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Why diversity: Explaining need for extra effort to diversify newsrooms

By Wanda S. Lloyd
Executive Director, Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University

03.22.02

The woman seated across the aisle from me on the flight was incredulous. She spent the better part of our runway taxi time asking me what kind of work I do.

At first I went slow, not seeing the need to lay out my entire professional life for this stranger and everybody within earshot of us on the plane. But she kept prying. Before long, she had a snapshot of my career, including my current role directing a program to train people of color to become journalists for daily newspapers.

“Why do you have to have a program to teach journalism to minorities? Why can’t they just get jobs like everybody else?” she asked me.

Why did she have to go there?

For almost a quarter of a century, since the American Society of Newspaper Editors started keeping track of people of color working as professionals in daily newspaper newsrooms, many in the newspaper industry have wondered the same thing: Why all the effort to find, train and mentor people of color to get parity on daily newspaper staffs?

According to the latest survey results, people of color — African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Native Americans — make up less than 12% of professionals in daily newspaper newsrooms.

My flight mate is not alone in questioning diversity efforts. Others have asked my colleagues and me why we put so much time, energy and effort into diversity.

I wish I could say that staff diversity in newsrooms is the natural order of things, but it’s not. Consider these obstacles:

• People of color are woefully under-represented in university journalism programs, the source of most entry-level hires for daily newspapers.

• At many large universities, many minority students say they perceive a less-than-inviting atmosphere on the staffs of campus newspapers, another source of newspapers’ recruiting.

• Editors of small daily newspapers in communities that don’t have significant minority populations will tell you how hard it is to recruit people of color. And when they do hire people of color, how hard it is to get them to stay for a reasonable length of time.

• In some newsrooms, staff turnover is high. People of color are leaving the business faster than their white colleagues, according to the 2001 ASNE survey. Some departing journalists cite hostile newsroom environments and poor communication with managers as reasons for leaving.

• And then there’s that chicken-and-egg thing: Readers (including youngsters still contemplating career choices) in some minority communities say newspapers don’t reflect their communities, and the leaders of those newspapers say they can’t find the talent to help them reflect the communities they want to serve better.

That’s why the Freedom Forum and other organizations are forming partnerships with newspapers and individuals — to make a difference by finding, training and mentoring people of color who want to be good journalists. Other partnerships include coaching and training editors and others in newsrooms who want to get better at managing diversity.

The bottom line for all — readers and journalists — is better, more inclusive newspapers.

On the next flight, I hope the woman I met on the plane reads her daily newspaper and notices something to make her say, “Oh, now I get it.”