Nomination: Pacific Daily News

10.12.06

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Pacific Daily News' publication for the Filipino community

Dear Judges:

The Pacific Daily News is located on the western Pacific island of Guam. Our location provides us the unique opportunity to reflect a mix of ethnicities that is unmatched in most areas of the world. Our island is home to an indigenous group of people, the Chamorros, and also is home to a melting post of ethnicities, from Filipino, Pohnpeian, Palauan, Chuukese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and more. Our challenge as a newspaper is to inform, educate and inspire our collective community with the contributions that our diverse population and their respective cultures provide to the daily life of our home island.

If our goal is to be our community's newspaper, then we must represent our community's issues and successes in our news pages and in our newsroom. But even on an island as culturally diverse as ours, staffing a diverse newsroom is an ongoing challenge.

When I first arrived at the Pacific Daily News, efforts to reflect our community in our newsroom staff were still developing. Many of our journalists, even in our newsroom of a little more than 30, were off-island hires who worked at the paper for two or three years and then returned to the U.S. mainland. Their contributions were valuable, but it is easy on an island where minority representation is so rich to look at this parade of journalists and coin our newspaper as the "outsider." This perception was unacceptable and had to change. But even on an island as culturally mixed as ours, staffing a newsroom to meet our community's diversity wasn't going to happen overnight.

Journalism was not a field in which young local children were encouraged to pursue. Parents wanted job security for their children. If their children were going to college, they should become doctors, lawyers or engineers. If the newspaper was serious about hiring local talent then we had to cultivate it. We've learned that to recruit — and most importantly, retain — diverse talent, we would have to develop programs that addressed that challenge.

Our strategy is three-prong: our high school internship program, our college internship program and our Grow Our Own program.

In 1992, we began our high school internship program. We had no budget or additional resources. We just did it. I took on the first group of high school students who would participate. We structured a program that invited interns to participate a year at a time. Now the program is in its 15th year and produces a weekly Lifestyle lead, contributes to an online site and produces content for a quarterly teen magazine. The teen editor, after graduation, is offered a spot on our college internship program.

Our current assistant managing editor was one of our first interns. He started here at age 15. Our former lifestyle editor, a current copy editor, a former assistant local news editor and a former reporter also began their careers as interns in our high school program.

The program works
The lifestyle editor is the program's coordinator, assisted by her reporter. The interns also have an editor chosen each year by a selection team of newsroom staff. The entire newsroom participates during Christmas break when members of the staff take on mentoring roles, allowing our high school interns to shadow them and assist in their daily assignments.

Our college internship program has been in place for three decades. College students who are accepted work alongside our reporting staff for eight to 12 weeks. Most of our interns have been from Guam. Although this program takes quite a bit of commitment, we have taken up to five interns at a time. We bring them on, knowing that if even one of these students decides to return to the newsroom, the investment was worth it. The interns are rotated throughout the newsroom's sections and each editor is responsible for the intern's training while in his or her section. During the first week of the internship, the interns attend training sessions that focus on the basics of journalism and career development. Many have returned to work in our newsroom.

Our third strategy is our Grow Our Own program. This essentially is a one-year internship for university seniors or for those looking to journalism as a second career. For a small newsroom, these programs have been fairly intense and time-consuming, but rewarding. Editors, assistant editors, photographers and reporters are the trainers and mentors for these interns. The programs require commitment and dedication, not only from the interns, but also from the editors and veteran staff who work with the interns and develop their journalism skills.

We've had our failures in these programs, but more importantly we've had our successes.

Lifestyle Editor Oyaol Ngirairkl came to us her final year in college. She was working for an airline at the time, making a decent salary with great travel benefits. But she wanted a career. She took on the one-year internship and was hired later as a full-time reporter. She was promoted to her current post this year — her fourth year on the staff. Our former lifestyle editor, Theresa Merto, also came to us her senior year in college. She was our cops and courts reporter for three years and then was promoted to the assistant lifestyle editor position and then the lifestyle editor position. She left us this year to start a family.

We currently have a new intern, Lacee Martinez, on staff who was in our college internship programs this summer and has decided she wants to pursue a career in journalism. She is a senior at the local university and shows strong potential. Our visual editor, Cid Caser, came to us from the production department as a graphics designer. Cid has been with the newsroom for more than seven years. He was promoted to design editor in 2001 and then visual editor this year. He now is responsible for a staff of two designers and two photographers.

These programs feed our ranks. We are seeing their impact. Many who have gone through our programs have come back to work. Many have stayed and continue to work and grow in our newsroom.

In 1992, four of 12 staffers on the city desk were minorities — 33%. In the newsroom, 54% of our staff of 33 was minority. Today, 92% of our newsroom professional staff is minority. On the local news desk, minorities represent 100%. Our community's MSA remains at 80.5%. Our newsroom well represents our community, exceeding our MSA in many areas of staffing.

When there is an opportunity to promote our diverse talent, we do so. We work with Human Resources on succession plans each year, identifying those in the newsroom who show potential for management. We develop Positive PIPs for those who need a bit more time to develop their skills. The Positive Improvement Plans can range from six months to a year. The goal is self-confidence and success. In 2005, we started a new editors training program. The executive editor conducts it once a week. We teach critical editing skills, as well as management challenges and expectations. This year we have three editors in the program. When I began as an editor, I had the fortunate experience of a very strong mentoring relationship with my managing editor, who was a minority woman. That mentoring was critical and allowed me a strong foundation on which to build success, as well as to handle failures. The new editors training program allows for that type of relationship.

But more important than the numbers that our diverse staff represents, all these individuals bring their collective experiences and culture to the journalism experience as well.

Our Chuukese sports reporter, Alex J. Rhowunio'ng, was able to produce a sport series that looked at why student of the Federated States of Micronesia were under-represented in high school sports on island. The series went beyond the school system and into the homes of families who still are struggling to make ends meet and to understand a way of life that is much more fact-paced than what they deal with in their idyllic islands. Our Palauan reporter Oyaol Ngirairikl also has brought more understanding of her culture to our newsroom and to the community through her stories about Palauan culture and issues among the Micronesian community on island. Our Chamorro staff cover both the hard news issues of the majority population on our island, as well as cultural issues, such as the erosion of local traditions and cultures amongst younger generations. Our Filipino staff members were advocates for a weekly publication that we published for the Filipino community, which is the second largest majority on island. The publication is produced in a mixture of English and Tagalog with features of the local Filipino community, as well as from the Philippines. Our Filipino staff is able to edit and write for the publication.

Even with an MSA that shows our minorities representing the majority of the population, there remain issues within ethnic groups that require attention and voice. Discrimination exists between minority groups, especially for those residents from the Federated States of Micronesia who come to Guam for better opportunities — jobs that don't exist in their homes and a U.S. education.

Representing our community in our newsroom and in our newspaper is a necessity because it will ultimately lead to community ownership of our newspaper. It's nice to no longer be "the outsider."