Newsrooms look at how well they mirror communities they cover

By The Associated Press

04.20.00

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The Kansas City Star began the week with a newsroom forum on "driving while black." Reporters and editors at the Missouri newspaper heard from a police chief, a civil liberties lawyer and a woman who complained she was a racial-profiling victim.

Staff at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., pored over back issues and color-coded stories by and about men (yellow), women (orange), and minorities of either gender (green). The results were displayed for all to see.

The Associated Press bureau in Jackson, Miss., set aside time yesterday for candid talk on whether its news and photo report reflects the true Mississippi.

The face of America is changing faster than ever. Newspapers increasingly are looking inward, asking if their content accurately reflects the communities they cover.

To focus their attention, an estimated 2,000 journalists at 165 newspapers, a half-dozen news services including the AP, and more than a dozen college newspapers and journalism programs are taking part in Time-Out II in 2000 for Diversity and Accuracy. For the second year of the event, participation is up about 15% over 1999.

This week and next, newsrooms are serving as host for programs for their own reporters, editors and photographers. They range from a brown-bag lunch with two outside observers, one white, one black, at The Herald in Rock Hill, S.C.; to multiple programs like visits from readers of all ages and backgrounds to the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, plus plans next month for an in-house session on race relations in the newsroom.

The Beacon Journal won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for "A Question of Color," about race relations in the Ohio community. But, said Gloria Irwin, Beacon Journal public editor, "That doesn't mean we have solved all the problems."

Materials to help newspapers analyze their communities' characteristics as well as their own coverage were developed as a kit by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. The materials are based on five "fault lines" identified by the late Robert C. Maynard, who was publisher of The Oakland Tribune in California. They are race and ethnicity, gender, generation, class and geography.

Honest self-examination is needed, many journalists agree.

Most newspapers fail to reflect the diversity of their communities, said Jerry Ceppos, vice president for news of Knight Ridder and president of the Associated Press Managing Editors. "When you sit down and take a solid look at them for a week, that jumps out at you," he said.

APME is co-sponsor of the event with the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

The event is the brainchild of David Yarnold, executive editor of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News and chair of the APME diversity committee. "A newspaper can't consider itself fundamentally accurate unless it fully reflects its community," he said.

Yarnold called that challenge "an hour-by-hour, story-by-story, picture-by-picture effort."

Devoting a week of close attention compels journalists to ask: "Can we really produce an accurate newspaper if we don't fully reflect the community?"

Yarnold's own newspaper will review a content audit and some additions in the past year: a business beat on diversity and new Latino, Asian-American and black columnists.

"Diversity has been an add-on, not a core value in most newsrooms," Yarnold said.

Change is hard, he said, "because it requires going to more than official sources. Because newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and, for whatever reason, so are our sources."

"I don't think the two (situations) are coincidental," Yarnold added.

Lack of diverse coverage results, in part, from a lack of minority journalists, something the industry has struggled with for decades.

The Mercury News staff, for example, is 32% minority, covering a community that is 52% minority — 24% each Latino and Asian-American, and 4% black.

Nationally, the latest figures show that despite more than tripling minority hires in the past quarter-century, newsrooms are still no mirror of the American public.

The ASNE annual census found the number of minority journalists at daily newspapers rose this past year just one-third of 1 percentage point, to 11.85 percent, or 6,700 out of 56,200 journalists.

Yet while minorities are less than 12% of newsrooms, they compose more than 28% of the U.S. population. In the mid-1970s, minorities made up 4% of newsrooms but 19% of the population.

Last week the ASNE and APME announced a $1 million partnership with The Freedom Forum, which is spending $5 million this year to aggressively recruit minorities to the newspaper industry.