The AAJA Style Guide is dedicated to the memory of Los Angeles Times Assistant Managing Editor Henry Furhmann, who mentored many AAJA journalists and ensured “Asian American” was not divided by a hyphen
The Asian American Journalists Association is proud to announce our revised Style Guide. The guide will be unveiled during AAJA’s national convention in Austin, Texas on Thursday, August 8, 2024. It is an essential resource for anyone writing about the diverse and often misportrayed Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.
While AAJA provided guidance on how journalists should cover anti-AAPI violence and anti-Asian hate during the pandemic, this is the first comprehensive AAJA Stylebook update in more than a decade. It’s timely as Asians are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., their influence in entertainment and media is rising, and in politics, a woman of Asian descent is a major party’s nominee for president.
The AAJA Style Guide complements the AP Stylebook, the industry standard for writing and editing, by providing guidance on how to cover the AAPI community with accuracy and nuance. The AAPI population comprises close to 50 ethnic groups that speak more than 100 languages; it is often treated as a monolith, covered inaccurately, or portrayed with stereotypes that can cause real harm.
“After covering anti-Asian attacks and experiencing firsthand how words can be weaponized, this guide was a labor of love to create a resource to not only combat hate but also build up our communities to promote understanding,” said Marian Chia-Ming Liu, AAJA Vice President of Civic Engagement, who led the guide’s launch.
It’s not meant to be a dictionary or encyclopedia on all things Asian but an actionable and practical guide by AAPI journalists to add context and guidance to terms that are being used or that should be avoided in the news. For example, it reminds journalists that “illegal” can be used to describe an action, but applying it to an immigrant is inaccurate and dehumanizes the person described. The term “kamikaze drone” is an inaccurate and insensitive way to describe an exploding unmanned aircraft. And the 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals detained in the U.S. during WWII were “incarcerated,” not “interned.”
This guide was the culmination of two years of work by more than 50 AAPI journalists across the country, some of whom have produced style guides for their own newsrooms, from The Washington Post to the Global Press. They overhauled the old guide, added new entries and wrote out new definitions. Then, experts from organizations such as APIAVote and John Hopkins University reviewed the entries for accuracy. After copy-editing, a production team created a new living database.
