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Diversity efforts start with a plan, succeed with time, attention

By Jim Strauss
Executive editor, Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune

11.06.02

Two decades ago when I entered journalism, many newsrooms didn't give diversity a first thought. Today, diversity is considered in most newsrooms, but too often it is an afterthought. Editors trying to diversify their newsrooms too often don't work at recruiting minorities until an opening occurs and then become frustrated because a qualified candidate isn't readily available. Reporters too often don't think of diversity until articles are nearly complete. That can result in last-minute sources awkwardly being forced into articles.

Successful diversity efforts aren't unlike successful project reporting, design or training efforts. They all start with a well-developed plan and a commitment of time, resources and sustained attention.

That plan must be tailored to fit each newspaper. What works in one market won't necessarily work in another.

The Great Falls Tribune serves a market that is more than 90% white. By far the largest minority group is Native Americans, most of whom live on isolated reservations. Several years ago, we realized that we were out of touch with and under-covering the reservations. We had had Native American journalists on our staff before, and the loss of those staffers left a void in our newsroom. Worse than that, our readers were being cheated. Cheated because the Tribune, or any other daily paper in Montana where Native Americans account for 7.4% of the population, simply cannot do its job as well without Native American journalists on staff. Without Native Americans on our staff the Tribune had less:

  • Perspective: Try as they may, non-Native American staffers cannot see issues in the same light as American Indian staffers can.

  • Credibility: How can a paper argue that it is committed to covering the Native community when its staff lacks members of that community?

  • Access: Quite simply, Native American journalists can open doors to stories that we cannot.

    • We realized that one hurdle we faced was a very limited number of Native American print journalists. So we developed a plan to attract more Native Americans to the rewards and challenges of a newspaper career and to help them develop as journalists. Steps we took included:

  • Outreach: We regularly visit the four reservations in our area, even though they are as far away as 345 miles — one way. We do more than meet with readers to discuss coverage and story ideas. We spend time with classes at tribal colleges and reservation high schools to discuss newspaper career opportunities. We also regularly sponsor tours of the Tribune for high school classes.

  • Apprenticeships: Native American apprenticeships are designed for high school seniors considering a journalism major. They are different from internships, which are focused in one discipline, such as reporting or photography. The apprentices rotate from newsroom department to department, getting a feel of the broad opportunities — from reporting to photography to copy editing and design.

  • Internships: We expanded our internship program and increased the number of Native American interns. The Freedom Forum has been a great help in this area. We have had eight Chips Quinn Scholars the past three years. In addition to providing a financial match to smaller newspapers, the Chips Quinn program provides a thorough training and orientation week for scholars and awards a $1,000 scholarship for successfully completing the internship.

    • Those recruitment and development efforts paid huge dividends for the Tribune with the hiring of two former Chips Quinn Scholars as full-time reporters. When we recruited Jennifer Perez and Katie Oyan, who are Native American, to the Tribune we got an assist from the ASNE/APME Fellows program. The two-year program, funded and administered by the Freedom Forum, provides fellows with training, mentoring and four $5,000 stipends — one awarded every six months on top of the newspaper’s usual salary. The training and support not only help develop fellows but also benefit all newsroom staffers. The Freedom Forum career coach has put on three training sessions for newsroom staff in the past 18 months. Two newsroom managers recently attended a two-day, fully funded training session at the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute in Nashville, Tenn.

    While the Native American perspective these staffers bring is a great addition to our newsroom, it benefits our readers only if it extends beyond the newsroom and onto our pages. We improved the diversity of our coverage by:

  • Expanding our coverage of reservations: We have worked to regularly cover the positive and negative news. The long distance of the reservations from Great Falls hampered efforts to consistently cover them, especially in the harsh winter months. So we opened a northern Montana bureau that puts a Tribune reporter much closer to three of the reservations. More consistent and thorough coverage has been the result.

  • Mainstreaming: We are careful to make sure that Montanans of color are not found only in stories dealing with cultural and racial topics. We look daily for ways to include minority voices in general news coverage, from school stories to career stories. Tribune editors regularly review our papers for these “mainstreaming” successes, and a local minority source list available online and in print for reporters and photographers is continually updated.

    • I've been asked if our diversity efforts have caused resentment in our newsroom, or if our increased coverage of area reservations has led to any reader complaints. The answer to both is no. I credit that to an important element of our diversity plan from the beginning: Our goal was and is to reflect our market in our newsroom and on our pages. It is not our goal to be disproportionate. What we want is balance — a fundamental concept that staffers and readers both expect in their newspaper.