Courtney Shives was being interviewed by a reporter from his local paper, The Greenville News, two and a half years ago for an article about his recovery from a terrifying accident. It was the kind of human interest story that is the staple of many newspapers. Shives explained how a car had slammed into him as he was biking, crippling his left leg so badly it had to be amputated above the knee. Reporter Deb Richardson-Moore asked all the predictable questions: How long did your recuperation take? How did you cope with it emotionally? How have you dealt with the pain?

But the reporter had one more query: "Was there anybody involved in your rehabilitation who is a minority?"

Shives was taken aback. "You're doing a story on me and my recovery," he remembers thinking. "Why are you looking for a minority to tie in?" Since then, Shives has discovered the question is common at the News: "I've been interviewed for several stories and they always ask me, 'Is there a minority connection for this story?'"

It's not a coincidence. The Greenville, South Carolina, paper, part of the Gannett newspaper empire, is dead serious about including comments from, or references to, minorities in each day's edition. Gannett has mandated the practice, which it calls "mainstreaming," at the 75 papers it owns around the country. It's "a positive inclusion [of minorities] in stories that are not necessarily about race-including minorities in stories about the weather, banking, or government," says Wanda Lloyd, the News's managing editor for features and administration.

It's hard to quarrel with the goal. Incorporating people of every race into news coverage is unquestionably good journalism. Says Chris Weston, the paper's managing editor for local news, "If you lived in a community - whether you're a white female or a black male or whatever - [and] you picked up the newspaper every day, and all you saw quoted and featured and participating in stories were people of another race and color, before long you'd get the idea that this newspaper is not written for me. It's very healthy to open that up."

That's particularly true in Greenville, a midsized city that sees itself as a beacon of the New South. Greenville is a forward-looking place, with a gleaming new BMW plant that symbolizes the modernization of a city once dependent on the textile industry. But Greenville is also socially conservative. Like much of the South, it has struggled to overcome the legacy of racism. In that context, the News's attempt to broaden the racial palette of its coverage is more than an academic exercise. And it raises a fundamental question: Does quoting more minorities add up to better coverage of minorities?

It's not clear that it does. Some Greenville residents say the answer is "yes." But some News reporters wonder if they aren't simply adding a veneer of racial balance to news coverage that fundamentally hasn't changed. Along the way, reporters sometimes go to absurd lengths to include a sliver of a comment from a minority. Some of those quotations come from people whose ethnic groups barely exist in Greenville, where 99 percent of the population is either white or black. Staff writer Mike Foley says he "probably made an extra thirty phone calls" before finally tracking down an Asian astronomer in Utah for an article on a solar eclipse. "When you're doing that," Foley says, "you're like, okay, that's a quota. Put it on the tally sheet and send it to Gannett. What is that doing to help our readers?"

Quoting minorities certainly was not a priority when I worked for The Greenville News four years ago, before its parent company was bought by Gannett. Back then the paper belonged to a wealthy Greenville family (through its controlling interest in Multimedia), and I was a young reporter in my first job out of journalism school. The News wasn't an exciting paper. It was filled with staid reporting about crime, schools, and government, and generally relied on official pronouncements. When I worked there, my editor never once asked if I had included a minority in a story, and I don't recall ever making a conscious effort to ensure that I had.

That changed after Gannett bought the paper in December 1995. The company is deeply committed to racial inclusion in its articles - it even grades its newspapers on how well they do it. Using federal government definitions, which divide minorities into blacks, Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, the company spot-checks from three to more than a dozen issues of each paper annually. Local editors highlight stories that have been mainstreamed. (Minority hiring also counts toward the score. The News's editorial staff is 20 percent minority, roughly on a par with the Greenville area's 19.5 percent minority population.)

The Greenville News has made it quickly to the top of the Gannett class, scoring 9 out of a possible 10 in the 1998 All-American Contest, as the mainstreaming competition is known. "Three other newspapers also received 9.0s, but no one had a higher score," executive editor John Pittman wrote in an e-mail congratulating the staff. How has the paper done so well? By taking Gannett's philosophy to an extreme, reporters say. "If Gannett had a Bible," says former staff writer Melinda Young, "The Greenville News would be the fundamentalist version."

The News has instituted two rules to meet its racial minimums, according to 11 current and former reporters. Each section's front page must have at least one minority quote every day -- which means such comments invariably turn up in the first several paragraphs of an article. And all stories that aren't prompted by breaking news must quote at least one minority. Executive editor Pittman says those are goals, not requirements, and insists that no quota exists. "We really want the mainstreaming question asked of all stories," he says.

If reporters are lucky, they'll find the person they need in a list the paper keeps with the names and phone numbers of 1,000 nonwhite sources. If not, the search begins. Most of the 20 current and former reporters interviewed for this article say they have gone to extreme lengths to track down such comments.

"I've had some really embarrassing moments with the mainstreaming," says staff writer Tilly Lavenás. She describes once having to search for a minority source for a story about food for Hanukkah. Because religious minorities don't qualify, Lavenás tried to find someone who was both Jewish and a racial minority -- no mean feat in Greenville. "I could not find any Ethiopian Jews," she says. "I called the synagogue and asked if they had any African Jews. They said no." (An editor, recognizing the futility of the quest, let Lavenás off the hook.)

Last fall Lavenás, who is Hispanic, found herself devoting an entire day to hunting for a nonwhite to quote in a story on gourmet dog biscuits. She started with the 50 members of her Hispanic women's group, but "not one of them had dogs," Lavenás says. "Finally, I remembered this Indian woman I'd interviewed, and remembered she had a German shepherd." Bingo. "She was very good-natured," Lavenás recalls. "I call her for all kinds of things."

The constant search for minorities means that if you live in Greenville, and you've got an appropriately "ethnic" last name, chances are you've heard from a News reporter. Consider Yuri Tsuzuki, the director of a small Japanese cultural center. Tsuzuki was quoted three times in 13 days last September. On September 14, she weighed in on the popularity of a local jogging path: "It's inspiring to me." On September 19, she appeared in the "Lifestyle" section, expounding on the virtues of changing an area rug each season: "It's very important to respect the seasons." A week later, her comments on an upcoming Elton John concert made the front page: "I think it's a good follow-up after Janet Jackson." Never mind that Tsuzuki isn't an Elton John fan, and doesn't have any particular expertise on jogging or area rugs. She fit the bill. Her experience suggests that the fervor to quote minorities can narrow the diversity of voices in the paper instead of broadening it.

When reporters can't turn up a Yuri Tsuzuki, they're instructed to buckle down and look again. Former staff writer Melinda Young was stumped by a January 1996 assignment on a small community in northern Greenville County whose water supply was about to be cut off. The suburban enclave had only 23 homes, and Young couldn't turn up any residents who weren't white. "I told the editors there were no minority sources -- I had checked -- and they said, 'That's unacceptable.' ...I said, 'We'll have to make an exception,' and they said no." So she called Ralph Anderson, a black state legislator. Anderson had never even heard of the community (which isn't in his district), much less its water problems. "But he gave me a standard quote," Young says. "We ran it."

The quest gets even more challenging when the reporter needs a person with specific technical expertise. Young, for example, says it was almost impossible to find minorities in Greenville with the requisite scientific knowledge on environmental issues, which she used to cover. She was reduced to combing through directories of national environmental groups, hoping the photos might reveal an expert with the desired skin color.

Finding the person was only half the battle, Young says. Once located, the minority sources would sometimes try to steer her away, claiming ignorance on the subject at hand. "I would sweet-talk them into giving me a comment," Young recalls. "They'd say, 'I don't know anything about it, why don't you talk to so and so,' and I would say, 'Well, I've already got you on the phone.' I never wanted to say, 'I need to quote you because you're Hispanic.'"

Managing editor Weston shows little sympathy for his reporters' travails. "I'm not put off by the notion of someone having to work hard to find the best mainstreaming source," Weston says. "I don't really make any apologies for that."

He also argues that quoting a nonwhite who lives thousands of miles away still achieves mainstreaming's goal of reflecting the diversity of Greenville's community "if they have expertise about what you're writing about."

More important, though, he denies that mainstreaming constitutes tokenism. "We're not talking about quoting a minority just for the sake of quoting a minority," Weston insists. But when asked about the often-quoted Yuri Tsuzuki, he acknowledges, "I'm sure there are bad examples....I think if you've got one person you're continuously quoting for no real good reason, then I'd have to agree, that's probably not a good thing."

Mainstreaming, executive editor Pittman claims, is helping to bring black readers to the paper. Even if that's true -- Pittman doesn't have specific figures -- that gain hasn't been enough to offset a drop in overall readership. Circulation has dipped from 102,110 to 97,407 since Gannett bought the paper in December 1995.

Beyond its potential appeal to minority readers, has the newspaper's heightened race consciousness improved coverage where it really counts, in stories about the issues that affect Greenville's minority residents? It's a fuzzy picture -- one that suggests that addressing deep-seated issues of race requires more than a daily quotient of quotations. Like most Southern towns, Greenville bears the scars of segregation. One episode in the civil-rights struggles played out there after baseball legend Jackie Robinson was barred from the whites-only waiting room at Greenville airport in 1959. The incident provoked a suit by the NAACP that led a court to find the practice unconstitutional.

Like all institutions, The Greenville News has had to struggle with this difficult legacy. "Three years ago, I found it repulsive to even read it," says Ennis Fant, president of the local chapter of the NAACP. "It was very conservative. Minorities and poor people...were never portrayed in a positive light." But Fant says coverage of minorities has improved since Gannett bought the News. "The paper is certainly more balanced now than it used to be. They have a commitment to diversity....Now it really goes to great lengths to make sure that the total community is heard."

Eleven of the 17 Greenville residents interviewed for this article -- shopkeepers, politicians, and students among them -- say they have noticed more coverage of the minority community. The paper "has made a more conscious effort to do more positive stories on blacks," says Fletcher Smith, a black Greenville lawyer.

The change is visible, agrees Sam Zimmerman, who became the first black reporter at the News's sister paper, The Piedmont, in the late 1950s. For example, he says, photos of black homeowners are routinely seen in the "Homes" section: "My wife has commented frequently to me, 'There are people with dark skin'" in the newspaper.

Certainly, the paper is willing to address racial issues when they are noncontroversial. On October 7, for example, the News trumpeted the less-than-shocking revelation that, as its top-of-the-front-page headline read, "Americans find value in diversity."

But the News shows a reluctance to delve into sensitive racial issues. For example, it tiptoed around a controversy that galvanized the black community when a black man died shortly after being arrested in 1997.

The conduct of guards at the county jail became a hot-button issue after the August 21, 1997, death of Jamel Radcliff. He had been booked for failing to show up for a court hearing on a four-year-old gun charge and died about six hours later after a confrontation with jail guards. At first, it looked as if the News would pursue the case aggressively. It ran the story of Radcliff's death on the front page and published an article the next day that included the account of his brother, who had witnessed the confrontation and was critical of the guards.

But the paper backed off, seemingly waiting for the authorities to reach conclusions rather than digging on its own. In the ensuing months the newspaper did little besides report official developments (albeit usually on the front page). In one article during that period, the News noted that civil-rights groups had received more than 200 letters of complaint about conditions at the jail, a prime -- but wasted -- opportunity for the paper to make news by uncovering a pattern of abuse.

Instead, its coverage consisted mainly of accounts of suits being filed, protests being held, or officials calling for investigations, and relied heavily on the NAACP's Fant to raise questions about the official version of events. "They didn't do a lot of independent investigations themselves," says Fant, "but they covered our press conferences."

The paper dutifully reported the conclusions of a local task force that found no pattern of abuse by guards. But eight months after Radcliff's death, the U.S. Department of Justice, which had undertaken its own investigation and had won access to records denied to the local task force, came to the opposite conclusion. It found that county jail guards routinely used excessive force, denied inmates their constitutional rights, and subdued prisoners by "hog-tying" them, a practice federal officials said "can be life-threatening" and is "rarely, if ever, justified." Radcliff's death, the report found, was "a tragic example" of these conditions.

Only after the Justice Department's report in late May 1998 did the paper break ground with its coverage. Reporter Scott Wyman produced some commendable work, obtaining an unreleased state report on the death and reviewing records that demonstrated that the jail's internal investigations cleared guards accused of using excessive force most of the time. But these stories merely served to buttress the Justice Department findings. Wyman explains the paper's approach this way: "When you look at this area,"he says, "you have a fairly conservative population. If you give them anecdotal information, you're going to have many readers who will just dismiss it, whereas if you can back it up in records and facts and statistics, it's going to be a lot more sound and have a lot more weight with people."

Those people, it seems, include the News's editors. In fact the paper had assigned a reporter, Mike Foley, to this story well before any of the authorities weighed in. Foley interviewed some two dozen current and former inmates -- many of them black -- about conditions at the jail where Radcliff had died, and gathered accounts that pointed in the same direction as the conclusion ultimately reached by the Justice Department. (Top editors Pittman and Weston declined to comment on Foley's jail stories.) Ultimately, the paper never ran the articles that Foley wrote -- despite the fact that they were filled with more quotes from minorities than would ever be included in a "mainstreamed" article.