Of all UCSB undergraduate students, 83% — a similarly large majority — are from California. However, 8% and 9% of all undergraduates hail from other states or countries, respectively.
Transfer students
While around 1 in 5 UCSB undergraduate students are transfer students, 100% of survey respondents are non-transfer students, having joined UCSB as freshmen.
First-generation students
UCSB defines first-generation students as students whose parents did not complete a four-year college degree. At UCSB, around 1 in 3 undergraduate students are classified as first generation. Among our staff respondents, 24% reported being first-generation students.
Major and minor
Continuing the trend from the past two staff reports in 2023-24 and 2024-25, communication is the most common major among the Daily Nexus editorial staff. 32% of respondents are communication majors. Political science and economics are the second and third-most common majors, at 24% and 16%, respectively.
The majority of respondents’ majors were within the College of Letters & Science, where 90% of all UCSB undergraduates study.
Among respondents who are also completing a minor to accompany their majors, professional writing is the most popular, accounting for 28% of minors taken.
Work and journalism experience
Alongside pursuing degrees at UCSB, a majority of the Daily Nexus editors work paid jobs and internships in addition to their time commitment to the Daily Nexus. Aside from working at the Daily Nexus, 59% of surveyed editors have an additional paid internship or job. 22% of respondents had two or more jobs or internships outside the Daily Nexus.
Prior to joining the Daily Nexus, our staff had varying levels of journalism experience. 57% of respondents reported having no prior journalism experience, while 43% did.
Race
Of surveyed editors, 47% identified as Asian, 44% as white, 14% as Hispanic or Latino, 8% as Black and 6% as Middle Eastern. Racial demographic data for respondents who identified with more than one race was double counted, in line with how UCSB reports its own demographic data. Of our 37 respondents, 19% identified with more than one race.
Among survey respondents at the Daily Nexus, the proportions of the racial categories of Asian, white and Black students were higher than the corresponding proportions among UCSB’s undergraduate population. The categories of Hispanic or Latino and American Indian/Alaskan were underrepresented in comparison to UCSB’s student population.
Language
Among the 37 surveyed staff members, 10 unique languages including English are spoken. 25% of surveyed editors speak Spanish in addition to English.
Gender and sexuality
Beginning last year, the DEI team began including questions related to gender identity and sexual orientation in our staff survey to better understand the diversity of the Daily Nexus editorial board.
Reflecting national trends, UCSB maintains around a 60/40 split of female to male undergraduate students. Comparatively, the Daily Nexus holds a more female-prominent staff, with 68% of surveyed editors being female and 27% male.
One respondent to the demographic survey is nonbinary, and four respondents use gender nonconforming pronouns.
Among 32 respondents who opted to share their sexual orientation, 63% identified as straight and 38% identified as LGBTQIA+.
The DEI team believes balanced representation is essential to maintaining diverse, equitable and inclusive journalism at the Daily Nexus — which involves who our main contributors are.
Looking at the data, the Daily Nexus has both strengths and shortcomings in the relative diversity of our staff. Addressing existing representation gaps within our editorial staff is a high priority for the Daily Nexus and our readership as a whole. Building a staff that more closely reflects UCSB’s diversity can help Daily Nexus leadership offer a better representation of the perspectives and experiences of our campus communities, which will inevitably lead to more diversity in content, opinion and coverage throughout the newsroom.
Though the DEI team has made attempts to bridge representation gaps throughout the years, including the creation of the Daily Nexus’ Spanish-language section, La Vista, in 2022, we acknowledge that much more can be done in specifically improving progress in staff diversity.
Looking ahead, the 2026-27 DEI team at the Daily Nexus aims to develop a focused initiative on promoting a more diverse staff cohort to better reflect the composition of UCSB’s undergraduate student population — a focus point that we have not yet majorly addressed. Specifically, we want to prioritize addressing gaps in transfer, international and Hispanic/Latino student representation, which show some of the most significant discrepancies between Daily Nexus and UCSB undergraduate representation.
Conducting these yearly staff demographic surveys is a crucial first step in this effort, helping our team maintain transparency with our readership, acknowledge gaps in staff representation and hold ourselves accountable as we plan for the future of the Daily Nexus.
Malia Guy contributed data collection and visualization to this article.
A version of this article appeared on p.8 of the Oct. 8 print edition of the Daily Nexus.