Achmed Valdés, top, and Joel Ruiz, bottom. In America, they discovered race matters. Photo: Librado Romero/ The New York Times for Best of Friends, Worlds Apart, a series by Mirta Ojito.

Welcome to the teaching guide for The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity, a Web site that supplements the just-released book & DVD set by the same name (Columbia University Press, 2006).

The teaching guide is currently under construction. Please visit us again soon.

The Web site, like the book and DVD, features stories honored in the annual “Let’s Do It Better!” Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity held at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The site includes a teaching guide, new stories and links to additional resources – all aimed at helping journalists, educators and the public get better at handling one of the country’s most profound and challenging issues -- relations between people of different races and ethnicities.

We believe the book, DVD and Web site will help working journalists, college students and others by offering examples of excellent work, chapter-by-chapter analyses of the stories, links to tip sheets, and interviews with the winning journalists about handling everything from getting people to speak candidly about race and ethnicity to writing with authority and depth.