Juana Summers is struck by “an incredible sense of responsibility.”

She took over one of the host chairs at “All Things Considered” in June 2022 after many years as a political correspondent for NPR. Now almost a year into her new role, she sees herself as a guide to making the news program — and NPR in general — a place where people can feel represented.

Part of that, Summers believes, starts with the audience knowing her.

“I am never setting at the door that I am a Black woman, I am a stepparent, I am a woman who grew up in the Midwest and lived in a low- and middle-income home growing up, and who went to private religious schools,” said Summers, 34. “All of those dynamics are things that inform how I do my journalism, and the degree in which I lean into any part of that varies from story to story.”

Summers is one of the four women of color — three of them Black — who have taken over hosting duties at flagship NPR programs over the past year. Leila Fadel moved to “Morning Edition” in January 2022, joined just over a year later by veteran NPR host Michel Martin. Ayesha Rascoe became the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday” in March 2022. Their roles extend beyond the voices delivering the headlines. Each are editorial leaders with immense influence over what and who is covered.

“It would seem that after NPR top executives and news managers saw its three most popular women of color hosts departed within the last year, they would have pondered seriously about why these stellar female journalists left, with serious determination to make progressive changes at the public network to recruit and retain women of color hosts,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on race and gender in broadcast journalism.

Bramlett-Solomon added that leadership at NPR now faces a unique challenge in showing their commitment “to move forward with dramatic and meaningful transformation in programming inclusion and not simply window dressing on the set.”

Whitney Maddox, who was hired for the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion manager role in January 2021, said that in her role, she has especially focused on women of color at NPR: “What’s happening with them? How are they doing? What do they need?”

She has created a monthly space for women of color at the organization to meet and share about their day-to-day experiences and voice what resources they need. Her work also includes consulting to the flagship programs and checking in on their workplace cultures and how people are supported, including how stories are pitched and edited.

Maddox also started Start Talking About Race, or STAR, which is a twice-monthly event open to everyone in the organization. From these conversations, Maddox said she’s already seen an impact.

“This is moving beyond this space into how people are pitching their stories,” Maddox said. “Editors have come back to me and said, ‘A point that somebody made in STAR — I used that when I brought up a point of how we should think differently about how to source this story.’ There is a process, there is time, there is changing people’s hearts and raising their consciousness to understand why this work is important.”

The leadership of Fadel, Martin, Rascoe, and Summers are key parts in acting on conversations surrounding equity. Their roles in the host chairs are a signal of NPR’s commitment to reflecting their audience, Marrapodi said. “Our job is to be public media for the entire public,” he said. “We’re here for everybody. Our job is to hold a mirror up to society. And this is what society looks like.”

Fadel, 41, is acutely aware that her in the host chair is a representation of what society looks — and sounds — like.

“I just never thought it could happen. Clearly women have held host seats at NPR long before me, and people of color have moved up through the organization, but I just never imagined it,” she said. “How could I have imagined this for myself? There was no one who looked like me, who was an Arab woman, who was Muslim, doing this job.”

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, constantly as she works. “I think about her and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

Even the sound of her voice has been true to Rascoe’s roots: As her executive producer Sarah Lucy Oliver said, “Ayesha sounds like herself. She says she sounds like a Black woman from Durham, North Carolina.”

Oliver described what she calls “NPR voice” — a low register, stripped of any regional dialects, that registers as white and male — as the prevailing sound of NPR. Rascoe, she said, is a disruption to that.

“For decades, listeners have been accustomed to a particular kind of NPR voice. You can run through the dial and figure out when you’ve landed on an NPR member station,” Oliver said.

Hearing a voice like Rascoe’s “is a definite change in direction, and is exactly the kind of voice NPR wants to bring to the air,” Oliver said. “This is part of the real world. People speak differently. People have different regional accents. People use different kinds of colloquialisms. NPR is trying to sound more like the real world now.”

But Rascoe has had to reckon with the way audiences — used to that staid, white, and masculine NPR voice — perceive her. She has received racist listener feedback: coded messaging urging her to “sound professional,” telling Rascoe about how they don’t like her voice.

Rascoe says this is “all just a way of saying, ‘You are Black, and you are a Black woman from the South, and therefore you are stupid.’” When she first arrived at NPR in 2018 from Reuters, where she was a White House correspondent, it was a shock. “I will not try to pretend that it didn’t hurt and that it wasn’t frustrating,” she said.

Though Rascoe said she has received nothing but support from her colleagues and managers, her experience speaks to the dynamic at play in newsrooms nationwide aspiring to evolve, change and grow in being representative in their journalism.

The work of “disrupting the whiteness that journalists of color so often feel in white newsrooms” is hard and real, Bramlett-Solomon said — but doable, especially when there is real, on-the-ground support from management, with actual dollars behind it to show it.

Rascoe is aware of the fact that by simply being on air in such a high-profile way, she is doing that work of not only changing NPR, but changing American audiences’ expectations more broadly on credibility within the news.

“I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine…Hopefully, it helps expand their idea of what authority, what professionalism and what intelligence can sound like,” Rascoe said.

Martin, 63, first joined NPR in 2006 to launch “Tell Me More,” an interview-focused show that aired on NPR member stations nationwide from 2007 to 2014. She then became host of “Weekend All Things Considered,” a position she held until joining “Morning Edition” as one of the hosts in March.

After decades in journalism, and many years at NPR specifically, Martin is deliberate and thoughtful in her imagining of the organization’s future and her role in it. As someone with a long history with the organization — one that includes using her voice to help push NPR forward on how it thinks about and covers race — she brings to her new role the ability to hold the past in the present while continuing to look forward. She said she’s constantly thinking not only about her time at NPR, but the ways journalists of color have worked to serve communities throughout history in how she approaches her role today.

“I just want us to keep getting better,” Martin said. “I want us to keep getting better because if you aren’t, then you are not growing. If you are not growing, then you’re dying.”

Martin steps into leadership at the flagship program at a time when the political climate often makes it tough for journalists to report. Martin says she thinks journalists play an especially important role “to help us understand each other’s experiences.” Without helping audiences dig into the nuances of why people believe what they do — and why the political is so personal for so many — journalists aren’t doing the job they are charged with executing.

“Yes, the words are changing and we’re all having to learn to use different language and to recognize different identities that were perhaps not part of our own experiences before. But that’s life. That’s learning. That’s education. That’s the news,” she said.

Martin said she takes inspiration from the way that Spanish-language and Black newspapers have crafted their coverage strategies.

“The origin of these news outlets was not just to talk about the politics that particularly affected these communities, but also to help people understand how to live in the new world that they were in: telling people things like how to register to vote, how to register your kids for school,” Martin said.

It is exactly this kind of work — often dismissed by editors and audiences alike as “unserious” for being service-oriented or because its target audience is those from historically underrepresented backgrounds — that Martin has always prioritized, and sees as essential now more than ever.

“What I want the most is for us to keep moving forward and not lose sight of our mission, which is to serve the public…I want us to keep doing our jobs because I think the country really needs us,” Martin said. “I want us to get more honest and stronger and more clear in how we serve people by helping them understand the world that does not lead them to carry the baggage of waking up and saying, ‘Whose side am I on today?’ That’s not who we are and I think not being that is so important.”

To think about equitable journalism means to consider the weight and totality of experience that exists behind each voice that feels unheard. That’s something that Martin’s “Morning Edition” co-host Fadel thinks a lot about, too. Fadel said she sees a major part of her job as being someone who can actively make and support a “safe space” for a range of voices, opinions, and perspectives in the editorial process.

Being fully present as herself in the host chair is a critical element of that, Fadel said — while also acknowledging that simply sitting in the seat doesn’t mean her newsroom, or any other, is done with the work of thinking holistically about what representation means in journalism.

“Change doesn’t happen because one person sits in a chair,” Fadel said. “It requires action at every level. This is happening at NPR, but of course there is more work to be done. Diversity isn’t just who is in a newsroom, but whose voices are in a story, and there is still a lot of work to be done there. We have a very diverse newsroom, but we need to always make sure it is more than white men whose voices get to talk about what happened.”

Fadel said she thinks all the time about how her own journalism can help change other people’s — and predominantly white listeners’ — perceptions.

“I didn’t see myself and my family in the stories I saw on the news. My father is from Lebanon and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Talking about people like my family in the news meant only talking about people who were ensconced in conflict. It was all conflict. But there are real people who exist in these places where there is conflict. And they are nuanced and may all experience pain differently and joy differently and have lives outside of the conflict going on around them.”

Sitting in the host chair at “Morning Edition” is a way that she feels she can change this kind of sentiment across journalism, writ large.

“Representation matters,” she said.

In the study, released Tuesday, journalists were asked to describe the industry in one word. Forty-two percent of them used words like “struggling,” “chaos,” “dying,” “declining,” or “under-resourced.” Seventeen percent used neutral words like “changing,” while just 9% used positive words like “important.”

Pew surveyed nearly 12,000 journalists in the United States between February and March 2022. Of those respondents, 77% were white, 8% were Hispanic, 5% were Black, 3% were Asian, and a combined 6% identified as “other” or did not answer. Men and women made up 51% and 46% of the respondents, respectively, while 1% identified as “another gender identity.”

Despite more negative feelings about the industry, journalists felt more positive about their actual jobs. Over 70% said they were proud of their work and would pursue a journalism career again.

A surprising finding: Online journalists are the happiest journalists (followed by print!) https://t.co/U7aqCYCnJD pic.twitter.com/ll1NqlglUd

— Chris Suellentrop (@suellentrop) June 14, 2022

They also feel that the industry is doing a good job “adapting to industry change.” As for “getting the story right,” well, there’s disagreement — 14% of respondents said that “getting the story right” is the thing the industry does the “best job” at these days. But 23% of respondents said that “getting the story right” is the thing the industry is doing the worst job at.

Journalists said newsroom growth has been been relatively stagnant, with 46% saying their newsroom is “mostly staying the same,” while 22% reported their organizations were cutting back and 30% said their outlets were expanding. At the same time, 41% said their salaries had increased while 50% said theirs stayed the same. Seven percent said their salaries decreased.

The Center also conducted two separate surveys of its panel of American adults, during the same time period, in order to compare the differences between the ways that journalists and the public view the journalism industry. Turns out there are major discrepancies between the way the press views itself and the way the public views it.

Journalists and the public were asked about five journalism functions: Covering the most important stories of the day, reporting the news accurately, serving as a watchdog over elected leaders, giving voice to the underrepresented, and managing or correcting misinformation.

“In all five areas, journalists give far more positive assessments than the general public of the work news organizations are doing,” the report’s authors noted. “And on four of the five items, Americans on the whole are significantly more likely to say the news media is doing a bad job than a good job.”

For example, 71% of journalists said made-up news and information is “a very big problem for the country,” compared to 50% of U.S. adults who said the same. Meanwhile, 40% of journalists said that news organizations are generally doing a bad job of managing or correcting misinformation, but 51% of U.S. adults said the same.

The survey also looked at how journalists view diversity in the industry and their individual newsrooms. Sixty-seven percent said that their newsrooms have “enough” gender diversity, but only 32% said the same about racial and ethnic diversity. Less than half of respondents (42%) said their newsrooms make diversity a “major priority.”

The way that journalists view their organizations’ progress varies based on demographics. Overall, white journalists and men were more likely to think that their organization treated everyone fairly regardless of gender, age, or race.

At the same time, white journalists and journalists ages 65 or older were less likely to participate in diversity, equity, and inclusion-related trainings and discussions, compared to Black, Hispanic, Asian, and journalists under 65.

You can read the full report here.

A new open letter signed by dozens of professional journalism organizations, nonprofits, and labor unions asks the Pulitzer Prizes to add language requiring newsrooms to participate in the News Leaders Association’s annual diversity survey (or similar) by 2024 in order to be considered for their journalism awards.

The open letter cites reporting in Nieman Lab that though NLA sought responses from 2,500 news organizations for this year’s survey, just 303 newsrooms responded. The signees include professional organizations like Society of Professional Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, Native American Journalists Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, LION Publishers, and Institute for Nonprofit News — as well as a host of individual news organizations, including Vox and Spotlight PA.

The open letter, sent on Friday morning, was organized by Sisi Wei, co-executive director of OpenNews, and Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild. (Marjorie Miller, who was named administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes last month, confirmed she’d received the emailed letter and said she supports diversity efforts in newsrooms, but has “not had time to study the letter or the survey or the NLA efforts in particular.”)

Wei and Schleuss sought counsel from NLA — which gave its support to the participation clause — and Meredith Clark, the professor at Northeastern University who has run the diversity survey since 2018, as they drafted the letter. After reaching out to professional organizations and groups, the two took additional suggestions to clear up the language and “make sure the criteria we were asking for was both firm and generous,” Wei said.

Here’s the open letter, as sent on Friday morning:

“The most incredible feedback we got was that other groups had thought of this idea as well, and they were excited that someone was finally taking action,” Wei said. “While we came upon the idea to start with the Pulitzers, so have many others.”

The organizers are still adding to the list of signees. They plan to release a second version, next week, with a list of individual journalists and news leaders who have given their support.

“There’s been overwhelming support for this, which has been so inspiring. Newsrooms were supposed to have a ‘reckoning’ after the murder of George Floyd, and yet, here we are in 2022 seeing that so few organizations want to even be transparent about their own newsroom diversity,” Wei said. “This small step would be a big push towards helping our newsrooms serve the communities they cover.”

Illustration of the Pulitzer Prize’s gold medal by Nicoletta Barolini.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/journalism-groups-make-the-pulitzers-open-only-to-news-orgs-that-are-transparent-about-their-diversity/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/crushing-resistance-yet-again-newsrooms-arent-showing-up-to-the-industrys-largest-diversity-survey/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/crushing-resistance-yet-again-newsrooms-arent-showing-up-to-the-industrys-largest-diversity-survey/#respond Tue, 12 Apr 2022 16:38:53 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=202399 The journalism industry is letting a vital resource wither on the vine.

The News Leaders Association has — through its precursor, the American Society of News Editors — conducted an annual diversity survey since 1978. The resulting report is a basic but indispensable tool for gauging diversity efforts in journalism and helps newsrooms see larger trends about hiring, retaining, and promoting underrepresented journalists. Back in 2020, NLA announced it was pausing the survey over disappointingly low participation rates from news organizations.

For this year’s report, which will be the first released since 2019, NLA said it reached out to thousands of news organizations and planned to have 2,500 print and online organizations participate. Meredith Clark, a professor at Northeastern University who has been the survey’s lead researcher since 2018, told the Associated Press in October that her goal was to reach at least 1,500 responses in order to produce a statistically solid report.

In the end, just 303 news organizations responded, NLA executive director Myriam Marquez said. That was down from the 429 orgs that responded in 2019 and prompted the survey to “pause” due to low participation. (The 2018 survey — the historic low-water mark for participation — had 293 news organizations respond, a response rate around 17%.)

The report is expected to be released this week, after several delays, and will count 12,781 journalists from the 303 participating newsrooms. Even without this year’s final report in hand, it’s hard not to question the future of the survey.

The two-year long “pause” to retool the survey didn’t help. Pushing the deadline to participate back again and again didn’t work. Historic protests and an industry-wide conversation about race and representation did not spontaneously prompt many more news organizations to respond.

Clark, who told NLA this year that she plans to step away from the diversity survey, was candid about where she thinks the project falls down.

“What has become abundantly clear to me is that diversity can never be a measure of goodwill. You don’t get to transparency about diversity by relying on people’s goodwill,” Clark said. “Ultimately, that’s what the design of the newsroom diversity survey at the organizational level does. It’s driven by relationships. It’s driven by political will. It’s driven by those journalists, and leaders within journalism, who are willing to withstand criticism about the progress that they may have not made, and willing to do some introspection about where they need to improve. That is not tenable and that is the reason that we continue to see declining numbers of participation.”

For Clark, being transparent is the least newsrooms can do, especially as outlets often ask businesses and other organizations to do the same.

“It feels like supreme hypocrisy on the part of the journalism industry,” Clark said. “Transparency and doing the digging and the reporting — all of that is so germane to what we understand journalism to be. And we are absolutely unwilling to do it among ourselves.”

There are some bright spots, based on what we know so far about the unpublished survey. The Associated Press participated for the first time. There was strong participation from newspaper chains including McClatchy and Gannett, which has pledged to “make its workforce as diverse the country by 2025.” NLA is also linking to the handful of newsrooms that have decided to self-publish their diversity stats — including The New York Times and The Washington Post — even though they declined to contribute to NLA’s survey that seeks to paint a more comprehensive picture about print and online journalism.

The survey includes questions on race, gender, ethnicity, disability, and veteran status and not every organization has the necessary data readily available. Small and resource-strapped outlets may have a difficult time finding someone available to fill out the spreadsheet-based survey, which Clark acknowledged could take multiple hours depending on the organization. A few newsrooms told NLA that they didn’t have the requested information on hand, but instead of failing to respond entirely, they passed along what they did have and added a voluntary self-report within their existing HR system to collect more.

What about the vast majority of outlets that did not respond, though? Marquez cited “many” out-of-date emails on the list that NLA purchased from Editor and Publisher (potentially due to layoffs and other turnover within the industry) and some outreach going to spam folders as two contributing factors.

Marquez — who joined NLA as interim executive editor in May 2021, and whose previous experience includes serving as executive editor at El Nuevo Herald and editorial page editor for the Miami Herald — also pointed, more obliquely, to newsrooms knowing they were not meeting diversity expectations as a reason for non-participation.

“I can tell you that frustration,” she said. “If you don’t have any possibility of hiring anyone, how can you diversify your staff?”

Other reasons newsrooms gave NLA for not participating were that they were not legally required to collect the demographic data NLA was asking for, that timing of the survey was not ideal (the original deadline was in October and some preferred a first-quarter deadline), and that they were worried that the information would be used against them in labor negotiations, among other concerns.

Clark characterized reasons for non-participation as ranging from “benign neglect to passive aggressive resistance to outright hostility.”

Some survey feedback was openly unfriendly to the ideals of diversity and inclusion. Clark recalled that one newsroom sent a response along the lines of, “We’re not participating in your woke diversity exercises, you snowflakes.” Another emailed response, when Clark was testing out language for a gender nonbinary question, stood out to her too.

“I got a response from an editor-in-chief who asked, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do, check between the legs of everyone who works for me?’” Clark said. “It echoes the same sort of nasty emails that journalists of color, that women in journalism, that people who are at all different in journalism, get from the general public. But these are coming from the people who are supposed to be upholding values of journalism as a part of democracy.”

One of the solutions that Clark has advocated for, and that NLA has been slow to adopt, is implementing stronger incentives for outlets to submit their data.

This year, for the first time, NLA will require news organizations to complete their diversity survey to be considered for some NLA awards. (That’s one reason why the survey, though the official report is imminent, remains open right now.) Next year, it will be required for all NLA awards. But why stop there? Why not reach out to major funders like Knight and MacArthur and awards committees from regional SPJ honors to the Pulitzers and ask them to include a participation clause?

Clark says she’ll be devoting more time to developing her own research center at Northeastern, but underscored she believes having an industry-wide diversity survey is critically important. (NLA, for their part, said they want to continue working with Clark.) Other organizations look at slices of the industry, such as diversity in nonprofit newsrooms, but no other survey seeks to be as comprehensive.

“This is the tool that the industry, that researchers, that journalism needs,” Clark said.

As a master’s student in journalism, Clark used the NLA survey — then the ASNE Newsroom Diversity Survey — to learn what the journalism landscape looks like, specifically for Black journalists.

“Over the years, I was critical of the way the data were collected, the way they were reported, and I thought, with great hubris, ‘I can do a better job of it,'” she said. “I learned that this project is not just about the person who’s leading it, and it’s definitely about the association and the relationships that the association values.”

“I’ve been met with the kind of crushing resistance that you would expect when you’re trying to do things that contribute to structural and systemic change,” she added. “I just did not expect to meet with that among leaders in journalism.”

Photo by Eirik Solheim used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/crushing-resistance-yet-again-newsrooms-arent-showing-up-to-the-industrys-largest-diversity-survey/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/american-journalisms-racial-reckoning-still-has-lots-of-reckoning-to-do/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/american-journalisms-racial-reckoning-still-has-lots-of-reckoning-to-do/#respond Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:55:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=201098

George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed were wake-up calls to newsrooms across the United States. From protests and strikes to viral Twitter threads calling out newsroom racism, news organizations heard that staffers and readers were tired of empty promises to do better from newsrooms that are often disproportionately whiter than the communities they serve.

In the months that followed those protests and the “media reckoning,” news outlets turned extra attention to hiring for roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

These types of jobs have existed for decades, in different iterations. They’ve been called the “immigration and minorities reporter,” the “race and ethnicity reporter,” the “demographics reporter,” and the “diversity reporter,” among other things. But they have posed journalists with similar challenges: lack of editorial support, lack of resources, and fundamental misunderstandings of the role journalism plays in marginalized communities.

The most recent push to create these positions stemmed from how the public reacted to Floyd’s murder, said Danielle K. Brown, the John & Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

In June 2020, about two-thirds of Americans said they supported the Black Lives Matter Movement, according to Pew. That number dipped down to 55% between June and September 2020, but the initial spike turned out to be enough to push newsrooms to look inward.

“There was a massive shift in public opinion. That always changes how newsrooms perk their ears up, or decide whose views they’re willing to tap into,” Brown said. “That public opinion shift and the visible engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement being one of the biggest mobilizations we’ve ever seen, that gave the news cues for the news to take this as a remarkable event.”

The second annual Medill Media Industry Survey, which Brown helped conduct and which was published in February, received responses from 1,500 media workers out of the 25,000 who were invited to participate. It found that “nearly four of every five survey respondents” said new efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion “have positively affected the journalism industry.”

But 86% of the respondents were white, raising the question of who, exactly, gets to decide if and how progress is being made. Only 30% of respondents said that their news organizations have made changes to efforts to encourage retention and inclusion.

In recent months, I checked in with the journalists hired into these roles about how their jobs were going.

What 12 journalists — at newspapers, online-only outlets, and radio stations across the country — told me ranged from enlightening to reassuring to exciting to absurd to horrifying to sad. Together, their stories underscored the idea that meaningful, sustainable, and lasting change — especially when it comes to institutional racism and discrimination — takes time. Even so, some news outlets are further along than others when it comes to making these changes.

Some of the journalists I spoke with feel more successful and supported in their roles than others. But many say they are still missing meaningful support from their managers to do the work they want to do. They agreed that one reporter or one beat isn’t enough to cover a community, subject, or issue with nuance. At the same time, not having a dedicated reporter on the beat can mean certain stories will get overlooked.

The journalists I spoke to feel personal responsibility to their communities and sources who help them tell stories. Many spoke to me on the condition of anonymity so they wouldn’t face retaliation from their workplaces for speaking up. For clarity, all anonymous sources were given pseudonyms.

 

“Can I SPEAK UP on something like this?”

In California, Stephanie Rivera was the first community engagement editor for the Long Beach Post, an online-only news outlet that covers the second largest city in Los Angeles County. She started in October 2020, after working as the publication’s first diversity and immigration reporter for over two years.

While she was a Post reporter, Rivera wore lots of hats in the newsroom. She was the only bilingual reporter. The Post didn’t have a social media manager, so she helped out with that, too. She applied to Report for America on her newsroom’s behalf to get new reporters and managed the process. That resulted in the Post getting two Spanish-speaking reporters who would cover areas with large Latino populations.

As the community engagement editor, Rivera worked on community partnerships and maintaining relationships with readers. She also worked on fundraising campaigns that are based on editorial projects, newsletter writing, and social media campaigns. She was also the newsroom’s liaison for its community editorial board, an initiative that brought together seven community members to write about various Long Beach issues.

It was a lot of work, but it allowed Rivera to showcase the range of skills she has and learn new ones along the way. But the learning curve affected the newsroom more than it did her, at first.

“Not everyone in the leadership team understood my role early on,” Rivera said. “I had to prove to them that I wasn’t doing business and ad sales. I [dealt] with fundraising, but it’s reader revenue and our readers are not a conflict of interest.”

Rivera still took on more projects. She hosted a live, virtual storytelling event, conducted a readership survey in Spanish among Spanish-speaking readers, launched a membership program, and published a year-in-review that gave readers an insight into the inner workings and accomplishments of the newsroom.

When the Post promoted Rivera, she also became the only person of color on the Post’s leadership team. Rivera said she felt empowered in her role, but that the job also came with a unique sense of responsibility.

Once, when another reporter inaccurately used the word “surge” to describe the arrival of migrant children to the U.S., Rivera spoke up. Ultimately, the editors changed the wording.

These were difficult conversations to have. “The last year and a half really tested us, and tested me personally,” Rivera said. “I was wondering, ‘Can I speak up on something like this?'” She found it to be worth the effort because it improved the journalism.

Rivera said that, although she was able to try a lot of new things, the newsroom was more focused on achieving financial sustainability and saw her role as key to that effort. (The Long Beach Post’s managing editor did not respond to a request for comment.) There was a push to work more on the business side, which Rivera said didn’t align with her career goals and didn’t offer much work-life balance.

“I decided to leave because I wanted to be in a place where I could be involved in more newsroom and editorial decisions,” Rivera said. She left in January and is now an audience editor for Colorado Public Radio.

 

GOING BEYOND the same sources

Desiree Stennett is a senior reporter covering race, identity, and inequality for the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. She was a breaking news reporter for the paper for over three years between 2012 and 2015. In August 2020, after freelancing and working for a paper in Tennessee, she returned to the Sentinel in August 2020 to cover the race and inequality beat.

Stennett said that, while the Sentinel had historically not covered many stories through the lenses of race, culture, and identity, her editors have given her the time and space to build the beat. She’s covered a range of issues: Orlando’s Haitian community after an earthquake in Haiti, the impacts of Covid-19 on housing, voter suppression.

“I had to make a lot of new sources and find experts for the first time,” Stennett said. “I had to dedicate weeks of energy into stories that didn’t even take that long to write — it just took a long time to track people down.”

Building relationships with sources from scratch is tough. For instance, reporters on beats like politics and the court system can usually quickly reach out to familiar academic sources at the University of Central Florida. Or, if a reporter is looking for a source, someone in the newsroom can usually suggest someone they’ve spoken to before. Sometimes those sources do fit into Stennett’s stories, but she’s also looking for new people to talk to and trying to diversify who gets quoted. She makes a conscious effort to reach out to academics at Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Bethune-Cookman University, which are local, historically Black institutions.

Even with the support of her editors, Stennett said that reporting and the emotional aftermath are challenging. After every story, she feels drained. She said she feels lucky to have unlimited vacation time, but knows she’s not great at taking advantage of it. “I feel bad for any reporter who’s doing this and only has two weeks of vacation a year. They’re not going to last,” she said. “Their newsroom needs to anticipate that and fix it before that reporter leaves.”

She said it’s been particularly taxing to learn how public records and data — and the lack thereof — erase marginalized people. For instance, data about who is in the county jail is not fully broken down by race — there’s no way to identify how many people identify as white and Hispanic or Black and Hispanic, Stennett said.

“It’s difficult. Race is a very real thing that impacts every day of your life,” Stennett said. But sometimes it can be difficult to quantify. The less numbers-based stories “are worth doing as well, about what is not accessible in the data even though we know it to be true.”

 

“You read through some of the old clips and they’re OBVIOUSLY RACIST. There’s a historic BLACK neighborhood here…and if you go through our coverage you can’t find ANY record of that. It’s almost like IT DIDN’T EXIST.”

“I thought I was gonna get FIRED”

One race and culture reporter I spoke to — we’ll call him “Jake” — has mixed feelings about his role. He thinks his beat has a lot of potential. He lives in a majority-minority city. If his outlet can’t get its coverage right, he wonders how journalists will fare in other places?

Jake is grateful to the newsroom for creating the position that allows him to cover marginalized groups in his city, including his own.

“The newsroom put their arms around me as I’ve tried to work this thing out,” he said. “It’s difficult starting a new beat. They told me not to worry about pageviews…I thought I was gonna get fired at every moment. Now that I’m over a year into it, I feel a lot better.”

But Jake is also overwhelmed by the number of story ideas he gets from readers. He’s the only person in the newsroom covering the diversity of the city, and thinks that, because of that, he’s often the primary person in the newsroom to whom community members feel comfortable reaching out.

His newsroom has taken some steps to improve its coverage. It started conducting listening sessions within different marginalized communities, giving people the chance to voice their concerns about the news outlet’s coverage. But their feedback isn’t always get implemented when it’s brought back to the newsroom. That makes Jake feel as if his time, and the time the community took to give their input, is wasted.

When the newsroom reviewed its coverage and its historical impact — as other news outlets across the country have also done — Jake said he didn’t think management prioritized the project or devoted enough resources to it to achieve a meaningful outcome. Some newsrooms let their journalists step away from their regular beats to work on these coverage reviews full time; his didn’t, he said.

Once, a film crew came to town and asked the newspaper for archival material about a Black community. The publication had to tell the crew there wasn’t much of an archive; the community simply hadn’t been covered in a meaningful way.

“You read through some of the old clips and they’re obviously racist,” Jake said. “There’s a historic Black neighborhood here…and if you go through our coverage you can’t find any record of that. It’s almost like it didn’t exist.”

Jake also struggles with shifting notions of journalistic objectivity. He sometimes finds it difficult to cover public officials, he said: In drafts, he may call them or their actions out as racist when he thinks it’s necessary, but then the language is softened or cut during the editing process.

“It’s a challenge to have to temper the language for the vehicle,” he said. “If someone does something that is racist, or misogynistic, or anything, I think it’s important to call it out as that. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t, nothing will happen.”

Another race and culture reporter working in a major city, “Jen,” echoed a similar frustration. She feels as if her newsroom has made progress in covering a wider range of communities with nuance and substance, but there’s a long way to go in diversifying staff and retaining talent from marginalized groups. A difficult editing process is one factor that can push people out of a newsroom, she said.

“The editing process is where you find so much pushback against certain things that are culturally relevant or culturally important to the topic that you’re covering,” she said. “[Editors] try to whitewash or water it down so things seem less aggressive toward one side or the other and I’m like, ‘That’s a fact. The thing that you’re trying to delete is a fact.’”

Jen has faced this problem herself when it comes to stories related to policing and criminal justice.

“[The editors] have yet to understand that police lie. Authorities lie,” she said. “They place a lot of emphasis on [showing] both sides of an argument, even when there’s clearly a side of an oppressor and clearly a side of the oppressed. That conversation and debate is still something that I find myself fighting and figuring out.”

 

“They made it feel like they were making an ALLOWANCE for me to have this position”

While Jake and Jen feel support for their beats from their colleagues and editors, others I interviewed for this piece don’t see that support.

“Tara” was hired as a general assignment reporter in California before the pandemic hit, with a focus on covering issues related to race and identity. She said that while her newsroom is making efforts to diversify the staff and establish pay equity, meaningful change in the actual journalism is hard to come by.

Despite the fact that Tara is working on a beat that’s new to her outlet, she’s required to turn in two daily stories a week along with a feature, just like all the other reporters. That workload is a roadblock when such a beat requires a reporter to spend time with sources and rebuild trust in the communities they’re trying to serve. On top of that, Tara said her editors don’t give her much feedback or guidance, and she feels as if she’s not doing the beat justice.

When George Floyd was killed and protests erupted, Tara felt that her newsroom’s coverage was reactive instead of nuanced, and said her editors seemed surprised that the protests were happening.

“I was surprised by how little they utilized me in that [protest] reporting,” she said. “The reporter on it ended up being a white man, and I was not sure where that decision had been made. There was never a newsroom discussion about who might be most appropriate to cover this, or who might be able to bring a certain amount of context to the story.”

And when her race and identity beat was established soon after the summer of 2020, she said some people in the newsroom thought it was too “political.” They thought, she said, that it would signal to the community that the outlet was going in a “liberal direction.”

Tara pitched a story about the intersections of different racial communities in the area in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. Her editors made her feel like she didn’t know what she was talking about, she said, and rejected her story based on the fact that they didn’t think there was “a real issue” there to be covered.

So she took the story to another news outlet in the area as a freelancer. That outlet embraced the story, took it seriously, and published a larger package.

“It’s something that I still hold with me and think about. How much impact can I make in this reporting role, since that’s often the wall that I come up against?” she said. “They’ve made it feel like they were making an allowance for me to have this position as a race and equity reporter. I feel like there are a lot of constraints on what I can do, what they’re comfortable with me doing, and [there’s a lot of] convincing them about what issues are important to cover.”

 

“Throwing ME under the BUS”

Journalists in diversity-related roles are often alone in their efforts. They feel direct and indirect pressure to better the publication’s overall coverage even when that isn’t the job they were hired to do.

“Sam” has been covering marginalized communities (including ethnic minorities, low-income people and working-class communities, and LGBTQ groups) since the summer of 2020 for a newspaper in the South “that has historically mistreated these communities,” she said. The person in the role before her reportedly left after less than a year because they felt unsupported.

“If anything affects anyone Black, the other reporters [ask if I] want to help out. You can also write about race!” she said. “Any time anyone needs to talk to a Black source, they’ve reached out to me and asked me for my sources.”

Sam feels that her news outlet prioritizes white voices over those of marginalized people, both editorially and culturally. In one instance, after she published a story, a reader sent her a critical email where she felt as if “this person was clearly being racist.”

When Sam didn’t respond to the reader, they followed up with an editor — who ended up agreeing with the reader instead of supporting Sam. The editor responded to the reader “basically throwing me under the bus,” Sam said.

“I was really hurt by that. None of the concerns that the editor brought up with the reader were presented to me [first],” she said. “There was no conversation with me about it. I didn’t think I did anything wrong.”

Sam also struggles with pageviews. Lots of newsrooms use metrics to measure a story’s success, like pageviews or engagement time or a combination. Those can be problematic ways to measure the success of stories about marginalized people, especially if that coverage is new and unfamiliar to readers.

Sam was told that a meaningful story might not get many pageviews (the main metric her newsroom uses to measure success) but should move people to subscribe. But her newsroom has a pageview quota. If stories on a particular beat get lower pageviews than stories on other beats, then the reporter has to write more stories to meet the quota — increasing the amount of work for the same amount of pay.

Sam’s experience in this particular newsroom has depleted her. She’s actively looking for a new job but doesn’t know if she wants to continue being a journalist.

“I don’t know that I’m ready to leave journalism. It feels like, so early on in my career, I’ve already been pushed out of it by majority-white newsrooms,” she said.

 

“I was trying to do that thing that well-intentioned WHITE EDITORS do all the time, and come up with SHORT-term SOLUTIONS for SYSTEMIC cultural problems.”

“Not a problem you can SOLVE overnight”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

All the way back in 1998, journalist Barry Yeoman wrote for CJR about “rethinking the race beat”:

Reporters who shy away from racial issues are symptoms of a greater problem: newspapers and broadcast organizations that are themselves uncomfortable with the topic…When management supports aggressive coverage of inter-ethnic relations, reporters will clamor to cover race. If they’re not clamoring, it indicates passivity on the part of the leadership — or even hostility…

The real solution is to devote more energy to the issue — by hiring additional race reporters and creating a sense of collective responsibility in the newsroom.

Twenty-four years later, that’s still a good way for newsroom leaders to think about covering marginalized people and inequality. Yeoman told me over email that newsrooms have come a long way since the 1990s but there’s still more work to be done.

“These have become more normalized parts of the conversation, rather than niche issues,” he said. “It’s not cool to report on your city or beat with demographic blinders on.”

Some news outlets have been covering race and identity thoughtfully for years; not coincidentally, many of these outlets are led by women of color.

Futuro Media, founded by journalist Maria Hinojosa in 2010, focuses on storytelling “without the explanatory commas.” “‘Why does this story matter to the random white woman in Minnesota?’ That’s a question we never really asked at Futuro,” vice president of content development Marlon Bishop told me last year.

Prism, founded in 2018 and led by editor-in-chief Ashton Lattimore, covers gender, elections, criminal justice, immigration, race, worker’s rights, and the intersections of those issues, and aims to center the voices of marginalized people in all of its stories.

Scalawag Magazine, launched in 2015 and run by editor and publisher Cierra Brown Hinton, produces community-driven and community-centered journalism about oppressed communities in the American South. Canopy Atlanta puts much of the editorial power in the hands of its community members who know the issues they face best.

At the end of 2021, Vox’s editor-in-chief Swati Sharma revamped its editorial strategy by scrapping its Identities section and instead working with writers and editors to understand that issues like race, gender, identity, and other are central to every beat, and every story should reflect them.

Anna Griffin, the vice president of news for Oregon Public Broadcasting, talked to me about how she learned to be more than “a well-intentioned white editor.”

At Oregon Public Broadcasting, the Black Lives Matter protests were a watershed moment, particularly in Portland. OPB staffers of color and their allies in the newsroom sent a letter to management saying that newsroom leadership had failed them, arguing that too many women of color were leaving the organization, that there weren’t enough training opportunities for staffers of color, and that management was much too white.

When Griffin read that letter, her first instinct was to repost a job opening for a race and demographics reporter. It was a job that OPB had wanted to fill for a few years, after a reporter previously occupying the role left.

The staff told her that was the wrong move. They pointed out that hiring someone in that kind of role again would be asking one person to do too much. They also said the newsroom lacked sufficient editorial support to help reporters succeed.

“I was trying to do that thing that well-intentioned, white editors do all the time — come up with short-term solutions for systemic cultural problems,” Griffin said. Instead, staff “pushed us to rethink our editing structure and rethink the goal of this reporting position.”

“Our mission is to be the most trusted primary news source for all the communities in our coverage area, particularly historically marginalized and underserved populations,” she added. “That’s not a problem you can solve overnight if you haven’t been doing it well. And most of us have either not been doing it well or have not been doing it at all.”

Griffin tackled the problem in a new way, this time with staff input. Some of the changes were easier. OPB got rid of unpaid internships, which serve as a form of gatekeeping, and made them paid. It also reduced its use of temps and created a one-year fellowship program for emerging journalists.

Fellowship programs are still temporary and don’t address newsrooms’ retention problems. With that in mind, OPB’s fellowship is designed as a rotational program that gives fellow exposure to different kinds of journalism jobs (audio, video, and digital) that exist within public media.

During the course of the fellowship, the fellow has regular meetings with a public media mentor outside of OPB who can share their own perspectives and provide coaching. In the second half of the fellowship, OPB works with the fellows on job applications and expects them to work on them during work hours. OPB’s first fellow, Donald Orr, ended up staying and is now an announcer and producer at the station.

“We tell fellows during the application process that we may not have a job for them at OPB at the end of the year, but we will do everything possible to help them find a job somewhere in the public media ecosystem,” Griffin said in an email.

Other problems, though, were harder to solve. Management conducted a survey and had open conversations with the staff about what kinds of roles should be created. It can’t be the responsibility of one person in an organization to solve “decades of problems in our industry and generations of white supremacy woven into our culture,” Griffin said.

So OPB scrapped the race and demographics reporter idea. Instead, with feedback from the newsroom and stakeholders, Griffin decided to create a position for an Indigenous communities reporter. The job posting hasn’t gone up yet because Griffin and the editor who will supervise that reporter are doing a lot of research and outreach work to make sure that whoever is hired into that role has the opportunity and resources to succeed.

That means Griffin is talking to current reporters and editors who cover Indigenous communities in the region to make sure OPB doesn’t create extra obstacles for the reporter, who will already be on a difficult beat. Griffin is trying to create a network of allies, mentors, and potential sources for the reporter to reach out to when they start.

Griffin said OPB learned the hard way that reporters will feel as if they’re failing if OPB doesn’t build the editing infrastructure alongside them. That’s why OPB decided to put reporters covering public health, policing, and legal affairs under a social justice editor, to ensure those beats are being edited with an eye toward how those issues intersect.

“The goal is creating one team that’s framed around the fact that issues of race, racism, and white supremacy are interwoven through so many of the topics we cover,” Griffin said. “If it works, through the work that they do, that team will make it clear to every other team in our newsroom that these issues are part of every single story we cover. I don’t know if it’s going to work. But we do have a much better sense now of what it looks like when it doesn’t.”

In terms of newsroom-wide efforts, Griffin said OPB implemented a system of accountability for managers and editors, who, as other reporters have told me, can be the barrier to success.

“We are absolutely telling more stories from historically underserved communities and highlighting more voices from historically underserved communities, but that is still because of individual journalists,” Griffin said. “It is not yet part of our culture. And I think the only way you make it part of the culture is by holding managers accountable when they’re not making that part of every front-end editing conversation.”

“As a middle-aged white editor, it’s both a terrifying time, and an incredibly inspiring and exciting time,” she added. “The young journalists are really the ones driving the conversation, doing so much teaching, and reminding those of us in positions of power what that power is supposed to be used for.”

 

“One reporter IS NOT ENOUGH”

Stennett at the Orlando Sentinel — and the other journalists I spoke to — think that one of the keys to success for a race and inequality-focused role is for the reporter and their editor to have an agreed-upon vision for what the role is supposed to be, and a sound strategy to carry out that vision.

When Stennett started at the Sentinel covering the race and inequality beat, she said she made the conscious decision that her role wouldn’t turn into an extension of a “cops beat.”

There’s much more to Black life and the lives of people of color than just policing, she said. Instead, she wanted to focus on other problems that needed fixing, while also highlighting the joy and culture of different communities.

It’s a big job. And, she said, “I hope that we start to show our newsroom leaders that hiring one reporter to do the job is not enough.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/03/american-journalisms-racial-reckoning-still-has-lots-of-reckoning-to-do/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/a-new-study-shows-how-newsroom-and-audience-diversity-affects-coverage-of-political-candidates/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/a-new-study-shows-how-newsroom-and-audience-diversity-affects-coverage-of-political-candidates/#respond Thu, 10 Feb 2022 15:03:50 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=200291 A study published in late January adds further weight to the refrain that diversity, equity and inclusion champions often share: DEI work is about more than just getting more minority voices in a room.

The study, published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly, evaluated how newsrooms with a good makeup of staff from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds and with an audience that was also diverse tended to cover political candidates — and whether differences emerged between the coverage of white vs. non-white candidates.

The study focused on an idea known as trait coverage, where candidates’ traits — such as socioeconomic status and other parts of a candidate’s social identity — are focus areas of news stories versus policies candidates may be pushing for.

Here’s how the authors of the study —  the University of Alabama’s Mingxiao Sui and the University of North Texas’ Newly Paul — actually did the study:

The authors used three main data sources: a database of political candidates running for offices in 2012, including their race, ethnicity, and gender; and Access World News, which contained a comprehensive collection of news articles that covered each state legislative candidate identified in the database (the researchers excluded op-eds and editorials from the search).

To determine the racial makeup of newsrooms, the researchers also used the 2012 American Society of Newspaper Editors newsroom census. To determine a legislative district’s racial makeup, Sui and Paul used data from the State Legislative Election Returns series.

The researchers narrowed their search to articles published between September 1, 2012, and November 6, 2012 (which was Election Day that year). The final dataset included nearly 1,000 news articles about almost 600 state legislative candidates across 13 states in the U.S.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors found that having a diverse readership meant that coverage of minority candidates wasn’t also limited to just traits. The study found:

…the likelihood of news stories featuring positive traits dramatically increases when voting-age minority audiences constitute a large portion of the population in the newspaper’s area of circulation…

In terms of figures, the study found that when the market for a particular newspaper ranked in the 10th percentile in terms of diversity (in other words, if the paper had an overwhelmingly white readership), white candidates were almost 5% more likely to receive positive trait coverage than non-white candidates. However, if the readership placed that market in the 90th percentile in terms of diversity, then the tables flipped: non-white candidates were almost 5% more likely to get positive trait coverage.

However, things looked a little different when it came to the effect of newsroom diversity on trait coverage of political candidates. When the number of non-white staff in a newsroom increased, it didn’t correlate with a decrease in trait-based coverage of non-white political candidates.

Specifically, the researchers found that:

For newsrooms ranking among the 10th percentile, the predicted probability of receiving positive trait coverage for non-white candidates was about 3.12% higher than that for white candidates. For news media ranking among the 90th percentile, the predicted probability of receiving positive trait coverage was 4.86% lower for non-white candidates than for white candidates.

That was not what the authors expected, said Paul, who teaches at UNT’s Mayborn School of Journalism.

“We were thinking that if you have more minority journalists in the newsroom, then the trait coverage of minority candidates will be positive, that they will receive more coverage of positive traits and so on,” said Paul. “But surprisingly, we found that when you have more minority journalists in the newsroom, it is white candidates who get more positive, great coverage,” she added.

Paul and Sui also conducted a robustness check, where they looked to see if controlling for the competitiveness of a given race, the presence of a non-white supervisor in a newsroom or whether political candidates were incumbents influenced favorability of a candidate’s trait coverage. They found that these factors didn’t significantly affect whether white candidates were portrayed more favorably by more diverse newsrooms.

Joy Jenkins, an assistant professor of journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee who was not involved in the study, said that this last finding underscores what many DEI advocates already know: “Despite heightened conversations about the political, social, and economic benefits of ensuring newsrooms represent their local communities, internal barriers for minority journalists remain, as well as the persistence of biases in political reporting,” she shared.

Still, what was heartening, Paul said, was that there weren’t that many articles that included a lot of trait coverage of candidates. “I think it’s good that coverage is moving away from that trait-based coverage because we know that voters often just rely on shortcuts like that. They’ll read up on what a candidate is like or what their characteristics are like, and then they will use that as implicit cues to determine whom they should vote for,” she explained, versus using information about a candidate’s policies to make voting choices.

As far as takeaways, Paul said that the study reinforces the idea that just simply filling newsrooms with more minority reporters isn’t a simple solution to addressing systemic biases and related issues in journalism. “There’s a need to move away from that tokenism,” Paul said. It’s not enough to fill quotas for reporters from certain ethnic backgrounds, she said, because what’s important to consider is, “Are these journalists able to use their full potential to make the kind of changes that audiences would want and are they able to change the content as much as they need to?”

For the people who have been engaged in diversifying newsrooms in more ways than just hiring underrepresented talent, the results should be no surprise, Paul said. “The people who are really invested and trying to bring about a change in journalism understand that one person can’t change how journalism is practiced.”

Jenkins adds that another takeaway is perhaps that “Newsrooms should remain aware of and engaged with their communities, consider what approaches to political coverage will best serve them, and offer sufficient insights into candidates and their platforms to enable public engagement.”

Read the full study here.

Photo of “I Voted” stickers by Element5 Digital is being used under the Unsplash License.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/a-new-study-shows-how-newsroom-and-audience-diversity-affects-coverage-of-political-candidates/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/can-u-s-journalism-truly-serve-global-audiences-not-if-it-treats-them-like-an-afterthought/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/can-u-s-journalism-truly-serve-global-audiences-not-if-it-treats-them-like-an-afterthought/#respond Thu, 13 Jan 2022 16:40:58 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=199613 2022 started off with some high-profile movement in the media entrepreneurship space, when Ben Smith, the media columnist for The New York Times and former editor of BuzzFeed News, announced he was leaving the Times to start a news organization with Justin Smith, who also announced that he was stepping down as the CEO of Bloomberg Media.

Their vision is a big, new, global player, and Ben Smith was quoted about the audience it will target: “There are 200 million people who are college-educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us.”

But who (and where) are these 200 million global readers? Are they really an underserved audience, just waiting for a new outlet to target them? What could a truly transnational, global media outlet look like? What pitfalls need to be avoided? And why does centrism of the United States often stand in the way of global community building?

These were some of the questions that were plaguing me — along with a lot of other thoughts on the news. What prompted me to tweet was the realization that all too often, U.S. journalism ventures don’t really understand their international audiences and fail to engage them in a meaningful way. I wondered: Would Project Coda, as the founders nicknamed the new initiative, make the same mistakes?

The topic feels kind of personal to me. I’m an an Austrian living in the U.S. I moved here three years ago to build and run executive education programs at the Newmark J-School at CUNY — a job that lets me interact with many smart people from all parts of the world including the U.S., something I’m very grateful for. The buzzing New York City media scene in general feels as international as it gets. New York, after all, is the media capital of the world.

But I have learned one thing in my time here: The amount of U.S. centrism and exceptionalism, even amongst my mostly liberal and highly educated media peeps here, is stunning. With all the talk of globalization, the American perspective and way of doing things are still at the core of everything. The surprising thing is that every immigrant or expat will tell you that they agree with this sentiment in a heartbeat while Americans often aren’t aware of their bias.

The bias, of course, does not stop at the newsroom door. From bigwigs like The New York Times to smaller newsrooms and broadcast news to local radio stations in the United States mostly treat the world from a U.S. perspective, even in their international coverage.

A Twitter user responding to my thread named examples:

Yes. Reading a US news story is often a slog in learning things you already assume I know. Who is Mr Rogers? What is a Snickerdoodle? What is a quarterback? Why do people care about college sports? Why do you only count American citizens among the dead you have killed in a war? https://t.co/SBpKiIHx3N

— Adrianna Tan (@skinnylatte) January 6, 2022

What does that mean, and how does it feel to be treated as an “outsider” from a homogenous system? As a news consumer, every story I read or listen to has cultural cues or words that are not easy to understand and that work with assumptions that are only true for a U.S. consumer. The scarcity of rapid Covid tests? An assumption that’s not true for many countries. Student loans? Not a thing in most of Europe. Universal healthcare? Not perceived as “socialism” in the majority of the world.

The problem is that we internationals mostly read the big U.S. papers for their different, outsider perspective on “us,” the others. And, of course, we read them because there is fantastic journalism, often produced by newsrooms way bigger and better resourced than the ones in our home countries. We don’t read them because we feel like the true target audience or even like part of a community.

Why is there no real feeling of belonging? Because a true feeling of community would require us to not lose in translation our cultural and historical beliefs and underlying assumptions. It would require true representation, diversity of perspective and authentic international voices and not just American voices commenting on foreign issues.

The vivid discussion led mostly by “internationals” working in the U.S. media scene that followed my initial Twitter thread shows that I’m not alone here:

Good thread. As a non American working in American media, I've been struck over the years by the imagined and uncritical "here" and "us" in some newsroom convos and also in what is written and produced. Does not serve U.S. readers, let alone the world. https://t.co/34mi35IjOs

— Emily Rauhala (@emilyrauhala) January 6, 2022

I'm re-tweetingas someone who straddles between different worlds, cultural/political contexts and – as @Zielina put it – cultural cues. https://t.co/Qu8yZoFORC

— Vincent Ni (@nivincent) January 6, 2022

As another international/American I agree with a lot of this @zielina but I’ve found some major U.S. media works harder to overcome these forces than media in other countries (esp. Australia) because they have had to in order to grow reader revenue among immigrant Americans. https://t.co/8draTRg6Uh

— Prue Clarke (@prueclarke) January 7, 2022

And at least one person who is in a managerial role in U.S. media reflected on their work trying to address global audiences:

This really tracks with my experience trying to reach this audience, both at the NYT and HuffPost. It's also interesting that college-educated is assumed to imply interest in "unbiased" journalism. That isn't really my experience globally!

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) January 6, 2022

Which brings us back to one of my original questions. If we try to imagine it, what could — or should — a truly international media organization look like? I created a list, based on my own expertise and experience. I am a journalist, editor, media manager and have been a journalism educator in four countries, have led several internationalization projects for news organizations and have kept tabs on media startup activities all over the world. Here’s my vision for a truly global media company:

• It would be launched in and run from international homes and hubs, not simply hire correspondents and open bureaus all over the world.
• It would be run by a truly international team and leadership. And no, the United Kingdom and Australia do not count as enough international representation because the Anglosphere makes up only a slice of the world. We are talking Eastern Europe, the Global South, Africa, Asia outside of the four Tiger States. In other words, parts of the world with fast moving digitization and a need for high-quality journalism.
• The team and leadership would represent a bold future that’s diverse when it comes to race, gender and nationality. They’d virtually scream “We are different,” not represent the past with a mostly white, male and affluent U.S.-based management team.
• It would be an organization that avoids automatically replicating U.S.-centric work principles, ethics, regulations, social safety nets (and lack thereof), HR principles, and journalism traditions. For example, it might decide to follow the majority of countries in providing paid family leave and sick leave as a rule, and not follow the outsider path the U.S has chosen.
• It would have a clearer target market than “everyone who is college educated outside of the U.S.” and would be way more regionally specific. The world outside the U.S. is not one unified pool of news consumers, but rather an extremely diverse set of audiences with different behaviors, needs, and consumption patterns, as shown each year in the Reuters Digital News Report.
• It would focus laser-sharp on specific user needs. Transnational belonging? A global sense of community? Tackling the climate crisis? Navigating the future of work? Whatever these topics are, pure general interest news is most likely not the answer. While niche publications exist, they often don’t tackle major global issues from a transnational lens, which a successful international venture would need to do to gain traction.

Now the big question is: Will Project Coda (or whatever it ends up being called) do this, or will it tap into the pitfalls mentioned?

It will be crucial for it to analyze the shortcomings of past global efforts. There are enough historic examples of globalization gone wrong — from the botched launch of The Correspondent in the U.S. to the ultimately economically unsuccessful Buzzfeed expansion to Europe. If one outlet came close to building a truly global brand for the elite audience the Smiths seem to be going after, it’s probably Quartz, as Gabriel Snyder analyzed in depth for Off the Record. Quartz’s idea of “obsessions,” very specific beats for an elite, global audience, was revolutionary and part of what’s helped it succeed. The idea is built on the assumption that passions unite us — that a vegan, urban millennial in Jakarta has more in common with a vegan, urban millennial in Vienna, New York, or Kiev than with their next door neighbor who might live a totally different lifestyle.

And there are more promising examples of addressing global audiences that are really underserved and include the Global South, such as Rest of World, a “new global nonprofit publication covering the impact of technology beyond the Western bubble,” or Global Voices, which claims to be “the first global community-based newsroom.”

The world’s audiences, it seems, are slowly waking up and demanding journalism with new perspectives that empower them. It remains to be seen if the Smith/Smith venture can overcome the biases and assumptions of the past to truly center international audiences. Internationals like me who are craving to be treated as core audiences rather than an afterthought by U.S. media hope so.

Anita Zielina is a media manager, digital strategist and journalism educator running the executive education and professional development department at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York City.

Image of 1859 map by James Bryce from the British Library/Rawpixel is being used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/can-u-s-journalism-truly-serve-global-audiences-not-if-it-treats-them-like-an-afterthought/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-idea-and-techniques-of-investigative-reporting-can-be-done-by-anyone-anywhere-how-francisco-vara-orta-wants-to-change-ires-mission/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-idea-and-techniques-of-investigative-reporting-can-be-done-by-anyone-anywhere-how-francisco-vara-orta-wants-to-change-ires-mission/#respond Thu, 13 Jan 2022 15:09:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=199591 When Francisco Vara-Orta went to the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in 2013, he said “he knew his place.” And it wasn’t as part of IRE.

“I wasn’t an investigative reporter — I didn’t have the title,” he said. “I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t white, and I wasn’t ‘one of the boys.’”

Eight years later, as of September 2021, Vara-Orta is the first director of diversity and inclusion for Investigative Reporters and Editors, trying to make sure IRE isn’t the space that he initially observed. He was first hired as a training director for IRE in 2019, after years of experience at The Los Angeles Times, Chalkbeat, and various newsrooms across Texas.

The Objective’s Janelle Salanga spoke with Vara-Orta about what diversity, belonging, equity, and inclusion look like in practice, the importance of not confusing progress with perfection, and more. This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Janelle Salanga: Tell me about your path through journalism. How did you get started with doing more macro-level work with the industry?

Francisco Vara-Orta: My first job in journalism was at a publication called La Prensa in San Antonio, a bilingual publication that was free and served primarily the Latino community. And you can get it at all the businesses around where I grew up, which is a very working-class, mostly Latino, but pretty mixed, as far as some former military, lots of single moms, Black [people]. There was a Korean immigrant community.

So I grew up with a degree of diversity. My mother always talked about it, that it was a good thing — it was important to appreciate other people’s cultures, so early on, I had that appreciation of culture and diversity in my household. So through that and reading books, I think that’s where it started.

I know a lot of folks have come around to this [macro-level diversity work] later in life through some type of traumatic experience or episode. But my relationship with it started, I think, in a positive manner. It’s been more perplexing as I’ve lived to see how it’s viewed as such an ugly thing, or bad thing, or corrosive thing to this country and world.

When I started at La Prensa, I started to experience this because the daily mainstream paper, which was mostly a white staff, really looked down on La Prensa. That was kind of the beginning of me starting to realize how different I was even in my own backyard in my hometown. But while La Prensa didn’t have the resources, or the training, or maybe the editorial direction that the mainstream paper had, it was serving a need that the major daily never reached. It was giving me a platform at the age of 17 to write news stories just because they needed staff writers. They took a gamble on me, so I really credit the “ethnic press” to giving me my first ticket into the room of being a journalist.

From there on out, inherently I just was either assigned stories about people of color, or they were the ones that I found myself most attracted to. They were the ones that I saw no one picking up or like struggling with and it would come to me, so I felt like I might as well do those stories. I had the privilege of going to a Hispanic-serving institution, so my college newsroom — which is something a lot of us [journalists] go through — was mostly Latino. And my next job after that was at The Los Angeles Times. Even though Los Angeles is very diverse and, predominantly in some places, Latino and Mexican American, I did not see that in the newsroom.

I noticed as I worked my way up through journalism programs, fewer and fewer faces looked like mine. Back in San Antonio, it looked more like me, so I felt this disconnect. I had professors and teachers from all backgrounds saying, “You’re going to make it like you’re the type in this bunch, it’s going to go national.” That really helped me feel motivation and security, but in hindsight, I wonder, “What didn’t they see in my other classmates? Where did the pipeline break down for the people around me?” On my education team of four people, I was the only male, but I’m also the only one still in journalism.

I saw that race and gender really are two of the biggest issues, and you also see how class in a capitalist society, in the U.S. also is a factor. It’s not just a white male class issue, it’s usually tied to your race or gender. That has led to these rooms not being reflective of this country, and as that gradually registered more and more, I felt more and more of a need to more explicitly center my work around this topic.

Salanga: I think it’s interesting that you brought up your professor saying “Oh, you’re gonna make it national,” because I think that speaks to the glorification of pursuing national news over more local outlets like La Prensa. How else have you seen and thought about that in your own work?

Vara-Orta: There is a lionization of working in a big city at the big media outlets. And look at the raw data. I mean, the numbers show that the majority of journalists are not in those spaces, they’re in community newspapers, their local TV stations and radio, they’re in their communities, and they cover their counties, they cover their towns and their cities.

That’s really one reason I decided to stay at IRE, because we do have a more explicit mission now of making sure that people know that while investigative teams sound somewhat elite, that the idea and the techniques of investigative reporting can be done by anyone anywhere. And that is something that we have to deconstruct partly because it [investigative reporting] was viewed as a straight white male image at The Washington Post. We all grew up with All the President’s Men. You don’t want to take away from the power of that moment and the press holding the administration accountable.

But we have to think, why was there not a Black person or a woman on that team?

That’s something I thought about in later years. Who are my role models? I came to learn them way later in life when I started to get to a place of better agency and I no longer knew where to look. I thought about Ida B. Wells, I looked at Ruben Salazar. The more you know about your own cultural background, you learn about who your journalism ancestors were, who never got credit. Maybe in AAJA, or NAHJ, they’re a household name in those spaces, but not to greater newsrooms and J-schools.

You can go back and look at years of reports of journalists of color and queer journalists and women journalists saying, we need to do a better job at x or y. And we’ve seen success, with organizations like The 19th*. Organizations you would think, “Do we still need them in 2021?”

We’ve needed them forever. Now, we’re just legitimizing them in a way that the industry is less defensive of the need for them.

It’s also difficult when you’re not going to a big city, like New York or Chicago, where maybe there’s a more intersectional scene reflecting your identity as a journalist. So you have to decide, where do you want to go? You might want to be one way as a queer person. But then once you bring up your — ffor you, for example, Filipino heritage, you don’t know what microaggressions you may experience. Like for me, in the Mexican American space, transphobia or homophobia shows up in all kinds of different ways, so you end up defensive in both cases.

Salanga: It sounds like the IRE Journal issue you and IRE’s editorial director Madison [Fleck Cook] worked on is one of the ways you’re hoping to highlight that this is something a lot of folks experience, and something editors need to understand when they work with folks who are queer or trans in their newsrooms. What else do you think is important for them to know?

Vara-Orta: Just because we’ve seen some, what might feel like sustainable, progress in the industry, when it comes to queer visibility specifically, and to some degrees racial visibility, doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. Progress does not mean perfection.

That’s where I think people get defensive and feel exhausted. In the context of right now, we have to always underscore everything with the pandemic. I just don’t think you can uncouple the general malaise and fatigue that people are feeling about fixing the world and changing the world. It does feel with how much consumption of information we have at our fingertips, that the world is constantly on fire. When you’re a person of color, you’re used to trauma around you all the time. When you’re a queer person, the same thing. We’re very equipped to be able to do two things at once, so a lot of queer people of color come from a very “fighter mentality” about resiliency.

There’s stories done about this. Can we get to a point where we don’t need to do those stories because we no longer need to be that resilient? We particularly see this in the U.S. in stories about queer Black women and trans people. Can we get to a point where they can just be joyous and free? Why are we not striving for that standard, as opposed to going, “Well, look at what we already have [in terms of visibility]”?

I think you can acknowledge what people are putting into the other equation of your relationships, and give them validation, but it doesn’t mean you stop there, especially when your needs haven’t been met or respected. That’s what I see younger journalists have less patience for, and I think that that is a good thing, to say, “We don’t have time to wait, we need to address these things. Now.”

You don’t always get it right. You know, you trip up. But it’s about how you own your mistakes. That’s part of the process. But I think journalists, we’re so in the business of being right that we’re scared of ever messing up. And that is an unrealistic standard.

Will it be fixed overnight? Not necessarily. Will we agree on how to fix it? Not necessarily. But that feeling of urgency is what every journalist, and particularly every white journalist, needs to absorb fully, to not be defensive in doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work, because it will benefit them in the long run.

Salanga: Going back to sustainable progress, what is the legacy you hope you’ve created for IRE once you transition out of the position? What does “progress” look like to you and how are you thinking about making that sustainable?

Vara-Orta: There’s definitely a few ways. I think metrics are important. I don’t think it’s the only way to measure sustainable progress if you don’t have great data to start with. [We asked], how do you build the infrastructure to collect data? Especially around identity. People do not always want to disclose their background. That can make it hard to know how to tailor the programming. So trying to get a hold on that as best we can, is one of the main things that I have been stressing and that IRE and that my team really believe in.

For example, when we started looking at our membership data in 2019, we saw we had about 6,000 members or so. At the time, of the people who had given us their data, we could only say at least 13% of our membership were journalists of color. But I knew from being around the space more and more, because my first conference was in 2013, that wasn’t accurate.

It was a slow burn for us to figure out “How can we make this sustainable?”. We did a listserv in Spanish when I was a grad student there. And then when I got hired a few years later, full time, as a trainer, I was the only trainer of color. I was the only person of color on the staff. We’re only about 13 people. But still, inherently, these questions came to me. I thought, “Do we even have a snapshot of what we look like?”

That’s what every journalist will tell you: Get the data because you can’t go off what you feel. But I felt like there were more people of color in our membership than we knew. A lot of them maybe didn’t mark the box, or we knew we were on the cusp of getting more of them, because every time we would go teach at schools that didn’t have J-schools, I would see majority women, and I would see a good-sized number of people of color.

In just two years of us making a better effort and publicizing the importance of filling out your data, we now can say 30% of our membership is journalists of color. We know now we have more capital in saying we need to serve these communities better and make our space more accommodating and welcoming so that people of color want to stick around.

You also have the DEI symposium that we did last year, and that was new, and we had to do it virtually because, again, our communities have been hit hard by the pandemic and we were trying to figure out, does it look appropriate to do an in-person event as Delta was surging? Delta kind of calmed down by the time we had the event. But now we’re kind of dealing with Omicron, and we have people coming from all over the world to [IRE’s data journalism conference] NICAR, and it’s just complicated the process. So it’s about responding in kind.

We’re working with some more folks this year that we’re going to be bringing into the diversity work to help us with that. Because it can’t just be all in one person. I’m a conduit. I’m not the know-it-all expert. And that’s something that I’ve tried to publicize in my space. You cannot put all this work on one person, no matter how much they love it, or how skilled they are. Because I have my own blind spots.

And what do we have already available that we can utilize? That’s revamping our trainings, to make sure that we show examples of great investigative and data journalism from women, people of color. So this week, I’m doing a curriculum review of all of our trainings to look at making sure that we have visibility and representation and that when we show examples of what can be worked on, it’s not just people of color or early-career journalists. We’re all susceptible to mistakes, so spreading around the glory and the pain.

In the IRE Journal magazine, in the last two years, we have done an issue centered on race and diversity. And we did diversity & inclusion in 2020, and then we did the queer one that just came out. We made those free to the public, so anyone — even outside of journalism — can download those and see how we “make the sausage.” And in the first issue, we didn’t have all writers of color. So for this one, we wanted to build on that and have as many queer authors as possible, and the cover was designed by a non-binary illustrator. And Madison worked really hard to help procure that.

There’s still more work to be done in the journal space that Madison and I would like to do. But you don’t do it overnight, and we also have to ask people that are on us to give us grace and patience, that you can’t move a boulder as quickly as you want, always. So when you operationalize things to make things sustainable, there’s a process to that. And that process takes longer than any of us. But the hope is that by instilling a process that it will go on beyond whoever is there.

Salanga: How has your idea of diversity, belonging, equity and inclusion evolved as you’ve been in journalism and in this position?

Vara-Orta: You and I know that we come from communities that are not monolithic. When you’re in a space, among people with your racial background or your gender or sexual orientation, you know we don’t all agree, we don’t all vote for the same people. We don’t all like the same artists, we all don’t cook the same dishes the same way. These are the nuances that have to go into those conversations.

I feel like on the cusp of a pandemic, the insurrection, and climate change, that you cannot avoid these conversations anymore. Race and gender and class have to do with every single one of those issues. Let’s stop pretending that we can put our head in the sand anymore. We all have to confront it. And that’s uncomfortable for every single one of us, no matter whether you’re the aggrieved or you’ve been part of the benefits of the system. I think it’s important that IRE centers those conversations in our trainings and our work, and understand that is not activism, those are facts.

With IRE, we took an inventory of all the things we’re doing, and embedded it everywhere. It doesn’t need to be a dramatic announcement all the time. There’s a balance between making sure you’re being explicit about your DEI efforts in your organization and public-facing. And then there’s all the work that goes in between. For example, when there’s an opening on staff, are you reaching out to your networks and making sure people of color and women and people of all different ages feel welcome to apply? Sometimes older journalists, and particularly older journalists of color, went through so much trauma to stay in the field, that they grapple with listening to younger journalists of color about what they think is the best way to move forward on something.

We need to foster those conversations and, at the same time, realize that if it was a silver bullet, one answer fits all, that we would have fixed this industry a long time ago. It is a moving target. To shift to queerness, when I started in the industry in 2001, I was told not to come out. I wasn’t even sure if I was queer at that point. But I had all these messages reinforced, like, “You’re already going to have a huge strike against you as a darker-skinned Latino male. So don’t add any more stress to yourself. Keep that at home.”

It’s gone from that to like us putting in on the cover of our magazine and letting people know, it is a good thing. It is a thing to be valued, and no matter who you are, or where you come from, you should know about it. If you’re in the LGBTQ+ community, you should know about other parts of your own community, that it’s not just a white cisgender community. There are so many currents running at the same time. We’ve all been here all this time. You just haven’t paid attention to us.

Salanga: What challenges have you faced when doing this work and what keeps you hopeful?

Vara-Orta: I think one of the greatest challenges is one that we’re all dealing with: Am I doing enough? And is what I’m doing right?

The biggest challenge is usually internally, I think, for most people, because if you can have a good handle on that, it’s easier to deal with the external adversity, in my experience. When it comes to external adversity, it’s trying to meet people where they’re at and sometimes having to say something that’s going to make people uncomfortable and possibly damage your relationship. But by not underscoring something or surfacing a concern or a problem, I am part of the problem by letting them move forward.

Another challenge is remembering that I can’t do things alone, so I have to approach with humility. Some days, I do feel like, you know, you can’t make anyone happy.

But that is the kind of training a lot of us get prepared for as journalists — that we put out what is classically viewed as a “good story.” It’s factual, it’s well-written, it might be ahead of its time, but because of what the truth is, it’s not well-received. Later on, people are like, “Oh my God, you were saying this a year ago?” But at the time, you felt very isolated and alone.

That’s why it’s so important to have a good support system and people around you that are going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. I have friends that tell me to let it go. Or don’t take it personal, even though this time it feels personal, or that’s on them, or give them time to come around. Or you’re right, stick to your guns, let them learn.

I think it’s trying to be empathetic, but also firm in your conviction. I believe you can do both. It’s just an art. And it’s not something you get right every day.

What makes me hopeful is seeing websites and publications and efforts like yours, Nieman, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review, taking on these issues and making us kind of self-examine, because once we leave college, for those of us that went through to college in order to get into journalism, you don’t always get a lot of training. You’re out there doing stories, and you’re not really knowing what’s going on in the industry. It is on us [as IRE] to help provide that information to journalists that are grappling with these issues, and that everything I’m talking about, I eventually see on your side or Poynter or Columbia Journalism Review, or in Quill with SPJ, which makes me encouraged.

And five years ago, I was hearing conversations that were very much like, “You stick it out. This is a hard field. If you’re weak of heart, get out.” You do need to have a strong backbone, but it can be covered around with soft flesh. You’re a human.

We’re talking about mental health, we’re talking about pay equity, we’re talking about representation, and in 2001, when I started thinking about La Prensa and the mainstream daily paper, my God. If I brought up any of those things I was viewed as making it about race or making it an excuse or trying to get a hand up as a pity, or a kind of plea. Now, it’s changed so much.

But I think that’s also why we’ve seen some of the ugliest vitriol spewed out in this country, is because some people are threatened. And we also have to deal with that and try to hope we can bring some of those people around to realize that there’s not this boogeyman in us becoming a multicultural society. Once America started forming in the beginning, and we started blending different types of people, whether it was intended or not, that is what we’ve been handed. At this point, what are you going to do about it? In 20 years, what kind of work do you want to be remembered for? That’s how I operate, and that calls for a bolder, more courageous approach to journalism to rise to this moment of crisis that we’re in.

Janelle Salanga is the deputy editor of The Objective. This Q&A originally ran at The Objective. Subscribe to its newsletters here.

Photo of Francisco Vara-Orta by Ian Cruz.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-idea-and-techniques-of-investigative-reporting-can-be-done-by-anyone-anywhere-how-francisco-vara-orta-wants-to-change-ires-mission/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/overwhelmingly-white-but-leaning-female-see-the-results-of-the-canadian-association-of-journalists-inaugural-diversity-survey/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/overwhelmingly-white-but-leaning-female-see-the-results-of-the-canadian-association-of-journalists-inaugural-diversity-survey/#respond Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:00:49 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=198132 Almost half of all newsrooms in Canada have only white people on staff, and nearly 80% of all newsrooms don’t have any Black or Indigenous journalists on staff. These are among the top findings of the inaugural diversity survey from the Canadian Association of Journalists.

The survey was conducted between November 2020 and July 2021, and includes data from 209 outlets (surveys were sent to nearly 640 outlets, but only a third provided complete responses).

Here are some of the other key findings:

• In total, the survey collected data on 3,873 journalists working in 209 newsrooms.
• 52.7% of all newsroom staff identify as women compared to 46.7% who identify as men and 0.7% who identify as non-binary.
• Of the journalists where race data is known, 74.9% identify as white compared to 18.6% who identify as a visible minority, and 6.4% who identify as Indigenous.
• About nine in 10 newsrooms have no Latin, Middle Eastern, or mixed race journalists on staff.
• About eight in 10 newsrooms have no Black or Indigenous journalists on staff.
• 81.9% of supervisors identify as white, compared to 1.4% who identify as Black, 8.3% who identify as Asian, and 4.2% who identify as Indigenous.
• 79.6% of outlets report having no visible minorities or Indigenous journalists in one of the top three leadership roles in their newsroom.
• Black and Middle Eastern journalists are twice as likely to work part-time jobs as full-time jobs.
• 27% of all interns identify as Asian, compared to 9.1 per cent of full-time journalists.
• The racial identity of 25% of journalists included in this survey is unknown by their newsroom managers.

These findings are not too surprising, nor do they differ greatly from what similar surveys of American newsrooms have found. The News Leaders Association and American Society of News Editors, which have tracked diversity in newsrooms in some form, found in its most recent survey in 2019 that journalists of color made up around 22% of salaried staff in the newsrooms that responded to that year’s survey (that figure was nearly 33% for people at online-only publications).

Though the ASNE/NLA survey has a long history of tracking diversity, the survey has faced roadblocks in the past two years. Meredith Clark, the researcher in charge of the survey in recent years shared on Twitter that the organizations would be “pausing on data collection this year to fully revise our approach.” Two months ago, Clark told the Associated Press that the survey deadline had to be extended because of a poor response rate from newsrooms seemingly unwilling to share their diversity data.

It’s unclear what hurdles the CAJ survey will face, even as the researchers behind the survey write that they have plans to increase both the number of newsrooms and the number of journalists who participate in next year’s survey.

Beyond overall demographics, the CAJ survey also broke down some of the nature of the work being done by journalists who don’t identify as white, and found that these journalists were less likely than their white colleagues to be in full-time jobs. For instance, although 84% of white journalists included in the survey were full-time workers, that figure among Black journalists was around 64%, and it was 60% for Middle Eastern journalists. Roughly 75% of Asian journalists work full-time, while 80% of Indigenous journalists are employed full-time.

Differences also emerge when it comes to seniority. While women slightly outnumber men when it comes to leadership positions (52% to 47%), racial disparities are more stark. More than 80% of supervisory roles are held by a white journalist, compared to about 1% held by Black journalists, Middle Eastern journalists and Latin journalists each.

At the same time, women journalists from communities of color hold 20% of supervisor roles compared to 15% of male journalists of color who do the same. The trend was similar for top roles in newsrooms:

Of the newsrooms that indicated they had a visible minority or Indigenous journalist in at least one of their top three newsroom roles, 57.9% are held by women compared to 42.1% held by men. There are no non-binary Indigenous or visible minority journalists in a top leadership role. Around 8 in 10 outlets reported having no visible minority or Indigenous journalists in one of the top three leadership roles in their newsroom.

The survey also found that supervisors who were asked to fill out the questionnaire are more optimistic of their newsroom’s representation than the reality reflects. Among this group, 70% said that their newsroom is somewhat or very representative of their audience. But when compared to the actual census, less than a third of all participating newsrooms were found to be as diverse or more diverse than the public they serve.

For example, survey results for Metroland Toronto were compared against census data for the City of Toronto showing that 93.3 percent of all staff at that outlet identify as white, compared to 48.3 per cent of Torontonians identifying as such. Similarly, results for the Canadian Press newsroom were compared against national census results showing 87.3 per cent of staff identify as white compared to 73.2 per cent of Canadians nationally.

The upshot? Although Canadian newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and not necessarily representative of the audiences they serve, those newsrooms with leaders from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds tended to have more diverse workforces. Many newsrooms included in the CAJ survey also said that although this was the first year they collected data on race, gender and other demographics among their staff, they plan to keep up with the practice every year.

Read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/overwhelmingly-white-but-leaning-female-see-the-results-of-the-canadian-association-of-journalists-inaugural-diversity-survey/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/intercepted-sports-medias-attempts-at-diversity-that-is/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/intercepted-sports-medias-attempts-at-diversity-that-is/#respond Tue, 28 Sep 2021 14:12:51 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196279 For the sixth consecutive year, news organizations collectively received a failing grade for gender hiring practices in sports media.

Just 19% of sports staff positions in the United States and Canada are held by women, including 14% of reporting positions, according to a new report card, compiled by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport in the University of Central Florida. (A 30-year study recently found that most TV completely ignores women’s sports. It’s possible those two things are related.) About 24% of staff positions in sports media are held by people of color.

The report card was requested by the Associated Press Sports Editors for the seventh straight year. A publication with at least 30% of its staff held by people of color would receive an A+ and one with at least 45% held by women would also receive top marks.

The grades sports media actually got — an F for gender and B+ on race — reflect that the vast majority of people in key sports media positions are white men.

“We’ve seen some signs of progress, but it remains a major problem for women and especially women of color,” said former APSE president Lisa Wilson, who acted as an advisor to the study.

The report looked at more than 100 newspapers and websites in the United States and Canada, though the authors note their requests weren’t always met in full. Out of 104 newspapers and websites, 72 submitted demographic information for upper management and only 23 submitted information for web specialist positions. Some chose not to participate at all, and three news orgs declined to be specifically named in the report, asking that their information be included only in the aggregate.

This year’s report card found that staff positions held by people of color increased from 20% to 23.5% since last year. The percentage of women also moved up — going from 17.9% to 19.3% over the last year. (The study does not mention — or appear to have asked about — nonbinary or transgender people in sports media.) Overall, the year’s grades reflect that:

• 79.2% of sports editors are white
• 80% of those holding upper management positions are white
• 85.6% of reporters are men

Without ESPN, the study would be more grim. ESPN employs a quarter of all of the women sports editors. (They have five.)

“If ESPN were removed from the data entirely, the gender percentage for sports editors would decrease from 16.7 percent to 13.5 percent while columnists would decrease from 17.8 percent to 13.8 percent,” the report noted. “Without ESPN, the racial percentage for sports editors would decrease from 20.8 percent to 18.9 percent and assistant sports editors would decrease from 27.7 percent to 22.7 percent. Columnists would decrease from 22.9 percent to 18.1 percent.”

Among newspapers with the largest circulations, the Miami Herald had the highest percentage of people of color at 41.7% and USA Today’s fan-centric site For The Win had the highest percentage of women at 31.3%. Among newspapers with smaller circulations, The Austin American-Statesman, Daily Memphian, and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (TX) stood out with the highest percentages of people of color at 58%, 50%, and 29% respectively.

Many of America’s newspapers are shrinking, taking the number of overall sports media positions down with ’em. Some of the industry’s diversity numbers can be counted on just one hand:

• Among the “A” size newspapers and websites — the ones with the largest circulation — Yahoo, ESPN and Miami Herald employed the only Hispanic/Latinx sports editors.
• The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, and ESPN employed the only Asian sports editors among “A” publications.
• The Chicago Tribune, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Athletic, ESPN and the Sun Sentinel (FL) employed the only female sports editors among “A” outlets.

You can read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/intercepted-sports-medias-attempts-at-diversity-that-is/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/neither-peace-nor-marine-the-new-york-times-is-looking-for-recruits-for-its-new-corps/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/neither-peace-nor-marine-the-new-york-times-is-looking-for-recruits-for-its-new-corps/#respond Mon, 27 Sep 2021 20:43:03 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=196316 How do you discover talented new journalists and prepare them for the big reporting and editing jobs of the future? An eternal question even before the news media’s diversity issues went from “longstanding problem” to “industry crisis.” The New York Times is changing one of its major pathways to the newsroom, and it’s picked a military metaphor:

The New York Times is launching a first-of-its-kind talent pipeline program for early-college students to receive career guidance from Times journalists over a multiyear period…

The program, named The New York Times Corps, will pair college freshmen, sophomores and some juniors who aspire to have journalism careers with Times journalists. Students will talk with their advisers perhaps two or three times a year, up to the duration of students’ undergraduate careers. Those conversations will focus specifically on career-building advice. Occasional speakers, training and activities will punctuate the experience.

Students who complete the program will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, where they will tour the newsroom and meet Times journalists in person. The best-performing Times Corps members, after they graduate, also may receive consideration for The New York Times Fellowship, an immersive, yearlong work program.

The Times Corps will specifically target students based in the United States from underrepresented groups, such as students of color and/or students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The program is replacing the Student Journalism Institute, our two-week annual boot camp, which finishes a successful nearly 20-year run supporting students of color.

They’re explicit about wanting the Corps to benefit “not only the participants and The Times, but other newsrooms.” (After all, it won’t hire the whole Corps.) Class size will start at 25, but could grow; applications will open next spring.

European and Asian newsrooms have long had more concrete talent-development systems — actual outlet-owned schools in some cases — than their American peers. For generations, the Times could simply treat smaller metro newspapers as their minor leagues, but their decline has meant more staffers entering via other routes. (Counting on metro newspapers also means, at least to an extent, counting on their own hiring practices building the pool your draw from — so their diversity problems becomes yours, too.)

All that said, a program focused on identifying talented college freshmen and sophomores has its own limitations. Recent graduates, career switchers, and young people who aren’t enrolled in college won’t be caught by this net. But at least you can always build more nets.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/neither-peace-nor-marine-the-new-york-times-is-looking-for-recruits-for-its-new-corps/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/this-shit-is-just-embarrassing-the-new-yorkers-archive-editor-breaks-down-the-print-mags-dismal-diversity-stats/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/this-shit-is-just-embarrassing-the-new-yorkers-archive-editor-breaks-down-the-print-mags-dismal-diversity-stats/#respond Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:05:44 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=195908 Prestige magazines are so white, “their mastheads resemble member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950,” Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s archive editor, tweeted on Tuesday. To prove it, she was armed with 96 years’ worth of data from her own employer — circumventing the notion that a diversity audit has to come from the top.

So let’s go ahead & delve into some of the diversity stats (all public) for @NewYorker mag…

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

From 1990-2020, @NewYorker mag published only 7 Book reviews by Latino writers and 12 book reviews by Asian-Americans. Less than 1% of the book reviews @NewYorker has published are by Indian-Americans. Only 28% of all print book reviews are by women.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

And there were actually more Profiles written by women in the first decade of @NewYorker’s existence (1925-1935) than there were published by women from 1990-2000. From 1925-1935, 26 women wrote 64 Profiles; from 1990-2000, 18 women wrote 29 Profiles.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

The stats keep coming. (Disclosure: My father, who is white, is a New Yorker staff writer.)

By the way, all of this information is public & anyone who wishes to can do their own research into the data. I encourage everyone to explore the @NewYorker’s diversity ratios, as well as those of other influential publications.

— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) September 14, 2021

Collecting the data was a painstaking process that took months, Overbey — who on Monday tweeted about pay discrepancies at the magazine — told me via Twitter DM. She’d noticed that the same white writers and critics — “terrific writers that I like and admire but, still, primarily white” — kept appearing in the magazine’s tables of contents. “I started going back year by year via the TOCs. Many of the [writers of color] I already knew, but I Google image–searched every single writer I wasn’t sure of, to make sure I wasn’t missing a writer or critic of color. I have the breakdowns for pretty much every rubric at the magazine. And then I compiled that into a larger data group of what we call fact or feature pieces and critics pieces.”

Most, but not all, of this data is technically public. A reader could go through The New Yorker’s back issues on their own. Data on who edited pieces, however, is internal, and The New Yorker does not publish its masthead. Overbey told me that her focus was on feature nonfiction and criticism “and those are primarily edited by senior or mid-level editors, so that’s more straightforward.”

A New Yorker spokesperson said in a statement:

“We’ve worked hard for years to increase the number of underrepresented voices at The New Yorker, and we’ve made significant progress—among our writers, in senior editorial positions, and across the entire enterprise. Nearly 40% of new hires at Condé Nast are from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. While we don’t believe these tweets present a full or fair view of The New Yorker and its ongoing efforts, there is always more work to do, and we look forward to doing it.”

Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, said that hiring of a diverse group of editors and writers has been prioritized in recent years, especially on the digital side:

We’ve more than doubled the size of the digital operation at the magazine since I came aboard in 2016, and the percentage of POC hires has been very, very high.

— Michael Luo (@michaelluo) September 14, 2021

Many prominent writers and editors of color cheered on Overbey’s effort, including Dodai Stewart, Doreen St. Félix, Josie Duffy Rice, Porochista Khakpour, and Min Jin Lee. (A couple folks pointed out that Overbey’s analysis excludes theater reviews and therefore Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s long-time theater critic, who is Black.)

In the minority, in terms of public reaction, was Joyce Carol Oates, the 83-year-old novelist whose fiction and poetry have long appeared in the print magazine and whose side hustle is acting like an asshole/possibly performance art-ing (??) on Twitter.

the New Yorker has been a model of diversity & originality, indeed. it is perhaps most remarkable in its evolution over the decades while its cartoons remain near-unchanged in their gentle, wry humor. but –dissatisfaction w/ magazines should inspire others to start their own. https://t.co/ISGZnqfJE8

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) September 14, 2021

Yes just start your own magazine—separate from the existing ones but equal to them, as it were https://t.co/ooS7WMxxDa

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) September 14, 2021

Changing the status quo, Overbey said, is what she’s trying to do.

“White people, who really have no risk factor here except inconvenience and discomfort, have to actively step up and start raising these issues,” she told me, “not just once but over and over again until the needle finally starts to move on this.”

This thread is remarkable – in part because typically black and brown journalists are the ones forced to speak up here. Can’t imagine statistics at any of the major journalistic institutions would look much better… https://t.co/tm2NxT6L4M

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) September 14, 2021

archivists matter! https://t.co/qJ3dm89QgV

— Adriana Lacy (@Adriana_Lacy) September 14, 2021

This post was updated several times, with additional information, tweets, and links, on Tuesday.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/this-shit-is-just-embarrassing-the-new-yorkers-archive-editor-breaks-down-the-print-mags-dismal-diversity-stats/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/small-steps-but-most-big-american-newspaper-newsrooms-are-now-led-by-someone-other-than-a-white-man/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/small-steps-but-most-big-american-newspaper-newsrooms-are-now-led-by-someone-other-than-a-white-man/#respond Mon, 26 Jul 2021 20:33:05 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=194725 Last week, two dailies near and dear to my heart hired new top editors to lead their newsrooms.1 The Dallas Morning News announced that Katrice Hardy of The Indianapolis Star would be its next executive editor. And three hours down I-45, the Houston Chronicle named Maria Reeve executive editor, moving her one spot up the masthead from her current role as managing editor.

Hardy and Reeve are both excellent journalists with experience leading newsrooms and overseeing important and complex stories. They are also both Black women, which while hardly the most interesting thing about them, is worth noting — given both the events of the past year and the long, long, long history of American newspapers being led overwhelmingly by white men. (Reeve is the first journalist of color to lead the Chronicle; Hardy will be the first woman and first African American in Dallas’ top job.)

Newsrooms have been talking about diversity for decades — but most of that talk hasn’t translated to action. American newsrooms are still much whiter than the communities they cover and substantially more male, especially in leadership positions. (As of 2018, surveyed American newsrooms were roughly 61% male and 84% white.) But it seemed to me that more and more important newspapers had been walking at least some of the talk and hiring someone who isn’t a white man for their top jobs. (Full disclosure: White man here!)

To check that hunch, I used data from the Alliance of Audited Media to pull together a list of the 20 largest American newspapers by daily circulation2 and then gathered the names of their top editors3.

Once I’d assembled them all, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much less white and male the leaders of American newsrooms have become in a relatively short amount of time. Of the 20 largest newspapers, only 7 are led by a white man. Twelve are led by a woman, a person of color, or both. (One top job, at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser4, is vacant.)

USA Today	Nicole Carroll
The Wall Street Journal	Matt Murray
Los Angeles Times	Kevin Merida
New York Post	Keith Poole
The New York Times	Dean Baquet
The Boston Globe	Brian McGrory
Chicago Tribune	Colin McMahon
(Minneapolis) Star Tribune	Rene Sanchez
The Seattle Times	Michele Matassa Flores
The Philadelphia Inquirer	Gabriel Escobar
Newsday	Deborah Henley
San Francisco Chronicle	Emilio Garcia-Ruiz5
The Washington Post	Sally Buzbee
The Tampa Bay Times	Mark Katches
The Denver Post	Lee Ann Colacioppo
Houston Chronicle	Maria Reeve
The Dallas Morning News	Katrice Hardy
Honolulu Star-Advertiser	vacant
The (Newark) Star-Ledger	Kevin Whitmer
New York Daily News	Robert York

By holding 7 of the 19 top jobs, white men make up 36.8% of these newsroom leaders. On its own, from a diversity standpoint, that’s…not terrible, actually! As of 2019, 62.9% of American adults were non-Hispanic whites, with white man making up a bit less than half of that share. So while 36% is an over-representation, it’s a relatively small over-representation — especially compared to not that long ago, when these jobs might have been 80-90% white men.

Back in 2014, when our friends at Nieman Reports examined the data, they found that women were the top editor of only 3 of the 25 largest U.S. newspapers. Now, women lead 7 of the top 19 — not yet parity, of course, but a significant improvement in a seven-year span.

Also in 2014, an ASNE survey of American newspapers found only 15 percent had even a single person of color in any of their top three editorial positions. Not just the top job, mind you, the top three jobs — and 85% of papers filled all three with white journalists.

The list of Black journalists who’ve run mainstream daily newspapers is a proud one (with names like Bob Maynard, Al Fitzpatrick, Bill Hillard, and Greg Moore), but it is also a short one. Now they lead four of the largest newsrooms in the country, as do three Hispanic editors.

And the most recent trend lines looks good for diversity, too.

Of these 19 jobs, 7 have changed hands in the past 12 months — Dallas, Houston, D.C., L.A., the New York Post, Philly, and San Francisco. The people who previously held those seven jobs: 6 white men, 1 white woman. The people in those jobs now: 2 Black women, 2 Hispanic men, 1 Black man, 1 white woman, 1 white man.

Or to put it another way: About a year ago, the editors of the 20 largest American newspapers by circulation looked like this:

13 white men
5 white women
1 Hispanic man
1 Black man

Today, they look like this:

7 white men
5 white women
3 Hispanic men
2 Black men
2 Black women
1 vacant

Now, I want to be clear: The relative diversity of those holding these top jobs doesn’t mean the work of making daily journalism more representative of the public it serves is done. (Or half done, or a quarter done, or even 10% done.) There are still lots of areas where newspaper newsrooms look a lot more like, er, me than America at large.

• It’s one thing to hire a woman or person of color for the top job; it’s another to diversify the rest of the editorial ranks. Having looked at a lot of newspaper staff listings recently, I can tell you the next tier of editors down — assistant managing editors, deputy metro editors, features editors, sports editors, and so on — is substantially more white and male than these numbers might suggest. A top editor is the face of a newsroom, but most of the editorial decision-making is necessarily done by people with less esteemed titles.
• These are the largest newspapers in the country; smaller papers are further behind. Research has long shown that lower-circulation newspapers are less likely to hire minority journalists, whether as an entry-level reporter or editor-in-chief. (As of 2016, a typical newspaper with a circulation over 500,000 employed roughly 3× as many minority journalists as one with a circulation of 25,000 or lower.)
• Related: Because they’re in America’s largest cities, the population these newspapers serve is more diverse and less white than the country as a whole. Matching national racial demographics isn’t as impressive if your city is 80% non-white. “Reflective of the United States” doesn’t mean “reflective of your community.”

Not to mention that newsrooms’ habits, workflows, and stances have been engrained over decades; the default voice of most American newspapers has been white and male for as long as they’ve existed. It will take much more than a leadership change to truly allow a news product to reflect the interests, perspectives, desires, faults, and voices of its community. There is so much work to do!

But that shouldn’t make us ignore what is a real and honest accomplishment. When I entered the newspaper business 25 years ago — in a newsroom where every, if memory serves, every single editor outside the sports desk was white — I would have never thought I’d see the day when barely a third of America’s largest newspaper newsrooms were run by white men. That’s worth a tiny pause and a “Huh, okay!” of acknowledgement before going back to the hard work of diversifying journalism.

1. I was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News for eight years, and growing up in south Louisiana, I’d read the Sunday Houston papers the local grocery store had for sale — though to be honest, I always rooted for The Houston Post against the larger Chronicle.
2. Caveats: The AAM does not measure all newspapers’ circulation, though it does measure the biggest. It also lets newspapers count their online subscribers in strange ways and sometimes mash them up with print subs in stranger ways. Basically, this isn’t an iron-clad list, but it’s the best we have.
3. More caveats: Newsroom titles can be opaque; sometimes the top news title goes to someone who is more of a figurehead (or owner) than to someone who makes editorial decisions day to day. In these cases, I believe I’ve gotten the person in ultimate charge of the newsroom; corrections welcome.
4. Longtime editor Frank Bridgewater retired a year ago amid massive cutbacks at the Star-Advertiser; the job hasn’t been filled. With that slot vacant, the top two editors appear to be deputy editor Ed Lynch, who is white, and managing editor/news Marsha McFadden, who is Black.
5. Garcia-Ruiz is the child of immigrants from Spain.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/07/small-steps-but-most-big-american-newspaper-newsrooms-are-now-led-by-someone-other-than-a-white-man/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/the-new-yorker-leans-into-crossword-puzzles-online-and-now-in-print/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/the-new-yorker-leans-into-crossword-puzzles-online-and-now-in-print/#respond Fri, 12 Mar 2021 17:29:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=191184 The act of throwing money around to resolve an issue? COIN TOSS. One with four legs and many hands? CARD TABLE. Drop just a drop? MICRODOSE. What these have in common? CROSSWORD CLUES.

Clues, to be specific, in The New Yorker’s thrice-weekly crossword puzzle. The magazine launched its first-ever Puzzles & Games Dept. at the end of 2019 and has rolled out a number of digital goodies for solvers since, including the social distancing-compliant Partner Mode, a newsletter, special holiday puzzles, a way to play on the New Yorker Today app, and behind-the-scenes videos. (Here’s one entitled “Crossword Puzzles with a Side of Millennial Socialism” and another with tips on how to solve those tricky British-style cryptic crosswords.) The team is growing, and now includes fact-checkers and a dedicated copy editor. And, just last month, The New Yorker began investing some ink in the endeavor by announcing they’ll print a full-page puzzle in every issue of the print magazine.

The crossword puzzles, like the magazine’s longform journalism, fiction, and other work, live behind a metered paywall online. Readers who have not subscribed can view the newyorker.com home page, Goings On About Town listings, and a limited number of articles (including puzzles) per month; a digital-only subscription costs $100/year. The “Subscribe” page highlights the crossword, noting that every option includes access to “newyorker.com, including the online archive and crossword puzzles.”

Unlike The New York Times, which offers a standalone subscription to its crossword and other games, the only way to gain unfettered access to the New Yorker’s puzzles is to subscribe to everything. And, given that 80 percent of The New Yorker’s revenue is reader-generated, that’s exactly what the publication is hoping readers will do.

But can crossword puzzles really affect a news organization’s bottom line? There’s evidence to suggest the answer is yes. Publishers have found that the number of active days a reader has on their site is a telling metric for determining whether or not they’ll continue a subscription. Encouraging readers to develop a crossword habit may help. At The Wall Street Journal, for example, a team looking to increase subscribers’ active days found that playing a puzzle had a more dramatic impact on reader retention than other actions the team had been promoting to new subscribers, such as subscribing to an email newsletter or downloading the Journal’s app.

The New Yorker’s puzzle has been getting rave reviews from the crossworld, er, crossword community. Rachel Fabi, a professor of bioethics who moonlights as a crossword reviewer and constructor, says it’s her favorite puzzle to solve, thanks to a diverse set of constructors, answers that send her down fruitful Wikipedia rabbit holes, and a lively, unstuffy style. (“Love that New Yorker puzzles can just clue ASSES as ASSES without any need to pretend like they’re talking about donkeys,” she wrote in a recent review.)

Unlike The New York Times and other crosswords, The New Yorker’s crosswords get easier with each passing weekday and are always themeless. (The hardest crossword — the type that has “Eustace Tilley” sweating bullets, as above — appears on Mondays, the easiest on Fridays. Something in the middle is published on Wednesdays.) They’re also seen as less concerned with catering to an imagined “average solver,” Fabi said.

“There’s been a lot of discussion in the crossword space about what clues or entries get rejected from the Times,” said Fabi, who has constructed for the Times and USA Today, along with indie outlets like Inkubator. “You’ll get a rejection from the Times saying ‘This is not something that the average solver will know,’ which carries with it this connotation that an average solver is a white man in his 50s. There’s an expectation that the person solving your puzzle looks like Will Shortz.”

‘The New Yorker is willing to press those boundaries and reject that vision of the average solver,” she added. “There’s just a lot more diversity, both in the constructors but also in the clues and entries, in a New Yorker puzzle.”

The New Yorker’s Puzzles & Games Dept. is led by Liz Maynes-Aminzade, previously the magazine’s digital initiatives editor. I asked her about how The New Yorker’s quirky house style affects solvers, what other games they’re cooking up, and how her work fits into the magazine’s larger subscription strategy.

Read on for our full conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Scire: How did the Puzzles & Games Dept. come to be? Did the idea grow out of your work as digital initiatives editor?

Liz Maynes-Aminzade: It did, in a way. The idea for a New Yorker crossword came from David Haglund, who’s the features editor for newyorker.com. At that time, I was the digital initiatives editor, working on various experimental projects for the site. After David and I got to talking about our favorite crosswords and constructors, he invited me to edit the crossword with him and help get it off the ground. We came up with “Puzzles Dept.” as a nod to other New Yorker rubrics, but at that time the crossword was a scrappy experiment — far from an actual department.

We launched the weekly crossword in April of 2018, and by the end of that year, it had developed a solid audience: not huge in terms of scale, but very engaged. In 2019, we added a second, easier weekly crossword, because a lot of people found our original crossword prohibitively hard. By then, the crossword had become a big part of my job: not just editing it, but working with our tech team and our partners at Amuse Labs to refine the product, for instance, by making it work better on mobile.

By that point, it seemed clear to me that puzzles and games were a bigger area of opportunity. Mike Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, and Pam McCarthy, The New Yorker’s deputy editor at the time, believed that, too, as did others involved with strategy and audience development. I took on the mantle of puzzles & games editor at the end of 2019, and I’ve been building out the department since then. Nick Henriquez, who began co-editing crosswords with me when David went on paternity leave, became our associate crossword editor (he splits his time between crosswords and our production department). And Andy Kravis joined as assistant puzzles & games editor last summer. We also now have three fact-checkers who share crossword-checking duties, a proofreader, and a handful of puzzle testers and “consultants” around the office.

Scire: How many people play online each week? I believe they can play either online or through the app, yes? Do you have a sense for how many complete the crossword in print?

Maynes-Aminzade: To give you a general sense, our crosswords newsletter, which has been growing rapidly, recently surpassed 100,000 subscribers. That’s only one indicator — people access our crossword on many different channels, so it doesn’t encompass the entirety of our audience — but that’s how many people have opted into email updates whenever a new puzzle is published.

As for where people play, this has changed somewhat since we launched. You can play in the New Yorker app, as you say, and a lot of our audience has migrated there in the past year; if you’re playing on a phone, the app offers a much better experience than a web browser. There’s more screen real estate, for one thing, and you can stay logged in [Ed. note: !] and save your progress.

I have no idea how many people solve the crossword in the magazine; that will probably remain a bit of a mystery. But I’d guess a significant number, since it’s a mix of old and new audiences: those who regularly solve online but prefer to do so in print, and those who primarily read The New Yorker in print, and discovered our crossword that way. One interesting data point is that 5-10 percent of our online crossword audience prints out each puzzle. That tells you how much some people prefer the experience of solving by hand.

Scire: More anecdotally, what’s the feedback been like from readers?

Maynes-Aminzade: In general, the feedback has been very nice: people voicing their appreciation for the crossword and our constructors. But inevitably, there’s a range. One genre of email we get is from the language prescriptivist who regrets to inform us about, you know, the difference between “bemused” and “amused.” Webster’s, by the way, now lists them as valid synonyms. I understand why we attract that feedback, because our crosswords follow The New Yorker’s house style, which is famously fastidious. On the other hand, we want our crosswords to be reflective of semantic change and evolving usages.

We also get some funny emails when people are scandalized by clues. Someone wrote in objecting to a puzzle that had LUBE in the grid — clued as “Bedside-table supply, perhaps” — which she said had ruined her morning coffee.

Scire: I know there has been a vigorous conversation in the crossword community about diversifying constructors. Can you tell me how you think about putting together The New Yorker’s stable of puzzle-makers — and what effect you hope that range has on the puzzles?

Maynes-Aminzade: When David and I assembled the initial group, we were basically picking our favorite constructors — people with the most interesting voices, whose styles seemed like good fits for The New Yorker. But certainly, the homogeneity in some corners of the “crossworld” was part of why we wanted to start a new puzzle. Constructors had been calling attention to the lack of diversity, and there were some great indie outlets working to bring in new voices, but the mainstream outlets weren’t changing much.

Most New Yorker readers would find it a no-brainer, I think, that a more diverse group of constructors makes for a better and more fun puzzle. And I mean diverse in terms of race, gender, sexual identity, of course, as well as things like age and regional background. All those factors shape a constructor’s lexicon and frame of reference. And the appeal of a crossword is testing what you know, but it’s also learning new things. That strikes me as even more true of crosswords than other trivia-related games, where, often, you know it or you don’t. With a crossword, you can still “win” without knowing all the answers, and there’s a unique pleasure in revealing an answer by filling in the crossings.

Scire: How do puzzles fit into the larger subscription strategy at The New Yorker?

Maynes-Aminzade: There’s a big overlap between New Yorker subscribers and people who regularly play the crossword. It’s one of the site sections with the highest ratio of subscribers-to-overall visitors. That was definitely a factor in the decision to invest in puzzles and games. Because if you’re looking at a metric like unique visitors, the audience for the crossword is not colossal. But if you’re looking at people who subscribe, or people who read multiple articles a month, those are groups that really value our crossword.

Scire: New additions to Puzzles & Games Dept. have been, mostly, digital — like additional online puzzles, Partner Mode, or the video series. What led to the decision to include the crossword in print?

Maynes-Aminzade: It had been under discussion for a while. There had to be editorial buy-in, of course; it helped that crosswords are a natural fit with print. Mostly, it took a while to sort out all the technical details, like the location and layout. We also had to set up a new workflow for copy editing, fact checking, etc. because print and web, though integrated, have some different processes. On that front, it was lucky that Nick, our associate crossword editor, had worked for years in Makeup — that’s what we call the magazine production department — so he could act as a sort of emissary.

Scire: What’s next for the Puzzles & Games Dept.? The name and the initial announcement indicate you’re already thinking about other types of games. What ideas are you tinkering with?

Maynes-Aminzade: So far, our focus has been on the crossword, but you’ll definitely start to see a wider variety of puzzles and games. For last December’s Cartoon Issue, we worked with the cartoonist Liana Finck to design a set of kids’ placemat-style variety puzzles; we’ll probably do more of those collaborations with the humor and cartoons department.

We also digitized the great series of British-style cryptic crosswords that ran in the magazine in the 1990s; those are now playable online every Sunday. Because cryptics aren’t a big part of American culture, and have a higher barrier to entry — there are a lot of rules to learn — they haven’t found the audience of our American-style crosswords. Regardless, I think they’re a lot of fun, and we’ll likely keep them going once we run out of the ‘90s originals. Who knows, maybe we can turn a new generation of Americans on to cryptics.

Most of my energies right now are focused on a new game, which Andy and I have been working on for a while with our product team. It will launch later this year, and I’m pretty excited about it, but I probably shouldn’t say what it is. Sorry to be coy!

Scire: What would you say makes a New Yorker crossword different than, say, one appearing in The New York Times? And, more generally, if you had to characterize the type of games that New Yorker readers are interested in … are they word-y? Have some cultural component? Challenging?

Maynes-Aminzade: Broadly speaking, I think our crosswords reflect the interests of The New Yorker, meaning that they tend to be literary, and they often feature people and topics covered by the site and the magazine. To highlight that, our online crosswords include a “featured answer” that links out to a related New Yorker article — for instance, last Monday’s puzzle had (spoiler alert) OCTAVIA BUTLER in the grid, which linked to a recent piece about her “Parable” series.

New Yorker crosswords are also relatively topical. We have a fairly quick turnaround from first draft to publication, so our constructors know they can be responsive to things in the news.

Above all, though, I think our constructors are what set our crossword apart. All ten of them are fantastic, and each one has a distinctive voice.

To the question of what kind of games appeal to New Yorker readers, I think your formula — language-related, culturally literate, and challenging — pretty much nails it.

Scire: The New Yorker has a legendarily unique house style. Does that ever cause issues? Is that style reflected in clues and/or the correct answers?

Maynes-Aminzade: It has definitely presented some funny obstacles. When we first introduced the crossword, we wanted it to adhere to all aspects of The New Yorker’s house style, including the British-inflected spellings. We didn’t totally realize the ramifications this would have — not so much on the clues, but on the grids. In the first year, we had to send back several otherwise excellent drafts because the grids included, for example, OMELET instead of OMELETTE, or TOTALED instead of TOTALLED. And that type of revision often meant the constructor had to redo the entire grid.

Initially, we tried sharing The New Yorker’s word list with the constructors, but you can’t really expect someone who’s not a copy editor here to memorize all the quirks. Eventually, we explained the situation to The New Yorker’s copy chief, Andrew Boynton, who was very understanding. He gave the crossword a special dispensation to use standard spellings as needed. It was a big moment; I think our constructors were relieved.

Scire: Do the puzzles still have a dedicated copy editor and fact-checker?

Maynes-Aminzade: All the puzzles go through copy editing and fact checking. Andy is the dedicated copy editor. There are three staff fact checkers — Daniel Ajootian, Nina Mesfin, and Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa — who share crossword checking duties, and make the puzzles immeasurably better.

Scire: Can you (and maybe a couple of the constructors, if they’re game!) give me a favorite crossword clue?

Maynes-Aminzade: One of the best tasks we have as editors is putting together a list of our favorite clues at the end of each year. Here were a few of last year’s standouts for me: Elizabeth C. Gorski’s “Soprano of note?” (answer: JAMES GANDOLFINI), Anna Shechtman’s “Kingdom for a horse?” (answer: ANIMALIA), and Kameron Austin Collins’s “Literary family with a widely misremembered name” (answer: BERENSTAIN BEARS).

I asked a few of our constructors for their favorites. Erik Agard cited Kameron’s clue “Beauty company?” (answer: BEAST). Liz named this clue of Anna’s as a favorite fill-in-the-blank: “‘__ the Way,’ Loretta Lynn song that ends with the line ‘I hope it ain’t twins again’” (answer: ONE’S ON). And Wyna Liu applauded this clue from Natan Last: “Awkward knee-jerk response to a waiter saying ‘Enjoy your meal!’” (answer: YOU TOO).

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/the-new-yorker-leans-into-crossword-puzzles-online-and-now-in-print/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/want-to-know-if-your-news-organization-reflects-your-community-do-a-source-audit-heres-how/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/want-to-know-if-your-news-organization-reflects-your-community-do-a-source-audit-heres-how/#respond Fri, 05 Mar 2021 16:50:35 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=191047 Journalism, at its core, is about reporting facts and information to help people become better-informed members of society. The information and ideas in our journalism influences how we see the world, and a big part of that world view depends on whose voices are included. Since its inception, the staff of KQED have worked hard to be reflective of the Bay Area through the stories we cover. We strive to be fair, accurate and truthful.

KQED is a highly trusted provider of news for the Bay Area and California, but we have questions about how accurately we represent the people in our nine-county region. We live in one of the most diverse parts of the nation, but disparities exist, including in our own newsroom, and we wanted to know what they were. So we set out to develop a retroactive source audit of our content to know where we stand when it comes to reflecting our communities because despite our best intentions, we won’t know who is in our stories until we count them. A source audit involves identifying certain characteristics — such as gender, race, age, and location — of people who appear in our stories as sources and comparing that information to local demographic data.

We have been thinking about what it truly means to be a diverse and inclusive organization. Who gets to speak on behalf of a community? Whose perspective is elevated? Who gets to be on air and be heard by hundreds of thousands of listeners per week? We needed a baseline measurement so that we could know our starting point. We decided to look more closely at three types of data on diversity: staff, audiences and sources.

Staff diversity

Over the last few years, news organizations have been commissioning diversity reports to get a better understanding of their staff makeup. Those data points usually include gender and race/ethnicity. A more complete diversity report differentiates between news staff and the non-news staff in order to see who is directly involved in shaping the news. Good reports also separate staff from managers, i.e. those in positions of leadership. And the best reports are published online in order to establish transparency and accountability, so audiences can see the organization, warts and all. News staff diversity surveys have shown big gaps when compared to local communities; at most news organizations in most communities, white people are overrepresented in staff and leadership positions in cities small and large.

But knowing about your staff diversity isn’t enough.

Audience diversity

Every news organization has audience data by way of ComScore or Nielsen reports. They have a good idea about who they can sell ads to or convert into members. Having data about sources is fairly new territory, but it’s a crucial thing to measure because sources are a vital connection between staff and audiences.

Source diversity

We already know staff and source diversity at news outlets is pretty bleak. Meanwhile, the sources those journalists rely on and have on air or online as experts can perpetuate bias. For example, one news organization found that 75% of their sources were male and that most sources were white, contrary to local demographics. Another news organization’s source audit revealed that 67% of sources were male and 83% were white. It takes a lot of courage to make unflattering findings public, but it also reveals a commitment to the principles of transparency journalists seek in other institutions and a call to be better.

The KQED source audit (which you can find here) was new to KQED, but we learned a lot that we didn’t want to keep to ourselves. This isn’t typically the work of journalists, so we’d like to share some lessons about how to rely on existing resources while looking for ways to fund the work that’s outside the normal course of people’s regular jobs.

Demonstrate how a source audit fits into the big picture. Many news organizations have a mission that’s supported by a strategic plan. In this day and age, those strategic plans should include developing more diverse audiences. If it doesn’t, find a way to change the strategic plan with the support of senior leaders and staff. As we stated above, a source audit is one of three data points (staff, sources, audiences) that will help you understand how you’re serving your community. And as we’ve seen with other news organizations and our own, source audits always reveal areas of improvement.

Research the costs. It will help the case you make to folks higher up the food chain if you can say how much a source audit costs. A paid source audit might seem beyond your budget, but remember: like all things in the business world, fees and services are negotiable. Aim high, but if a source audit seems too expensive, ask for a smaller audit sample.

If you’re looking for auditors, there are several ways to identify one. If you see a source audit online, look to see how it was funded and see if it might be a fit for your organization. KQED contracted with Impact Architects, a team that has worked with several news organizations. Some news orgs depend on existing staff by reallocating a few weeks of reporter’s time to do the audit; some reporters track their own sources regardless of any formal process. There have also been recently published reports by academics at Temple University about the Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage.

Get buy-in from the top. We’re not saying this just because she’s our boss (ok, maybe), but KQED chief content officer Holly Kernan has been helpful and supportive in guiding this process. Having buy-in from the top can help to navigate the intricacies of a big organization.

Talk to others who have done it. We learned a lot by talking with news orgs that have already done the work and shared their data publicly. We also learned from studying other orgs like NPR, KUT, KUOW, Reveal, The New York Times, and Gastropod. We also hope to be a resource for news organizations looking to start this type of work. We hope you reach out to us if you’d like to talk more!

Talk to other departments. The three departments that helped us a great deal were human resources, audience intelligence and fundraising. Human resources and audience intelligence deal regularly with data and demographics; talking with someone who already parses data about race and ethnicity, age and geography is incredibly helpful. Our audience intelligence team already analyzes content by platform and knowing how they do it made selecting content areas for a source audit much more navigable. Our fundraising department knows which philanthropies are interested in helping nonprofit news organizations like KQED get the funding needed to do this work.

It takes time and LOTS of meetings. Our conversation about a KQED source audit started in October 2019 at a News Integrity Initiative summit at the Newmark Journalism School in New York City (Disclaimer: Ki does contract work for school.) The meeting elevated the need for policies and processes that actually move the needle.

The NII meeting could have been just another conference filled with exciting ideas that get lost in the daily grind back home. To keep these ideas alive, we had to conduct the sometimes boring work of implementing change and evolving culture.

We had so many meetings. And part of those meetings involved unpacking some of the racism and trauma caused by others. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work is messy and uncomfortable in part because of Americans’ deep discomfort with talking about race. But, again, racism doesn’t go away just because you don’t like talking about it.

Much of the meeting work involved preparing presentations to get buy-in from different parts of the company for both the source audit and the overall DEI work happening at KQED. We estimated that for every deck we presented, we met eight times to prepare. Then we presented the same deck five more times to different groups of stakeholders. A sample list of stakeholders include: our head of content, senior leadership team, senior content managers, news staff, and all staff.

Use the Triangle Offense. Okay, so some of us really got into “The Last Dance” Chicago Bulls documentary (not Jonathan, because he’s a Detroiter and a die-hard Pistons fan). Looking back, the source audit could not have succeeded as a one-person project — it’s just too much work. But the three of us working together created a triangle offense that helped us deal with different parts of the problem or answer questions when someone was dealing with fires. We always had someone to pass to. Nothing slipped through the cracks and we were able to keep ourselves accountable and keep going.

There will be disruptions. This source audit happened during several major events. The pandemic forced us to immediately figure out how to work safely and stay on air because KQED is an essential service: reporting news about a crisis during a crisis was our top priority. We were also unspared of the financial blows caused by the pandemic — revenue dropped and KQED had to make cuts to its operating budget. But we persisted, and by the end of June, we got the green light to pursue the source audit.

Plan your next steps for after you get the data. It might come as a surprise that after all this work, a retroactive source audit is only the beginning. Here are Impact Architects’ recommendations based on our source audit:

• Increase representation of women on shows with 55% or more men
• Interview more women as expert sources
• Do more stories in parts of the region/state we don’t cover as often
• Pursue greater representation of white and Asian/Asian American women
• Pursue greater representation of Black and Hispanic/Latinx men

We won’t be able to commission another source audit in the near future so we’re in the process of doing it ourselves. We’re borrowing heavily from NPR’s playbook and using a source questionnaire used at the end of each interview so reporters can collect the information as they’re reporting.

And it’s not just the tools we’re borrowing, but the lessons. It’s no secret that Americans have a hard time talking about race. But we learned that sources often appreciated the questionnaires once they heard what the audit is trying to accomplish. Some welcome the conversation. This was the case at Minnesota Public Radio where Jonathan helped deploy a questionnaire with Eric Garcia McKinley.

Some may feel that asking people about their race, gender, age, or other personal details is an invasion of privacy. In some ways, it is. And it’s intimidating to ask these questions when we may have avoided them in the past. But this is 2021. We are living in different times. If asked in a respectful way, with context, sources have largely been willing to give this information. Sources know we want to do better and they know this data is important.

We’re now using the source audit and staff data to help guide what we do next. There is nothing perfect about the work we’re doing, and none of it captures every question and concern about DEI in our newsroom. But it’s where we are right now, and anyone who’s in the work knows it’s forever work.

Ki Sung is a senior editor at KQED and host of MindShift. Jonathan Blakley is the executive director of radio programming at KQED (and a 2012 Nieman Fellow). Vinnee Tong is the managing editor of news at KQED.

Lego crowd by Costatino Beretta used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/03/want-to-know-if-your-news-organization-reflects-your-community-do-a-source-audit-heres-how/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/thats-not-timesean-can-be-used-to-exclude-the-new-york-times-gives-the-big-report-treatment-to-enacting-sweeping-cultural-change/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/thats-not-timesean-can-be-used-to-exclude-the-new-york-times-gives-the-big-report-treatment-to-enacting-sweeping-cultural-change/#respond Wed, 24 Feb 2021 20:01:03 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=190839

In 2014, The New York Times produced its pivotal Innovation Report. The report, which was the product of six months of work by Times staffers and was meant to be an internal document before it was leaked, outlined the digital challenges that the paper faced and argued that The New York Times must become a digital-first organization in order to survive. “We are falling behind in … the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.”

That 2014 Innovation Report was written by 10 white people and does not mention the words “diverse,” “diversity,” “racial,” or “race” once. In 2014, as the paper recognized that growing its audience and was crucial to its survival, it did not, in this report, recognize that readers and staff members of color were a key part of that mission. The 97-page report mentions race exactly once, in an aside about how reporters use social media (“Jon Eligon wrote a gripping first-person account on Facebook about his experience as a black reporter approaching a white supremacist in North Dakota”). The report does not include a single photo of a Black employee.

Another report, “Journalism That Stands Apart: The 2020 Group,” was released, publicly, in January 2017. This time, the report acknowledges that “increasing the diversity of our newsroom — more people of color, more women, more people from outside major metropolitan areas, more younger journalists and more non-Americans — is critical,” and it includes a couple relevant quotes from newsroom employees: “The Times should invest more in career planning, and should do more to not only hire people of color or people who aren’t from the usual talent pipelines but also help them with mentorship and career advancement,” and “We need more diversity at the top, in the traditional sense and in the sense of diversity of skills.”

Four years later — and following the high-profile resignations of reporter Donald McNeil Jr. (for using a racial slur) and opinion page editor James Bennet (for running an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that called on the military to quash Black Lives Matter protests), The New York Times on Wednesday released a report, “A Call to Action: Building a Culture that Works for All of Us,” that brings race in the newsroom front and center. “Without following through on our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion internally, we will inevitably speak to and reach only certain readers through our journalism,” the report’s authors Amber Guild, president of T Brand; Carolyn Ryan, deputy managing editor; and Anand Venkatesan, SVP of strategy and head of operations, write. “We want a subscriber and readership base that more fully reflects the breadth of the society we serve.”

As Nieman Lab did with both the 2014 and 2017 reports, we’ve pulled out some key passages from the new report.

There’s been some progress. The percentage of people of color at the company has increased slightly since the end of 2019 when the Times last made figures available (from 32% to 34%).

Last year, 48 percent of new hires were people of color. Since 2015, we have increased the overall percentage of people of color at the company from 27 percent to 34 percent; and we have increased the percentage of people of color in leadership from 17 percent to 23 percent. We have also increased the percentage of women at the company from 45 percent to 52 percent; and we have increased the percentage of women in company leadership from 40 percent to 52 percent.

The authors stress that hiring isn’t the end of the story and that good intentions aren’t enough. “Because we’re making a difference in society and have a mission, we feel like we’re already equitable and inclusive,” one staffer told them. “Because we care, we don’t have to work as hard. But that’s wrong.”

Elevate how we lead and manage people. We will define clear expectations for leaders who manage people and for how they will be assessed. We will significantly increase the feedback, training and support we provide managers. We will set a goal of increasing the representation of Black and Latino colleagues in leadership by 50 percent by 2025.

Leadership here is defined as director and above on the business side and deputy and above in the newsroom, which equates to roughly the most senior 10 percent of the company.

Here’s that element that was entirely missing from the 2014 Innovation report:

We will make our newsroom more diverse, our editorial practices more inclusive, and our news report one that provides a truer, richer and more textured portrayal of the world. By doing so, we will ultimately attract a reader and subscriber base that more fully reflects the breadth of the society we serve.

The authors outline a number of “cultural inhibitors” that “stand in the way of us becoming a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive company”:

— Success and belonging at The Times are guided by a set of complex, unwritten rules.
— A narrow view of excellence limits our ability to benefit from difference. “That’s not Timesean” can be used to exclude.
— We have discomfort with vulnerability, which is a barrier to taking risks, innovating, acknowledging mistakes and working on self-improvement.
— We often focus on how smart one person is, versus how smart that individual makes the team.
— Some people make the flawed assumption that there is a tradeoff between diversity and excellence.

Ideas that may have felt “implicit” to some people must be made explicit:

— Explicitly tie diversity, equity and inclusion to our stated values. We will ensure that principles on diversity, equity and inclusion are reflected in our stated values.

Set clear expectations for norms and behaviors for all employees. A team of news and business leaders, with input from a range of employees, will define the behaviors that lead to success at The Times — and those that don’t.

There are no names named in this public report, but the authors suggest that the Times has focused too much on individual stars (“people who make outsize individual contributions”) and while not rewarding the practices of “successfully leading people or contributing to teams. This fact can be detrimental to everyone in the organization, but we know it takes a disproportionate toll on people of color.”

Managers need to be effective leaders; the definition of “effective” includes the ability to “successfully lead diverse teams.”

To ensure that managers develop as people leaders and both benefit from and are evaluated based on the experience of those who report to them, we will build a feedback process that gives employees the opportunity to provide upward feedback for their managers. We will also provide new learning and development opportunities to support the growth and development of leaders as we set new expectations. And we will ensure that promotion rationales and compensation decisions for managers consider leadership abilities, making explicit in policy and practice that poor leadership of our employees will hold them back from advancing through the organization.

All employees will be able to give upward feedback for their managers, who will be assessed directly on their performance as managers in their evaluations. Starting in 2022, we will ensure that clearly defined diversity, equity and inclusion expectations are woven into all leaders’ assessment and compensation.

In addition, the report says the Times must work to ensure that “stars” aren’t treated differently from other staffers. (The “recent events” mentioned likely refer to the resignations of Donald McNeil Jr. and Andy Mills; I am guessing that Michael Barbaro and Rukmini Callimachi‘s names also arose in conversation with staffers.)

Amid recent events, employees have pointed to a “star” culture. They have questioned The Times’s commitment to fairly enforcing its policies and rules — and whether they are clear and rigorous enough in the first place.

The Times’s leaders have committed to a review, now underway, of our procedures for investigating employee behavioral issues, and for determining the appropriate discipline. The goal of this work is to clarify for all employees what our procedures are, to assess whether they are rigorous enough and to determine how to make them more transparent. The result must leave colleagues with confidence that standards are applied consistently, that processes are rigorous and fair, and that action is taken when violations are found to have occurred.

Times employees, especially employees of color, are often unsure of how to advance at the organization and unfamiliar with how promotion decisions are made, the authors write. “All employees deserve to know where they should aim, to have opportunities to put their hands up, and to have a fair shot at advancement and opportunities to grow in their existing roles.” The newsroom will need to take a cue from the Product Development teams:

There, career paths are well defined and promotions for those who are ready to rise in the organization are granted in specific windows each year. Managers and employees know when and how to propose promotions, and at the end of the process, employees receive clear decisions and feedback. While these processes are by no means perfect, they have the power to bring considerable rigor and fairness to personnel decisions.

The newsroom has begun to develop its own set of clear, fair career development processes. We need to ensure that people of color share in the opportunity for stretch assignments that can lead to more senior roles or growth in employees’ existing positions. And senior leaders should be judged by how well they create pathways for a diverse group of deputies to succeed them.

When the Times doesn’t create dedicated positions focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the work needed in those areas goes unpaid and falls to employees of color, the authors note.

Our lack of clear ownership and uneven systems has meant that people of color have shouldered a disproportionate share of this responsibility, often on their own time and without additional compensation. They lead employee resource groups (E.R.G.s), like Black@NYT, the Latino Network, the Asian Network, the Arab Collective and others. They serve on diversity committees (including this one) and participate in focus groups and listening tours. And they often read and edit articles concerning race to ensure accuracy and fairness in between their other duties. All of this work has been essential and has illustrated the commitment of so many people of color at The Times to the institution and to improving our workplace culture.

The Times has already taken some steps to bolster our companywide approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. We recently announced, for example, that E.R.G. leaders and committee members will receive annual stipends to recognize the work they do.

More broadly, we will build out an office within Human Resources to add expertise and oversee our efforts at making the company more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

“Sensitivity reads” should be made obsolete, the report’s authors write; they’re a symptom of “coverage that remains rooted in white perspective, from characterizations and discussions of race to notions of what’s newsworthy.” Employees of color should not be brought in at the last minute to ensure that “story framing and language hold up to our news standards and do not play into tired stereotypes.”

And while the term “objectivity” doesn’t appear in this report, this passage is noteworthy.

As we continue to diversify our newsroom, we will see more coverage that captures the lives of people and communities of color with deeper understanding and nuance. After all, while our journalists rely primarily on reporting and expertise in the subjects they cover, personal experience can also deepen and enhance their work.

Photo of The New York Times building by Scott Beale used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/thats-not-timesean-can-be-used-to-exclude-the-new-york-times-gives-the-big-report-treatment-to-enacting-sweeping-cultural-change/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/imagining-an-older-whiter-and-wealthier-print-reader-is-hurting-the-philadelphia-inquirers-coverage-a-report-finds/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/imagining-an-older-whiter-and-wealthier-print-reader-is-hurting-the-philadelphia-inquirers-coverage-a-report-finds/#respond Tue, 16 Feb 2021 15:50:05 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=190514 A report commissioned by The Philadelphia Inquirer found that its coverage overwhelmingly featured people who were white and male. Sourcing and editing practices that catered to an imaginary print reader were at least partially to blame.

The report — by two professors at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, Bryan Monroe and Andrea Wenzel — looked at nearly 3,000 stories over six randomly selected weeks between August 2019 and July 2020. They found that white reporters tended to cover white people the most, but that white individuals accounted for 58.8% of individuals featured across all coverage, regardless of the author’s race. (This, in a city whose population is 42% Black.) In their executive summary, Monroe and Wenzel point to one reason why:

Conversations with newsroom staff and management illustrated how sourcing norms and editing traditions favored an imagined print reader who was older, whiter, wealthier, and more suburban. This lens took a toll on story selection, framing, and style — but also on the experiences and morale of staff, particularly on staff of color.

After in-depth interviews with members of the newsroom, the researchers concluded that journalists’ desire to produce more inclusive coverage “was complicated by perceptions of The Inquirer’s audience.” Some of the audience assumptions are largely correct — the print publication does have an older and whiter audience than the population of Philadelphia as whole — but others were not. (Digital-only readers are more likely to be suburban than print readers, for example.)

“Some editors acknowledged that the continued emphasis on a print publication was a barrier to coverage appealing to more diverse audiences,” the report states. This emphasis had far-reaching implications. Journalists of color shared experiences with editors “where assumptions about the imagined reader’s whiteness had forced them to alter their stories, adjust their style and framing, or not do a story at all.”

The external report was commissioned by The Philadelphia Inquirer after an insensitive headline (“Buildings Matter, Too”) sparked a wider conversation about a lack of racial representation in the newsroom and throughout coverage. Staff, led by journalists of color, declared they had been “dragging this 200-year-old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age” and 44 of them took a “sick and tired day” in protest. The Inquirer’s top editor resigned a few days later.

The research released Friday consisted of an audit designed to “hold up a mirror” to existing coverage, one-on-one interviews, analysis of the staff’s demographic makeup, and recommendations to improve. Citing Wenzel’s previous work analyzing source diversity at WHYY as a model, the researchers identified 15,000 individuals who served as sources or subjects across Inquirer stories and other content, including photos, social media, and video.

[Related: Philly news outlets are collaborating to offer new kinds of Covid-19 coverage]

The investigation found that the Inquirer’s content consistently overrepresented white and male voices in a city where only one out of three residents is non-Hispanic white:

Men accounted for more than three-quarters of people featured in stories by Inquirer staff. (That 0.1% reflects that six non-binary people were represented in the Inquirer’s coverage.)

As of August 2020, the Inquirer newsroom employed 225 employees, including “management, editors, reporters, producers, photographers, news developers, coordinators” and more. The numbers show a newsroom that does not reflect the diversity of the city is covers:

The report also found that editors (7​7.3%) are whiter than non-editors (​74.3%)​, and that while white (40.9%), Black (6​.8%)​, and Asian (​2.3%)​ women hold editor positions, zero Latina staff hold editor positions.

In a newsroom where 35 out of 47 editors are white, the report found that “allowing whiteness to remain invisible,” “assumptions about what makes a good source,” and “logistical constraints” were barriers to more diverse sourcing.

Some white editors used terms like “natural” or “organic” when describing how source diversity happened . . . Likewise, some white reporters said they focused on what they saw as the quality of sources and not their race or ethnicity: ‘My top priority is getting the best people that I can talk to on time.’

Journalists of color interviewed felt their editors had good intentions, but felt responsible for closing any gaps in understanding. “This often left them feeling trapped between expectations of reporting for communities and editors’ expectations that they were reporting about communities,” the report found.

There’s much more in the report, including department-level breakdowns. You can read the full diversity report here. You can also find coverage of its findings in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Photo of man reading a newspaper by simpleinsomnia used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/imagining-an-older-whiter-and-wealthier-print-reader-is-hurting-the-philadelphia-inquirers-coverage-a-report-finds/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/11/the-moral-case-for-diversity-in-newsrooms-also-makes-good-business-sense/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/11/the-moral-case-for-diversity-in-newsrooms-also-makes-good-business-sense/#respond Tue, 24 Nov 2020 18:40:56 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=187949 This has to be the year that pushes newsrooms to make progress on diversity and inclusion. As the Covid-19 crisis exposed glaring racial health disparities in the U.S., and as the killing of George Floyd prompted global protests against racism, the journalism industry has been forced to confront its own record on race and its ability to cover an increasingly diverse nation. Journalists from marginalized communities have increasingly demanded change. And the recent presidential election coverage continued to expose shortcomings.

Census data from 2018 shows that people of color make up 40% of the population of the United States. According to a Pew Research Center analysis using 2012-2016 data, only 23% of newsroom employees are people of color. A 2019 Radio Television Digital News Association survey found that 14.5% of radio employees are people of color (an improvement from the 11.3% of the year before), and 25.9% of local TV news employees were people of color.

[Two new studies about media and diversity can help newsrooms through their reckoning with racism]

What’s more, over the past decade newsroom employment in the United States has dropped by a staggering 23%, as local papers shuttered, the internet killed the classifieds business, and advertising moved to online. The financial crisis in 2008-2009 forced newsrooms to downsize, and that contraction hit journalists of color especially hard.

In the years since, hiring newsroom staff that reflects an increasingly diverse nation has become, at least nominally, a bigger goal in the industry. As someone who has been in the news business for over two decades, I’ve been regularly asked in newsrooms, on panels, and as a consultant, about the importance of diversity and how best to achieve it on air, behind the scenes, in management, and in the content journalists produce.

One solution that has been espoused in corporate America over the years has been to emphasize the business case: Greater diversity is better for business. You may be aware of this 2015 McKinsey report, showing that of a group of 366 public companies, the ones in the top quartile for racial diversity amongst their management ranks were 35% more likely to bring in higher-than-average profits. The business case is one reason why companies large and small became replete with diversity and inclusion programs.

With that in mind, I wondered: Could the same be true for newsrooms? Could a business case for diversity in journalism bring real change to our industry?

This piece was originally meant to explore these questions. Based on my experience working across network TV, radio, and online news, my thinking was, of course there is a strong business case for diversity in journalism. I’ve learned in real time that the wider the range of perspectives and backgrounds covering the news, the more capable a newsroom will be in reaching a wider audience, the more revenue that audience will bring in, and the more attractive a newsroom becomes for drawing more diverse talent.

Yet even before 2020, many newsrooms had expressed a commitment to higher levels of diversity in hiring, promotions, and content — and progress remained slow. One harsh reality that’s become more apparent this year is that the business case is insufficient for incentivizing leaders to prioritize diversity. What’s needed is for newsrooms to accept a core responsibility to their audience and their employees — a moral case, if you will — to ensure they are covering the stories and experiences of the communities they serve.

I spoke with a number of newsroom leaders and academics. All agreed that although the business case is important, emphasizing the moral case is necessary for real and lasting change. The newsroom leaders pointed out the work that needs to be done to diversify newsrooms — starting with hiring and promoting more people of color, but also committing to diversity as part of a newsroom’s core values and operations. The academics I interviewed stressed the need for newsroom leaders, most of whom are white, to prioritize diversity in editorial and managerial decision making, and especially in hiring middle management and C-suite jobs. All offered compelling advice for where the industry needs to go from here.

An old problem

The need for higher levels of diversity in America’s newsrooms is not a new one. One need only look at the findings of the Kerner Commission’s report from 1968 for proof. The Kerner Commission was assembled in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to examine systemic issues that led to the “race riots” in cities around the United States that summer. Today, as the Black Lives Matters protests continue, we find ourselves in a country ripe for comparison to the way things were more than a half century ago.

The Kerner Commission report declared: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” It included a scathing assessment of press outlets across mediums, saying they were falling short in accurately covering and capturing these increasingly disparate worlds. The report stated, “the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective. That is no longer good enough. The painful process of readjustment that is required of the American news media must begin now.”

The commission went on to recommend a number of solutions, ranging from more first-hand reporting in Black neighborhoods (rather than a reliance on police reports) to more reporting on the full scope of Black life. However, the commission did not account for the notion of inclusion. Back then, the most immediate goal was integrating newsrooms. This meant hiring more Black journalists; it didn’t go so far as to ensure they would have the freedom and support to appropriately cover Black communities.

Martin Reynolds, the co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, which was founded in the aftermath of the Kerner Commission Report to address systemic racism in newsrooms, pointed out the flaws in this approach. “Integration is just that you’re willing to have someone next to you, but you are not necessarily inviting someone over,” he said. “There wasn’t an understanding of how the presence of these folks was valuable for the enterprise.”

In the wake of the George Floyd killing we saw a number of high-profile hires of Black journalists at media companies like The Washington Post and MSNBC. Newsrooms can’t stop at hiring in response to larger social movements; they have to do the hard work of changing their cultures, promoting inclusion and deepening their coverage.

Barriers to diversity

We’ve recently seen just how poorly newsrooms have fared in terms of diversity. A lot of it happened on social media. Journalists have called out their organizations for ignoring and undervaluing people from marginalized communities, for creating toxic work environments, and for discrimination.

Los Angeles Times reporters rallied around #BlackatLAT to draw attention to poor representation, treatment and retention of Black reporters in a city that’s 11% Black.

Former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery spoke to The New York Times about the unrelenting criticism of his Michael Brown coverage in Ferguson, Missouri, from his former managers at The Washington Post.

Producers at St. Louis Public Radio publicly organized against the station’s treatment of Black staff, leading the general manager to resign at the end of September.

Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Michael M. Santiago took a buyout from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after being told he could not fairly cover BLM protests because of a retweet. He was one of two Black journalists on staff barred from protest coverage in a controversial decision made by the paper’s then–executive editor.

How did those oft-heralded diversity efforts in newsrooms fail so miserably?

According to Dr. Laura Morgan Roberts, an organizational psychologist at the University of Virginia who has studied the experiences of people of color in journalism, one major problem is that there aren’t enough people of color in positions of power. “When the editors are not diverse, it adversely affects the coverage,” Roberts told me. News stories “can be incomplete or compromised by blind spots, or at worst, can perpetuate negative stereotypes about various communities, especially people of color.” This can lead to everything from selecting stories that only reflect narrow swaths of a community to having limited perspectives in reporting.

The racial composition of newsroom management demonstrates the imbalance. According to the 2019 American Society of Newspaper Editors diversity survey, only 18.8% of all print and online newsroom managers were people of color. A RTDNA 2019 survey shows that only 17.2% of TV news directors and 8.2% of radio news directors were people of color.

The lack of diversity in management can affect editorial decision making and the ability to retain diverse staff. Dr. Roberts found that journalists of color say they are often instructed to remove nuances that reflect their unique perspectives and experiences. Editors would “question the journalists’ ‘objectivity’ as if [their] cultural lens and perspective is something that only journalists of color have as an additional factor that shapes their journalism,” she said, “when in fact all humans have these lenses of cultural perspective.”

This type of “cultural editing” undervalues the expertise of many journalists of color and results in coverage that reinforces stereotypes about diverse communities. It comes as no surprise then how predominantly white leadership can drive both employees of color out of newsrooms and diverse audiences away from embracing the content those newsrooms create. According to a 2020 McKinsey study, 50% of LGBTQ people, 45% of ethnic or racial minorities, and 44% of women have turned down or decided not to pursue a job because of a perceived lack of inclusion. Not having senior members that represent marginalized communities can be one crucial hint to prospective applicants that a newsroom is less inclusive.

Moving the needle

Maribel Perez Wadsworth, the president of news at Gannett and publisher of USA Today, calls diversity a “declared choice.” She’s heard all the excuses. Managers tell her: “It’s hard. I can’t attract diverse talent. There’s not enough diversity in my community. I hire people but then they don’t stay; or they get a better job offer somewhere else because everybody wants diverse talent.” Instead of giving up, she’s doubled down on hiring and retaining more people of color. She made a public commitment to have Gannett’s local newsrooms match the demographics of their community by 2025, and she launched an emerging leaders program to train new and future leaders of the USA Today network. According to Wadsworth, more than half of the latest cohort were people of color.

Since January, her newsrooms (more than 250 in total, plus USA Today) have added 13 senior leaders, 11 of whom are people of color and seven are internal promotions. She said that she’s especially proud of those numbers because it “shows that we all are really walking the talk we are investing in our people who are getting the training, we are giving them the opportunities to stretch and that’s readying them for roles. I’m not talking about, you know, little management roles. I’m talking about top editor roles.”

She said that the key is in how she hires and develops talent. On the hiring front, she has her managers assess candidates on skills, and she takes on the role of interviewing finalists for senior level roles to evaluate their commitment to fostering an inclusive newsroom.

Wadsworth recognizes that each senior leader hired is responsible for developing the employees that report to them and building an overall newsroom culture that actively values inclusion and diversity. She explained they must be willing to mentor others and “cede [their] own turf sometimes in order to get people opportunities.”

Two of her newsrooms now boast a level of diversity most newsrooms would love to achieve. According to Gannett’s publicly released diversity numbers, Wadsworth’s El Paso newsroom is now 58% BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and more than 50% of its leaders are Latinx. Her Corpus Christi newsroom is 47% diverse with more than 60% of leadership also falling into that category. Wadsworth understands instinctively that the more diverse her staff, the more their reporting will reflect their diverse communities.

Another news organization that has worked to increase its reach is WAMU, the local public radio station in Washington, D.C. Between 2014 and 2017, the station doubled the size of its Black and Latinx audiences by hiring more on-air announcers and reporters to better reflect its community. However, diversity on air wasn’t enough. WAMU was one of a number of newsrooms in recent months to experience a management shake-up after employees publicized their concerns about the lack of diversity in management and what they characterized as a hostile work environment that was especially difficult for employees from marginalized communities. The public airing of these allegations ultimately led to the resignation of the station’s general manager J.J. Yore. The station also committed to putting together a more diverse senior leadership team and creating a more inclusive work environment.

Hostility at work is by no means unique to journalism. A recent McKinsey study found that 84% of American workers have faced microaggressions around their identity in the workplace. A 2018 study found that rates of experienced microaggressions were especially high for Black women (40%) and Lesbian women (37%), who reported being questioned about their judgments more than twice as often as their white male counterparts.

Models in action

The reckoning over race in legacy news organizations has prompted many leaders to commit to doing better. They’d benefit from looking to newer organizations that have successfully captured the attention of communities of color.

One example is Blavity, a media company co-founded by entrepreneur Morgan DeBaun in 2014 to fill a space that mainstream newsrooms weren’t occupying: news dedicated to Black Millennials and Gen Z.

Blavity relies on user-generated content in the form of op-eds to gain traction among its intended audience. “We very early partnered with writers, bloggers, and activists to share their voices. To date, a huge part of our content strategy is in partnership with organizations and leaders of Color of Change [and] the NAACP,” DeBaun said.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Blavity was heralded as a darling startup and its audience was growing. Once the pandemic hit and the disproportionate effects on Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous communities became clear, audiences knew where to turn. In May, as discussions around race were heating up, DeBaun said the site brought in 38 million pageviews, up 150% from the month prior.

One ongoing challenge for DeBaun has been raising ad revenue for stories that center on social justice issues. “We run a [financial] deficit when we cover Black racial justice issues because of the way the advertising world and agency world is set up,” she said. For example, “There are keywords that ads cannot run against, and oftentimes those keywords are the exact type of content that we need to be covering.” She said that keywords like “LGBTQ,” “police brutality,” “Black,” and “race” often can’t appear on a page without forfeiting ad revenue. That isn’t stopping DeBaun from continuing social justice coverage, but it does mean she’s had to think about other sources of funding.

Fortunately, she’s been successful in fundraising in the past. She brought in more than $6.5 million for Blavity in 2018 as other media companies targeting younger audiences — Mic, BuzzFeed, Vice, Bustle — were struggling. She also focused on creating multiple companies under the Blavity brand to diversify its revenue stream. In 2017, Blavity acquired Shadow and Act, an insiders’ guide to Black Hollywood, and Travel Noire, a digital brand that caters to adventurous Black travelers. Blavity has an events enterprise anchored by two conferences: Afro Tech, which targets tech companies and entrepreneurs, and Summit 21, designed for women of color, influencers, and creators. (Like so many Covid-19 era conferences, they’ve moved online.)

Blavity’s audience growth suggests that a new generation of consumers want coverage that reflects their experiences and communities, and they aren’t willing to wait for mainstream news organizations. Blavity and DeBaun prove that a newsroom narrowly focused on reaching a specific audience — in their case, Black Millennials and Gen Z — can not only survive but thrive.

Outlier is another news organization that has diversity central to its core mission and works closely with their audiences. [Disclosure: Outlier receives funding from the News Integrity Initiative, but the author retains editorial independence over the findings in this report.] Founded by journalist Sarah Alvarez in 2016, Outlier provides service journalism to communities in and around Detroit, Michigan. The organization’s executive director, Candice Fortman, said Outlier’s approach of cultivating strong relationships with the people they cover has led to the community becoming the “de facto assignment editor” for their newsroom. She told me they’ve built trust with their community by hiring journalists from within it, and she believes this gives them a leg up over other media organizations. While any journalist can learn a beat, she said, “there are also some things that are natural and intrinsic to living a thing that cannot be taught.”

Indeed, a core part of journalism is developing sources, and the more a journalist knows about the inner workings of a community, the better equipped they are to know who to ask, what questions to ask, and how to frame those questions in a way that gets to the heart of the story. If a journalist is from a community they are reporting on, they’re more likely to know the history of that community and be able to put it into proper context for their audience.

Outlier’s prioritization of community exposes a shortcoming in other media organizations: Diversity efforts must involve creating a space where different lived experiences are valued and shared. “You can hire all the people of color you want to, but if you enter them into an organization that at its very core is full of racism and sexism and all sorts of things, then so what? Then you’ve got a staff of folks who are just terrorized internally,” Fortman said.

Creating a safe space for people from marginalized communities is integral to retaining them. That work starts with newsroom leaders being clear in their actions and expectations about what it really means to have a diverse and inclusive newsroom and making sure it is reflected in more than just hiring practices or establishing diversity quotas for sources. To be effective, care must be taken to ensure that newsrooms cover stories unique to marginalized communities and does so respectfully and in ways that don’t reinforce stereotypes.

Following the murder of George Floyd, a number of newsrooms around the country held listening sessions for their teams to open up and share their own experiences with racism. While making room for such listening is a first good step, Dr. Roberts said that’s not nearly enough. It takes daily action to bring about change. “Inclusion is not about potlucks and Black History Month features, it’s about the hard work of helping people to grow and learn and develop and advance in psychologically safe ways,” she said.

In the same way that writing checks for social justice movements and hiring more people for marginalized communities has never been enough to change the culture around diversity in corporate America, listening sessions and hiring/sourcing quotas aren’t enough to change them in newsrooms.

More important and harder than ever

Covid-19 has plunged the U.S. economy into a crisis that has put 30 million Americans out of work. In the first couple months of the pandemic, more than 36,000 journalists lost their jobs, were furloughed, or experienced pay cuts, and more than 200 newsrooms were either forced to lay people off, merged with another company, and/or experienced reduced print runs. This economic crisis has only worsened the fate of a newspaper industry that between 2008 and 2018 saw its revenues plummet by 62% — a loss of more than $23.5 billion, according to data compiled by Pew.

So, to say the least, there are conflicting priorities in newsrooms today. Journalists of color and their allies have been risking their own employment and stifling their career advancements by speaking up about racism and inequality at work, while at the same time, newsroom leaders are having to make difficult decisions about cutting costs. Under tight financial strain, it’s easy to see how efforts to increase diversity — and the people who promote them — might suddenly wind up on the chopping block.

Alfredo Carbajal, managing editor of Al Día at the Dallas Morning News, told me that he fears a rise in layoffs and cuts to diversity initiatives that’s similar to what happened a decade ago. “We’ve seen that many, many times. Unfortunately, in situations of crisis, one of the first things that suffers is diversity [among] our staff.”

Roberts said that journalists of color who have pushed for accountability on diversity in their newsrooms might be especially vulnerable. Many are at a distinct economic disadvantage and have less wealth and financial security when compared with their white counterparts. “They will leave journalism because it’s just not economically sustainable for them to stay,” she said.

Dr. Meredith D. Clark, an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia who oversaw the 2018 and 2019 ASNE survey of newsrooms, said the voluntary departure of journalists of color often boils down to a lack of support from newsroom leaders. “The connective tissue in the stories that people told about why they moved from one newsroom to another or why they decided to leave journalism and take one of the communication-related jobs was the influence of a middle manager, usually white males.”

A recent McKinsey & Company study noted that the economic downturn has also forced corporate America to choose between keeping or dismantling their diversity programs — and 27% have chosen the latter. The researchers concluded that holding onto diversity initiatives, even during a financial crisis like the one we are in, could benefit companies’ bottom line in the long term. They argue that “diverse teams have been shown to be better able to radically innovate and anticipate shifts in consumer needs and consumption patterns” and that a “visible commitment to I&D [inclusion and diversity] during the crisis is likely to strengthen companies’ global image and license to operate.”

Gannett’s Wadsworth stressed that now is not the time to cut back on diversity initiatives. “If anything, we have to double down,” she said. Wadsworth emphasized that not only is this the right thing to do from an ethical point of view, it also makes business sense. Doubling down, even in the face of economic hardship, means going after new demographics in ways that show her newsroom is “happy to have paying subscribers and paying readers from all parts of our community.”

Keith Woods, NPR’s chief diversity officer, emphasized that diversity is an ongoing process and one that newsroom leaders have to truly commit to over the long haul. That’s important to keep in mind during especially uncertain times. “The more successful you are, the harder this is going to get,” he said. Once you’ve established a strong track record of hiring journalists of color and giving them visibility in significant roles, they will undoubtedly be recruited by other companies. In good times, newsrooms have to ensure that their pipelines of talent from marginalized communities aren’t limited to just one person and don’t stop at the entry level.

What happens when the only newsroom superstar from a marginalized community moves on to the next opportunity? When newsrooms limit their hiring to one person from a marginalized community, they fall into what Wadsworth calls the “only’s trap.” It’s “the thing that has been the most likely to fail in terms of newsroom organizations and their diversity efforts” because not only is it hard to be the only person from a marginalized community in a mostly white newsroom but it exemplifies a surface-level, “check-the-box approach to diversity.” Wadsworth suggests that newsroom leaders broaden their approach with a “focus not on, ‘Did we hire the one person?’ but, ‘What have we done to nurture that person to make them truly included? What have we done to give that person a duo?’ There’s a power in two.”

The time has chosen us

When I started writing this article, support for the Black Lives Matter movement among Americans was at a record high. A Marquette University Law School poll from June found that 61% of Americans approved of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just a few months later, that number had dropped to less than half (48%) of people supporting it.

How people felt about racism also changed. A CNN poll a week after George Floyd’s death found that 42% of Americans thought race relations were extremely important during this election year, placing race up there with health care and the economy in terms of importance. A June survey conducted by The Economist/YouGov found that 45% of white people in America thought racism was a problem; by August that number had dropped to 33%.

In November, American voters elected Joe Biden as their next president. His running mate, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, made history by becoming the first Black person, first woman, and first South Asian person to become Vice President of the United States. Leading up to the election, there was a lot of scrutiny of white, Black, and Asian voters who live in the suburbs or have college degrees. However, news coverage painted the “Latino vote” as a monolithic liberal voting bloc. Exit polling data, however, suggests that while most Latinos voted for Biden, Trump made gains with some groups. Wadsworth explained that uncovering the differences and nuances within the Latinx community requires committing newsroom resources and time.

“The most pressing issues and experiences of older Cuban Americans in South Florida are different than the issues and experiences most relevant to Central Americans or Mexican Americans,” said Wadsworth. Interviews with Latinx voters in Florida showed that those who those who had experienced socialism in their native countries voted for Trump in larger numbers than their Mexican and Puerto Rican counterparts.

With the election (mostly) behind us and a new administration taking office in a matter of weeks, we are seeing early signs that President-Elect Joe Biden will be following through on his campaign promise to both fight systemic racism and to appoint a cabinet that reflects the full diversity of America. He gave one early hint of his commitment to change in the speech he gave the night he became the President-Elect by thanking what he called “the broadest and most diverse coalition in history” and mentioning “gay, straight, transgender” voters. According to writer and trans activist Charlotte Clymer, that mention carried weight. “It was an extraordinary gesture of support for our community and part of his enduring commitment to trans and non-binary people.” She says she wasn’t surprised. “This is who he’s been. [Joe Biden] was the first national leader to publicly support trans rights back in 2012, the first national leader to publicly endorse trans candidates on the ballot, and he’ll be the kind of leader who ensures no one gets left behind, regardless of gender identity.”

It’s hard not to wonder now if companies and newsrooms around the country, which started to show interest both in more diverse hiring and programming, will follow the lead of the new administration by mirroring these larger trends and pick up a focus on diversity, or whether they will reflect the polling around the Black Lives Matter movement and lose focus on covering and addressing racism and inequality. This is where the moral case for diversity can help us.

As I discovered through my research and interviews, the business case for diversity in journalism is strong. I saw it in the successes of Blavity. I saw it in Maribel Perez Wadsworth’s success in hiring and promoting senior leaders from marginalized communities. I saw it in Outlier’s community reporting.

But there’s something else that stands out with these three stories: They’re not driven just by making money. Rather, each leader showed a core commitment to reflecting the audiences they serve authentically and prioritized supporting journalists from marginalized communities. All three realized they had to get that right in order to serve their audiences and reach new ones. All three knew they could do so in ways that added value to their companies’ bottom lines.

Although overall interest in combating racism seems to be declining, there is one thing I’m hoping will make a difference in newsrooms this time around: Journalists from marginalized communities are still speaking up. While they are limited by ethics codes to what they can say through their employers’ platforms, many have turned to social media to share what they are experiencing first-hand in their newsrooms. These newsroom whistleblowers are demanding accountability and change in a way we haven’t seen since the #MeToo movement. We’re in a moment driven by journalists who are trained to report on facts, fairly and accurately, while also speaking truth to power.

There has also been a growing movement of journalists pushing for newsrooms to not just become more diverse and inclusive but to be actively anti-racist and not afraid to call out racist systems, actions, and/or language. Journalists have pushed back on the notion that objectivity should reign supreme. Instead, many journalists from marginalized communities have called for journalists not to be afraid to call out racism, sexism, or homophobia when it rises to the surface in their reporting, even when it comes from the President of the United States.

As investigative journalist Ida B. Wells once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” In our newsrooms and in American society, the light has shown us that racism continues to be a problem. It’s the responsibility of both to decide whether this will be a fleeting moment or the time we bring forth real change.

Nicole A. Childers is an award-winning journalist and executive producer of Marketplace Morning Report. She’s also a contributor for the upcoming anthology Meeting at the Table: African-American Women Write on Race, Culture, and Community, out November 30. This report was made possible by the Talent, Change and Inclusion Community of Practice and the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. This piece was edited by Nicole Torres and overseen by Ki Sung.

Illustration by Jean Wei.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/11/the-moral-case-for-diversity-in-newsrooms-also-makes-good-business-sense/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/improving-ethnic-diversity-is-the-most-important-diversity-priority-for-newsrooms-around-the-world-a-new-report-says/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/improving-ethnic-diversity-is-the-most-important-diversity-priority-for-newsrooms-around-the-world-a-new-report-says/#respond Fri, 30 Oct 2020 19:11:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=187346 More than four out of ten newsroom employees believe ethnic diversity is the highest diversity priority in the next year, according to a new study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published on Thursday.

On the heels of the Black Lives Matter movement during a global pandemic ahead of an election in the United States, the Reuters Institute surveyed 136 news industry leaders from 38 countries between September 21 and October 7, 2020. The goal was to better understand how the external challenges of doing journalism in 2020 has impacted news organizations internally. The survey respondents were mostly from the United Kingdom, the United States, India, France, Denmark, Germany, and Spain but responses also came from Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Indonesia, Kenya, Lithuania, Malaysia, Nigeria, Poland, and Thailand. Respondents hold senior positions in the editorial, business, and product departments of their news organizations.

One respondent emphasized that improving diversity in newsrooms isn’t about numbers, but about how diversity leads to well-rounded coverage.

“It is about allowing staff from diverse backgrounds to tell stories that are important to that group through the lens of that background and for people from that background in a way that resonates with them vs a homogeneous approach,” the CEO of a digital publication in Asia said.

Just 18% said improving gender diversity was the biggest priority, followed by “more diversity for those from a less advantaged background” (I think this means class diversity).

A few other interesting points:

• Nearly half (46%) said their organizations have a specific role for diversity, equity, and inclusion but only 36% have budgets for internal diversity initiatives.
• A majority (84%) think their organizations are doing well on diversity at junior levels but only 37% feel the same about senior leadership.
• About 55% think that remote work, imposed by the pandemic, have made their companies more efficient, but are worried about how it will affect creativity.
• About 77% said working remotely makes it harder to build relationships and might impact the ability to communicate effectively.

The Institute acknowledged that addressing these issues are difficult on their own, and even more so all at the same time. However, the audiences will be better off when they are addressed:

None of this is easy. Changing a legacy broadcast or print organisation into one able to survive or even thrive in a digital environment is hard, as is starting something new from scratch in an exceptionally competitive market. Continuing this while also covering a global pandemic and dealing with the organisational and financial impact of the coronavirus crisis is even harder. Simultaneously reckoning with the news media’s frequent relative lack of internal diversity and often troubling history of dealing with different kinds of structural inequality is harder still.

But it has to be done. The reality is that audiences are embracing digital media, even if publishers may have reservations about them, that the coronavirus is here, and that a reckoning on diversity is underway.

The continued survival, success, and social standing of individual publishers and of the news media as an institution depend in large part on facing up to these tough challenges. Faced with rapid and complex change, sticking to business-as-usual will arguably be suicidal for the news industry.

Read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/improving-ethnic-diversity-is-the-most-important-diversity-priority-for-newsrooms-around-the-world-a-new-report-says/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/nonprofit-news-organizations-are-becoming-more-diverse-but-they-still-lag-behind-the-communities-they-cover/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/nonprofit-news-organizations-are-becoming-more-diverse-but-they-still-lag-behind-the-communities-they-cover/#respond Tue, 22 Sep 2020 17:26:07 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=186239 The ranks of nonprofit newsrooms are growing as more founders choose community-supported models over dependence on advertising. But are nonprofit newsrooms reflecting the people they want to serve?

The INN Index surveyed 117 nonprofit news organizations — roughly half of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ membership — on the diversity of their staffs in 2019 and asked related questions about hiring practices and inclusion efforts. The report represents the broadest sampling of diversity, equity, and inclusion data in the sector to date. (The results of the report will be presented at the “INN at Home: Racial Equity in Journalism” conference on Tuesday.)

The timing is worth noting. Newsrooms responded in February and March 2020, a few months before protests over racial injustice and police brutality put internal discussions over diversity in coverage and representation in the spotlight at major outlets across the country. (Relatedly, newsrooms reported that “the most forceful advocacy for improving diversity comes from within their organization rather than from outside sources,” according to INN.)

Back in 2016, INN found only eight member organizations either led by people of color or serving communities of color out of more than 100 members. Three years later, with more than 285 members, INN found that “about 60” are led by people of color and 30 are dedicated to covering underrepresented communities.

Despite that upward trend, INN found the majority of respondents said their staff does not reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.

On average, nonprofit newsrooms are 68% white and led by an executive level that’s 81% white. Black journalists make up 9% of staff and 6% of leadership positions while 9% of staff and executive-level positions are filled by Hispanic employees.

More than half of all nonprofit outlets have either no people of color or “only a small percentage” within their ranks. The vast majority — more than two-thirds — do not have a single person of color in leadership at the executive level.

The INN report concludes that though “nonprofit news publishers tell us they place a high value on increasing racial and ethnic diversity in their organizations,” they’re not always following through with action. In fact, more than a third said they have done “little or nothing” to address inclusion, equity, or diversity within their organizations.

What’s stopping them? Many INN members pointed toward their small size and a lack of funding.

“Some publishers say they also need dedicated time or training and mentoring to develop effective diversity plans,” according to the report. “Only six in 10 organizations had the opportunity to fill any position at all in 2019; only one in four filled three or more posts. Small organizations especially rely heavily on freelancers.”

Retention, rather than hiring, has also proved to be a problem.

At the Oklahoma Watch, executive editor David Fritze said competition for diverse talent has impacted staff diversity. Last year, his organization saw two Native American employees recruited by other organizations. People of color also leave journalism at higher rates. (Earlier this month, INN’s own Fran Scarlett wrote about leaving the industry for a decade because of its problem with race.)

Overall, in 2019, “for every 10 white employees hired that year, nearly six left a nonprofit news outlet. But for every 10 Black employees hired, nearly seven left. And for every 10 Hispanic employees, nearly nine left.”

The nonprofit newsroom demographics fit with wider trends at nonprofit organizations in the United States. Nonprofit and charitable institutions in general struggle with diversity, especially at the leadership level. Nearly nine out of 10 nonprofit executive directors or presidents of nonprofits in the United States are white, according to a 2017 study cited by INN.

Overall, INN claims that nonprofit newsrooms are more diverse than for-profit newsrooms, but still lag behind the makeup of the United States overall. The comparison to for-profit newsrooms is difficult to confirm, given the lack of a definitive industry-wide survey and the fact that many outlets have not been especially forthcoming with equity and diversity information.

Ultimately, INN called the study “a reality check” for nonprofit journalism and stressed that publishers need to “actively prioritize building diversity in their organizations and fostering policies and practices that promote equity and inclusion.”

You can download the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/nonprofit-news-organizations-are-becoming-more-diverse-but-they-still-lag-behind-the-communities-they-cover/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-hotline-promises-answers-to-your-race-and-gender-questions-on-deadline/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-hotline-promises-answers-to-your-race-and-gender-questions-on-deadline/#respond Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:29:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=186166 Is it “Black” or “black”? (Or African-American? Or kill the hyphen?) Hispanic, Latino, Latino/a, Latin@, or Latinx? Is calling a piece of legislation a “bathroom bill” an acceptable shorthand? LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA — or none of the above?

These are the kinds of decisions that can show up in any journalist’s writing (or, in many cases, their reporting). Getting them wrong can offend, misinform, or both.

Most of the major race- or gender-focused journalism associations have created style guides that aim to help with these decisions. (See: NAHJ, NABJ, AAJA, NAJA, NLGJA, and TJA.) But sometimes you just need to talk something out.

Enter the Society of Professional Journalists, which is partnering with the Trans Journalists Association on its brand new SPJ Race & Gender Hotline:

You’re a reporter on deadline. How do I properly identify that transgender crime victim?

You’re an editor on deadline. Can my headline be short and sensitive?

You’re an art director on deadline. Is my illustration stylistic or whitewashing?

You’re a photographer on deadline. Is my photo representative or insensitive?

SPJ has partnered with experienced Black and LGBT journalists and educators, including the Trans Journalists Association. They’ll offer concrete advice for your specific situation.

Even if you choose not to follow that advice, you’ll hang up with an enlightened grasp of the race-and-gender issues currently roiling the news media. And whatever happens on your call, it’s all off the record.

SPJ also produces the Diversity Style Guide, for the human-contact-averse.

To be clear, this isn’t a hotline in the 1-800-DONT-BE-RACIST sense; it’s a form you fill out with whatever question you have. Once you hit “Submit,” an expert will get back to you — and they’ll be paid, by SPJ, for their time. (“Why is this important? Because it’s become a sad stereotype that White people are constantly asking POC and LGBT communities for advice.”) Expect a response “within a few hours” — though I’d hope that more urgent deadline queries could be pushed to the top of the queue.

“You’ll have a calm conversation about controversial topics because this is a business transaction, no different than consulting a First Amendment attorney on a story,” the site says.

The Race & Gender Hotline is modeled on SPJ’s longstanding Ethics Hotline.

SPJ president Matthew T. Hall — just elected to that post a few days ago and by day an editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune — says think of this as a beta: “I’d love to see this program become bigger and involve even more experts and advocacy groups.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-hotline-promises-answers-to-your-race-and-gender-questions-on-deadline/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/almost-every-gannett-newsroom-agrees-diversity-is-critical-to-telling-stories-its-staff-demographics-show-theres-a-lot-of-work-to-be-done/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/almost-every-gannett-newsroom-agrees-diversity-is-critical-to-telling-stories-its-staff-demographics-show-theres-a-lot-of-work-to-be-done/#respond Thu, 20 Aug 2020 17:59:41 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185519 On Thursday, Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and more than 260 daily local news outlets in the United States, pledged its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and parity in all of its newsrooms.

On Wednesday, the company had published its workforce demographics, along with its intention to “make its workforce as diverse as the country by 2025 and to expand the number of journalists focused on covering issues related to race and identity, social justice and equality.” In the entire company, here’s how diversity breaks down:

On Thursday morning, nearly every newsroom in the USA Today Network published some kind of demographic census that took stock of its newsroom’s current staff diversity online and in print. This is the first time that USA Today and all local Gannett newsrooms have published a diversity census for their readers, alongside community demographic data. Across most of the newsrooms that released data, newsroom staffs and leadership were whiter than the communities in which they operate. The release of Gannett’s diversity data follows diversity reports from news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of news at Gannett Media and the publisher of USA Today, wrote on Thursday that newsrooms that aren’t representative of their communities can’t fully understand their needs and interests. From that column:

I want to acknowledge the gaps in these reported demographics. They do not completely represent our diversity nor do they quantify fully how far we must yet go to be truly representative. Specifically, these numbers fail to capture sexual orientation or gender identity. These statistics have not been previously incorporated into our human resource reporting or in the U.S. Census.

Gannett is committed to creating a culture where every employee feels safe, included and championed for their full identity. This week, the company announced important steps to expand our demographic data to be more inclusive by providing employees the opportunity to be heard and voluntarily self-identify as diverse in ways beyond race and ethnicity, such as identifying as LGBTQ.

In addition to setting this important parity goal, we are making significant investments in our coverage of race, equality and social justice.

By the end of the year, we will have created 20 national and 40 local jobs focused on social justice, disparities and inclusion to augment our coverage of race at the intersection of every critical institution, including education, health care, criminal justice and the environment. More than a third of this investment will come from incremental hiring, and the rest will result from a reprioritization of existing reporting and editing resources.

These new hires and jobs serve to underscore our commitment to diverse staffing and news coverage at USA TODAY and our local newsrooms. And it’s a commitment that starts at the top.

Many local newsrooms published one story with a graphic illustrating its census (some newsrooms made their charts embeddable but others did not) while others opted for a few paragraphs outlining their statistics. Executive editors separately published letters to readers about their commitment to improving their coverage and newsroom diversity.

Michael Kilian, the executive editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, included some interesting information in his column about what’s worked in his newsroom:

• We increased the percentage of our content of interest to diverse audiences from only 3% in the early fall of 2019 to as high as 25% earlier this summer.
• We cut in half the percentage of routine crime stories, while creating more content about communities’ responses to issues. Since February, we are producing more content of interest to diverse audiences than we are creating traditional crime content.
• Most important, we’ve begun getting substantial news tips from our new partners and contacts. Over time, such news tips help reporters point themselves in a direction toward creating relevant, authentically told stories.

Here’s a sampling of diversity reports from some Gannett newsrooms across the country:

The Arizona Republic:

The Asbury Park Press:

The Pueblo Chieftain:

The Fort Collins Coloradoan:

Florida Today:

The News-Press and the Naples Daily News:

The El Paso Times:

Gannett has launched a Diversity Advisory Council, which will be led by CEO Michael Reed and director of inclusion, diversity and equity LaToya Johnson. Gannett’s new job postings also went live today:

At @USATODAY, we're adding jobs to our news, sports, investigations, entertainment, money, opinion and audience teams. Here are some of those new positions

— Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK (@usatncareers) August 20, 2020

A full list that links to each newsroom’s census can be found at the end of Wadsworth’s column.

Maybe not this photo. pic.twitter.com/uiksZdgKLo

— Andrew Villegas (@ReporterAndrew) August 20, 2020

The Detroit Free Press released its diversity numbers.

Its staff (of 92) is 12% Black.

In total, it’s staff is 28% people of color.

Nearly 70% of the people who work for a newspaper reporting on a city that is 80% Black are White.

Let. That. Sink. https://t.co/TIkVr40OU9

— alex. (@Alex_Washington) August 20, 2020

Damn. Good on @DandC for recognizing this and *actually doing something about it* https://t.co/d5qkXKXd3z pic.twitter.com/3THhQWthIm

— Caitlin Dewey Rainwater (@caitlindewey) August 20, 2020

“As a Latina and the daughter of immigrants, it pains me that people of color are so often treated with indifference and contempt by the news industry,” said Cristina Silva, national enterprise editor and co-chair of the USA TODAY Diversity Committee. https://t.co/vKOyl9UxZK

— Jose de Jesus Ortiz (@OrtizKicks) August 20, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/almost-every-gannett-newsroom-agrees-diversity-is-critical-to-telling-stories-its-staff-demographics-show-theres-a-lot-of-work-to-be-done/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/a-new-study-of-five-countries-finds-that-newsroom-leadership-is-very-very-white/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/a-new-study-of-five-countries-finds-that-newsroom-leadership-is-very-very-white/#respond Thu, 16 Jul 2020 17:17:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=184584 In the six weeks since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the resulting Black Lives Matters protests that erupted around the country, newsrooms in the United States have been forced to reckon with their own institutional racism that has stifled and derailed news coverage and careers of people of color for decades.

A new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism finds that the United States isn’t the only country in which newsroom demographics don’t represent the demographics of the country’s citizens.

NEW factsheet on our website: @rasmus_kleis @MeeraSelva1 & @simgandi look at the number of white and non-white top editors across 100 news organisations in . Most of them are white.

Read the factsheet herehttps://t.co/ngYK3CUerO
Key findings in this thread pic.twitter.com/vYpksTOhMo

— Reuters Institute (@risj_oxford) July 16, 2020

The Institute studied 100 news outlets from Brazil, South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States:

In each market, we focused on the top ten offline (TV, print, and radio) and online news brands in terms of weekly usage, as measured in the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 2019). (Our focus on the most widely used offline and online brands means that some important outlets are not covered. For example both the Financial Times in the UK and Vox in the US have women of color as editors-in-chief, but they are not included in the sample.)

The authors looked at percentage of top editors and journalists of color, the percentage of people of color in the country (Germany doesn’t collect or publish data about its population’s racial demographics, though the call to change that practice has been renewed in wake of the George Floyd protests, and so the report’s authors aggregated migrant census data to come up with a figure), and the percentage of online news users using at least one source with a non-white top editor.

The results aren’t great. The report shows that just 18 percent of the 88 top editors (“We coded observations as missing in cases where both online and offline versions of the same brand share a top editor, so the analysis covers a total of 88 individuals across the 100 brands included”) across the 100 news outlets covered are non-white.

In Germany and the U.K., not a single publication studied had a top editor of color. In the United States, two publications did. (We’ve asked Reuters to confirm who those two U.S. editors are — we assume New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet is one, but in light of Lydia Polgreen leaving her HuffPost editor-in-chief position for Gimlet, we weren’t sure who the other person was.)

The problem was most apparent when the Reuters Institute directly compared the country’s non-white population to the country’s percentage of non-white editors.

“It is biggest in percentage points in Brazil, which has a majority non-white population (52%) but only one (5%) non-white top editor in our sample,” the report says. “The gap is very large in both South Africa (91% versus 68%) and the United States (11% versus 40%), in both cases almost 30 percentage points. The gap is numerically smaller in Germany and the UK, but in a way even more glaring given the absence of any non-white top editors in our sample in countries with significant non-white minorities.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, top editors lead the newsroom and determine editorial direction, which stories get the most resources, and how they’re placed in the paper or online. They help decide who gets hired, fired, and promoted. An editor who can’t relate to the way that large portions of the population experience the country has major blindspots, and the power dynamics in the newsroom may make it difficult for other staffers to point them out. “If your newsroom isn’t diverse, you’re failing at journalism,” Swati Sharma, The Atlantic’s managing editor, wrote in a Nieman Lab Prediction in 2017.

Dorothy Byrne, the editor at large of Channel Four, spoke at a Reuters Institute seminar in October 2019 about why diverse newsrooms are better for journalism and for the public. Here’s what she said in context of Brexit coverage:

If your newsroom is dominated by people with a particular mindset and background, you will also literally get the news wrong. That’s what happened with Brexit. Most newsrooms were taken by surprise by the fact that there was a narrow vote in favor of us leaving the EU. Why didn’t journalists see that coming? Well in the UK, far too many of our institutions are in London, and that includes major broadcasters and newspapers. London was pro-Remain so it was easy for journalists living in London to be misled by their interactions with the people around them.

Read the full report here.

In Germany and the UK, both home to millions of people of color, none of the outlets have a non-white top editor. In Brazil, with majority non-white population, one non-white top editor (5%), in the US, two (11%), and in South Africa, a majority (68%) https://t.co/Yhi5wDR761 pic.twitter.com/gWWcBowpug

— Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) July 16, 2020

Relative to their share of the general population, whites are significantly overrepresented among top editors in all five countries, and non-whites significantly underrepresented. https://t.co/AzWSzERCyS

— Katherine Salahi (@KatherineSalahi) July 16, 2020

Disturbing stats show few non-white leaders at the top of major media. https://t.co/sZAkvGYWDB

— juliansher (@juliansher) July 16, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/a-new-study-of-five-countries-finds-that-newsroom-leadership-is-very-very-white/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/two-new-studies-about-media-and-diversity-can-help-newsrooms-through-their-reckoning-with-racism/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/two-new-studies-about-media-and-diversity-can-help-newsrooms-through-their-reckoning-with-racism/#respond Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:21:51 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=184067 Two new studies this week couldn’t be more timely.

Amid a reckoning with institutionalized racism in the news media industry, the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation conducted separate studies that drew similar conclusions: American news consumers don’t feel that the news media represents them and the industry’s lack of diversity is a huge contributor.

“Roughly similar portions of black (58%), Hispanic (55%) and white Americans (61%) say the news media misunderstand them, but they cite markedly different reasons for this misunderstanding,” Pew found. One third of Black Americans, for example, said their personal characteristics were misunderstood. On the other hand, 39 percent of white Americans said their political views were misunderstood. Then, 26 percent of Hispanic Americans felt their personal interests were misunderstood.

The study gets into more specific demographics, too, including political leanings, religious affiliations, and age groups. “Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are far more likely to feel the news media misunderstand them than Democrats and Democratic leaners (73% vs. 47%),” Pew says. “Male U.S. adults are somewhat more likely than female adults to feel this, and those ages 18 to 29 are more likely to say this than those older than them.”

Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation specifically examined newsroom diversity and found that “69% of Americans say that reflecting the diversity of the U.S. population is a ‘critical’ (35%) or ‘very important’ (34%) role for the media. Black (50%), Hispanic (43%) and Asian people (41%) are more likely than white people (30%) to say the media’s role in reflecting diversity is ‘critical.'”

Of the people who want to see newsrooms diversified, they prioritized diversity based on race/ethnicity (35 percent), political views (30 percent), income or social class (18 percent), age (9 percent) and gender (5 percent).

About half of Republicans (51 percent) want to see political diversity increased, while 49 percent of Democrats said racial and ethnic diversity is the most important to them.

As newsrooms across the country look for ways to address diversity issues, both studies (which were conducted before the George Floyd protests beginning in late May) offer at least some insight into how future decisions might be perceived by the public.

NEW RESEARCH: 79% of Americans say news organizations should increase the diversity of their staff — but they disagree on the type of diversity they’d like to see. More new research from @Gallup-Knight: https://t.co/jjwMWSSp3g #trustinnews (THREAD 1/6)

— Knight Foundation (@knightfdn) June 25, 2020

Interesting disparities: White people feel the media misunderstands their politics, for POC it's more about personal attributes: https://t.co/GYVIov7Hq5

— Catherine McGloin (@catmcgloin) June 26, 2020

Race vs politics? "Roughly similar portions of black (58%), Hispanic (55%) and white Americans (61%) say the news media misunderstand them, but they cite markedly different reasons for this misunderstanding."
https://t.co/Zwbc8IO0WF

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) June 26, 2020

"… U.S. adults living in areas with a higher proportion of Hispanic residents were somewhat less likely to feel a connection to local journalists and news organizations …"

*clears throat* I'VE BEEN TELLING Y'ALL THIShttps://t.co/X3jc2ldKei

— Elvia Limón (@elvialimon) June 25, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/two-new-studies-about-media-and-diversity-can-help-newsrooms-through-their-reckoning-with-racism/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/the-los-angeles-times-newsroom-is-roiling-over-race-representation-and-missing-a-golden-opportunity-to-diversify/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/the-los-angeles-times-newsroom-is-roiling-over-race-representation-and-missing-a-golden-opportunity-to-diversify/#respond Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:04:54 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=184019 It’s been a week of reckoning at The Los Angeles Times.

On Monday, the newsroom’s Black Caucus sent an open letter to owner Patrick Soon-Shiong that cited “racist treatment, marginalization and neglect in [the] newsroom over the last three decades.” The next day, current and former Black reporters used the hashtag #BlackatLAT to share their experiences, and the paper’s arts and entertainment staff wrote their own letter — to deputy managing editor Julia Turner — expressing frustration that every open editing position in the past 18 months had been filled by a white person.

Then, on Wednesday, staff gathered for a four-and-a-half-hour town hall meeting over Zoom. Candid coverage of the meeting — and the representation and coverage issues that necessitated the lengthy conversation — appeared in the newspaper’s own pages. (The article follows two detailed pieces on the newsroom’s discontent by NPR’s David Folkenflik, among other coverage.)

One oft-cited frustration at the town hall meeting was that the newspaper, which billionaire Soon-Shiong purchased for $500 million in 2018, squandered a “golden opportunity” to bring on diverse talent. Although a hiring freeze and pay cuts prompted by COVID-19 and its economic impact are currently in effect at the LA Times, the paper “went on an unprecedented hiring spree, bringing on 110 additional journalists” a couple years back, according to the article by Meg James and Daniel Hernandez.

And yet:

Today, The Times newsroom employs 502 journalists, but it is 61% white, even though Los Angeles County’s population is 26% white, according to 2018 census information. Latinos represent 13% of the newsroom in a county where Latinos make up nearly half of the population. The paper’s composition of Asian American journalists mirrors the county’s population at nearly 15%. The paper has just 26 Black journalists — 5.2% of its staff — while nearly 8% of county residents are Black.

Staff writer Esmeralda Bermudez spoke up about the missed opportunity and criticized the hiring practices of top editors, starting with executive editor Norman Pearlstine. “We all saw the river of white people coming into your office,” Bermudez said.

Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa to Chinese immigrant parents, backed Pearlstine (“I want Norm to stay with us as long as he wants”) and told staff that The Los Angeles Times has the most diverse staff of any major newsroom. According to James and Hernandez’s piece, the New York Times newsroom is 68% white, the Washington Post editorial team is 71.2% white and the Wall Street Journal newsroom staff is 79.4% white. (The latest diversity report from The New York Times reported that its news and opinion sections, combined, are 71 percent white.)

Still, editors took turns apologizing to the staff for missteps and failing to fix, as one example, that the newspaper’s largest section, Metro, has just one black reporter.

It’s shameful that I’m the only Black reporter in the largest section of the @latimes.

We demand change now. https://t.co/hsrxWiElIz https://t.co/kKzI78kKBe

— Angel Jennings (@AngelJennings) June 23, 2020

The Los Angeles Times revealed Angel Jennings had repeatedly been denied a pay raise, which Jennings described as painful, given her contributions.

For 18 months, Jennings pleaded in vain with editors for a raise. City Editor Hector Becerra went to bat for her, saying that boosting her compensation was the “the right thing …[and] also the smart thing.” But Pearlstine and other high-level editors declined, saying the paper was in the midst of negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement …

During this time, Jennings’ coverage of the shooting death of rapper Nipsey Hussle attracted huge audiences that don’t normally read the L.A. Times. Her story was the third-most-read on The Times’ website in 2019. Among the stories that had the best engagement — the time that readers spent reading a story — her article was No. 1. (Jennings was given a bonus for her coverage, managers said.)

Some changes are already underway. The Los Angeles Times has announced they will hire a senior editor to oversee recruiting, career development, retention efforts as well as the MetPro fellowship designed to boost the newsroom’s diversity. (This position was one of the demands made by the Black Caucus.) A newly convened diversity committee and unconscious bias training for staffers were also announced.

The paper, which promised to add additional Black reporters including alongside Jennings in the Metro section, will publish an annual diversity report to track its progress toward a more representative newsroom.

According to the complaint, LA Times executives relied on Metpro and similar initiatives “as a source of cheap labor to depress the salaries of women and minority journalists” not just initially, but throughout their careers at the newspaper. https://t.co/Ukyn35UKTX

— Sarah Parvini (سارا) (@sarahparvini) June 25, 2020

It’s ridiculous that only 26 of 500 @latimes journalists are Black.

Black Lives Matter. Black Careers Matter. Hire us. Promote us. Respect us. #BlackatLAT

— Kurtis Lee (@kurtisalee) June 23, 2020

Our @latimes town hall on racism, diversity and inclusiveness just lasted 4.5 hrs. So proud of every colleague for speaking up. This generation of journalists now fighting for our newsroom and for L.A. has pushed this conversation farther than anyone has in decades.

— Esmeralda Bermudez (@BermudezWrites) June 24, 2020

If @latimes management wants to eliminate the systemic racism at this paper, they must meet the demands of the Black Caucus AND hold the people in their ranks accountable. #BlackatLAT

— erin b. logan (@erinblogan) June 24, 2020

Great! Some questions:

1. How much does this pay?
2. Is that salary in line with what the other senior editors make?
3. What changes will be made to current culture/internal processes prior to this person’s arrival to ensure their success? https://t.co/y7pqCDz0KO

— Hanaa’ Tameez (@HanaaTameez) June 24, 2020

For the record: Here is that first Metpro editing class, 1989-90, and my subsequent career in the form of my business cards.

Key fact: I was the first graduate of Metpro to be promoted to the level of department head at @latimes. We are still waiting for the second. 10/10 pic.twitter.com/WekvMDIS6B

— Henry Fuhrmann (@hfuhrmann) June 18, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/the-los-angeles-times-newsroom-is-roiling-over-race-representation-and-missing-a-golden-opportunity-to-diversify/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/five-simple-steps-to-making-your-newsroom-and-coverage-more-representative/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/five-simple-steps-to-making-your-newsroom-and-coverage-more-representative/#respond Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:25:14 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=183678 After reading accounts of racism in newsrooms across the country, you might be wondering what you can do to support efforts led by journalists of color to reduce bias and inequality in newsrooms. There are a number of voices calling for systemic changes — say, hiring practices that reflect the diversity of a publication’s audience and pay equality — that take collaboration and time. But if you’re looking for something to do now, a group at The Philadelphia Inquirer has some ideas.

Last week, staff at The Philadelphia Inquirer protested the headline “Buildings matter, too” as the latest in a long string of incidents they said has undermined their ability to build trust with readers and produce journalism that represents and serves the community. The journalists’ response to the headline, which included an open letter and a “sickout” led by journalists of color, prompted the Inquirer’s top editor to resign and extracted an apology and promise from leadership to do better.

Privately, the journalists who authored the letter to The Philadelphia Inquirer have offered a list of sweeping changes to the paper’s top brass. After hearing from a number of their colleagues — who signed a letter of solidarity, in addition to offering vacation days to those calling out sick — the group decided to make a second list of individual actions for their Inquirer colleagues. This list was made public, available to any journalist interested in combating racial biases that can narrow and weaken their coverage.

The list’s authors acknowledged the support from their Inquirer colleagues, and wrote “knowing you’re willing to put in the work alongside us gives us hope.”

To that end, many of you have been asking us how you can best support our combined efforts. When it comes to the systemic change we need to build a better newsroom and company, stay tuned — we will need your help soon.

In the meantime, there are things we can do right now to make a difference as individuals.

Here are five actions we can all take today to unlearn old habits and biases that have been a part of our profession for too long. We don’t expect you to do all of them immediately, but these are first steps that many of us have found useful. We have a duty to continue working on ourselves, and hope you will do the same.

Jonathan Lai, a data and democracy reporter at the Inquirer, tweeted the highlights.

As journalists of color continue to build a more representative and equitable Philadelphia Inquirer, our colleagues have asked how they can help.

Thank you.

Our latest letter, with five steps we can all take right now to make a difference as individuals: https://t.co/TL0hQPDRJm pic.twitter.com/pJAIgByFM0

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

1. Audit your news and social media sources.

How diverse is your reading list? Whom do you follow and RT? Identify new sources and make more of a conscious effort to amplify other voices.

Before retweeting a link, search the URL on Twitter and see who else has shared it.

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

2. Encourage organizers to construct diverse panels.

When solicited to attend a panel, ask if other panelists are people of color or women. Ideally commit only if half the panelists are women and people of color.

Prepare a list; organizers will inevitably ask for suggestions.

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

3. Audit your own sources over the last six months.

How many of your sources are Black? Other POC? Women? Identify three new experts and reach out to them now so you have them available on deadline.

Try colleges’ faculty pages. Also, many industries have groups for POCs.

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

4. Learn more about the racial history of your beats.

Every beat has its history, and we should be well-versed in it. Allow that context to inform our work.

Start with a Google or Google Scholar search for “race [beat topic]” or “racism [beat topic]” and see what’s out there.

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

5. Read more about race and journalism.

Outside of our beats, there is more we can all do to learn about race in America and in journalism. Consider one of the books, articles, documentaries, or podcasts on our list as a starting point.

https://t.co/TL0hQPDRJm pic.twitter.com/7VGK4XM0JC

— Jonathan Lai 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) June 11, 2020

 

You can read the full letter here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/five-simple-steps-to-making-your-newsroom-and-coverage-more-representative/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/a-window-into-one-newsrooms-diversity-opens-but-an-industry-wide-door-shuts-for-now/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/a-window-into-one-newsrooms-diversity-opens-but-an-industry-wide-door-shuts-for-now/#respond Tue, 26 May 2020 17:17:23 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=183143 The New York Times’ annual diversity report, released late last week, showed the staff becoming increasingly diverse across gender, race, and ethnicity, but with a large gap in representation at the leadership level left to close.

At the end of 2019, women were 51 percent of the staff and held 49 percent of leadership positions. Driven by a diverse class of new hires, people of color represented 32 percent of staff and 21 percent of the Times leadership.

The Times’ report noted that “pay equity is an important part of a diverse and inclusive workplace, and we conduct pay reviews every two years to ensure fairness.” It said its 2019 analysis “found no evidence of pay discrimination” but didn’t elaborate or include results.

credit where it's due: the @nytimes has published a report looking at diversity in its own org.

But they mention that their "analysis found no evidence of pay discrimination" without publishing the results. Why publish other results and not this? https://t.co/8MvTSfGTxz

— Steven Rich (@dataeditor) May 21, 2020

The Times said it sees supporting its distributed workforce as part of its inclusive efforts. “We need to do more to build an intentional remote and distributed work culture. The coronavirus pandemic has made this even more urgent.”

The report also highlighted editorial coverage like The 1619 Project (for which Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month) and an episode of The Daily about racism against Asian Americans as well as “candid explorations” of past failures covering AIDS and an obituary section that routinely overlooked all but white men.

“The diversity of our staff makes our report deeper and richer, and better able to address the needs and experiences of our growing, global audience,” the report concludes. “Though we’ve made progress, we know there’s always more to do. We will continue this work, which strengthens our journalism, our business and our culture.” You can read the full report online.

Very few newsrooms report diversity numbers (here’s NPR’s report from late last year; here’s ProPublica’s report from this spring; BuzzFeed last issued a report in March 2019).

Since we're getting closer to awards season, let's imagine how many more news orgs would publish diversity reports if they were a requirement for winning prestigious industry prizes https://t.co/BvJgvp1w17

— Ellis Simani (@emsimani) November 20, 2019

The Times’ report follows a dispiriting announcement from the American Society of News Editors that the group would be, at least, pausing its annual diversity census. Poynter reported on March 6 that the survey was “being scrapped,” a decision that seemed to elicit little reaction until last week when Twitter picked it up:

ASNE's diversity survey is being scrapped because outlets don't want to admit they are failing to hire and retain journalists of color. One of my former job's values was "radical inclusivity." I asked for us to participate. My boss' boss left me on read.https://t.co/bLG68D4L42

— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) May 19, 2020

Really bad news that the ASNE diversity survey is being discontinued. Hope some industry player will pick this up. Less measurement will inevitably lead to less progress. https://t.co/6IyRBP8axv

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) May 19, 2020

ASNE's decision to discontinue its annual newsroom diversity survey is extremely disappointing, but not at all surprising.

Newsrooms have been aggressively reluctant about collecting and publishing these stats.https://t.co/5L0oxdw0KR

— Jie Jenny Zou (@jiejennyzou) May 19, 2020

At that point, organizers said that the survey is actually being redesigned and rethought, not completely abandoned.

Amid concerns that a new group formed by merger of American Society of News Editors and Associated Press Media Editors would end ASNE's diversity survey of newspapers, organizers say the study instead will change. Hmm. https://t.co/5TGmdNZqVM

— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) May 19, 2020

Meredith Clark, the researcher who’s run the survey for the past two years, said ASNE is “pausing on data collection this year to fully revise our approach,” and that the survey in its existing form didn’t work.

Don't panic: The @newsleaders annual diversity survey isn't ending. We are pausing on data collection this year to fully revise our approach. 1/? @aaja @NABJ @NAHJ @najournalists @nlgja @spj_tweets @ONA @womenjournos #mediadiversity

— #TenureTrackHustle (@meredithdclark) May 19, 2020

Proposed changes to the newsroom diversity survey include:

1. Conducting a demographic census of newsroom leadership for 2020 while other components are being developed. 7/? @aaja @NABJ @NAHJ @najournalists @nlgja@spj_tweets @ONA @womenjournos #mediadiversity

— #TenureTrackHustle (@meredithdclark) May 19, 2020

3. Engaging foundations, affinity organizations (like those listed here) and other power brokers to require orgs to report their demographics in order to qualify for funding, prizes, etc. 9/? @aaja @NABJ @NAHJ @najournalists @nlgja@spj_tweets @ONA @womenjournos #mediadiversity

— #TenureTrackHustle (@meredithdclark) May 19, 2020

The most recent edition was published was published in 2018 in partnership with Google. It’s one of the association’s most public-facing programs and last year’s report is still featured prominently on the organization’s homepage. Three years ago, ASNE promised to overhaul the survey “into a world-class resource to support newsroom diversity efforts” with the help of a $300,000 Democracy Fund grant. ASNE’s executive director at the time, Teri Hayt, told Laura Hazard Owen that ASNE was refocusing on diversity, not shrinking newsroom numbers. “We don’t want this to be a headline about ‘X number of jobs were lost this year in journalism.’ We kinda know that, unfortunately. We want to focus on the diversity in the news organizations, and hopefully offer some good ideas or best practices.”

Bottom line: If this element of diversity, equity and inclusion work is to survive in these perilous times, it is going to require the participation of MANY journalism stakeholders. 13/? @aaja @NABJ @NAHJ @najournalists @nlgja @spj_tweets @ONA @womenjournos
#mediadiversity

— #TenureTrackHustle (@meredithdclark) May 19, 2020

The ASNE report isn’t the only organization to track newsroom diversity. Jesse Holcomb noted that Pew Research Center, Radio Television Digital News Association, and the Institute for Nonprofit News have all made efforts to collect — at least — segments of the news industry.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/a-window-into-one-newsrooms-diversity-opens-but-an-industry-wide-door-shuts-for-now/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/#respond Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:13:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175879 “We pass on information person-to-person in a fashion that sometimes can feel like an elaborate game of telephone,” Lam Thuy Vo, Disha Raychaudhuri, and Moiz Syed write in the introduction to their Journalists of Color Resource Guide, which was released this week by the News Integrity Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. They built the guide based on discussion, research, and more than 260 survey responses.

The 2019 ASNE Newsroom Diversity Survey, released last month, found that journalists of color made up 21.9 percent of the salaried workforce in U.S. newsrooms…that bothered to respond to the survey (428 responded out of 1,883 that were asked). Because of the low response rate, ASNE cautions that “these figures cannot be generalized to interpret the landscape of the U.S. journalism industry as a whole because the survey relies on information collected from a convenience sample of organizations that volunteer to participate”; it’s safe to assume, however, that the total percentage of journalists of color working in U.S. newsrooms is lower because news outlets with particularly abysmal stats may just not respond.

“We repeatedly observed the same needs in our various circles of journalists of color,” Vo (a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News), Raychaudhuri (data and investigations reporter at NJ Advance Media), and Syed (news apps developer at ProPublica) write. One of the goals of this guide is to offer something that’s more efficient and widely available than the “kind of invisible labor done in the background that a lot of underrepresented groups in newsrooms do to improve both their newsrooms and the careers of their peers.”

The guide, which consists of lots of links to outside sources, includes sections on career growth, salary and benefits, accountability, and training. The section on salary, for instance, points to a spreadsheet on salary data from the Journalists of Color Slack and information on negotiating salary and benefits.

But most importantly, thanks to all the journalists of color and allies who quietly do the work — those who write resources like these, who pass them along, who support their peers on a day-to-day. We see you and thank you. https://t.co/7rkINazGGi

— Lam Thuy Vo (@lamthuyvo) October 14, 2019

And of course this project and efforts like these are all just stop-gaps to the wider problem with the lack of diversity in newsrooms around the country.

The real solutions will come from folks who are in positions of power within our industry and usually don't look like us.

— Moiz Syed (@MoizSyed) October 14, 2019

We acknowledge and applaud the invisible, unpaid labor many of you put in at your workplaces and hope this helps you address at least some of those issues. If you have concerns/questions about anything on the resource guide, please reach out to me/@lamthuyvo/@MoizSyed. (3/n)

— Disha Raychaudhuri (@Disha_RC) October 14, 2019

This is honestly an amazing resource for journalists of color. Congratulations to @Disha_RC, @lamthuyvo and @MoizSyed for handling this project with such care.

Make sure to amplify it! https://t.co/1e7RBrCKGT

— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) October 14, 2019

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/what-does-it-take-to-change-a-newsrooms-racial-narrative-minnesota-public-radio-built-a-coalition-to-try/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/what-does-it-take-to-change-a-newsrooms-racial-narrative-minnesota-public-radio-built-a-coalition-to-try/#respond Mon, 23 Sep 2019 16:33:15 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175165 The journalism industry has plenty of problems to work through these days, but one of the most-cited (and least-widely-acted upon) issues is diversity. Barely one in five newsroom journalists are people of color, in a country of 24 percent people of color, according to the 41st annual survey of legacy newspapers (and now online-only outlets, too).

Minnesota Public Radio, where 15 percent of employees are people of color, did its own survey earlier this year — of 250 media professionals in its state — using two research firms. Almost a third of respondents said the Minnesota media portrays indigenous people and people of color poorly, and that number jumped to 49 percent when surveying non-white media professionals. Ninety-five percent said white people are generally presented fairly or positively in the media, and two-thirds said black people are not.

The survey was conducted as part of a larger initiative to help local media reconsider harmful racial narratives (reporting on crime or certain groups of people in un-nuanced ways, for example) coordinated by the station and five other local partners, funded by the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundations. (Community foundations are stepping up their support for journalism, a recent Media Impact Funders report found, with five percent of journalism philanthropy since 2009 coming from 114 community foundations.) The survey came in the midst of a year-long listening process to develop training via a two-day conference for Minnesota journalists off the foundation’s grant.

“Some might ask: Why MPR News? Doesn’t it have issues related to race inside its own newsroom?” news and programming executive director Nancy Cassutt wrote in a post announcing the initiative. “Yes. When the coalition was awarded the grant, my newsroom was experiencing some turnover in staffing. Churn is normal, but it was impossible to ignore that a disproportionate number of the departures involved journalists of color. Seven left within the course of about a year.”

What is up with the exit of POC reporters from @MPRnews? MPR has reported on "why employers struggle to keep employees of color". Wondering if @MPR has done some internal review as well? https://t.co/JDXQQNm5CC

— saengmany ratsabout (@Saengmany) July 25, 2018

“We’re not perfect. I acknowledge it’s not intended, but some of our work has caused harm in communities of color because it’s not the complete story or there’s a voice missing or we just didn’t get it right,” said Ka Vang, MPR’s director of impact and community engagement and one of the leaders of the organization’s initiative. “When I was given the opportunity [with this grant to address it], the approach was a coalition.”

In a couple of days, Vang had pulled together the coalition:

1. radio station KMOJ, focused on communities of color in Minneapolis;
2. Minnesota Humanities Center, a St. Paul-based nonprofit which helped provide the curriculum for the training;
3. Pillsbury United Communities, a Minneapolis nonprofit that includes a newspaper and low-power FM radio station for underrepresented communities;
4. ThreeSixty Journalism, part of the University of St. Thomas that trains high school journalists;
5. Hamline University, the conference’s host.

“We invited several nonprofit news organizations to apply for a grant to help tackle problematic racial narratives in media,” said Nadege Souvenir, the foundation’s vice president of operations and learning. “MPR’s proposal was compelling because of their involvement of community partners in forming the work and their desire to be informed by the communities most impacted by existing problematic narratives.”

In July 2018, the foundation awarded the team the $250,000 (which later became $332,000) grant with the aim of “[changing] problematic racial narratives and their representation in local news media by helping news professionals uncover their own biases and assumptions, and amplifying community solutions to narrative change.” That set in motion the survey and the year of listening and reflecting on each newsroom’s own harmful habits, culminating in the March conference and commitments from the 275 participants going forward.

Impressed by this self-examination from @MPR #collaborativej pic.twitter.com/bEcNitC9jI

— Ariel Zirulnick (@azirulnick) May 17, 2019

Vang and her co-planners wanted to answer “this really crucial question: Who is missing at the table and who do we want to hear from?”

This was where KMOJ general manager Freddie Bell, among others, came in. A historically black urban radio station founded in 1976, KMOJ is an “organization with its legacy that talks directly to the community that in many cases is directly impacted by the narratives presented,” Bell told me. “The community wins or loses just by the narrative itself.”

He, Vang, and others from the coalition organized 18 community listening sessions across Minnesota, from historical mining towns to tribal nations, to talk about how journalism had affected their lives. They also coordinated a group of white journalists to talk about the racial narratives they were participating in. That helped them develop the programming for the March conference itself.

The conference included sessions from “The Power of Story” (“How do stories and narratives shape the way we know ourselves and the way we perceive others? And what effect does it have on the health of civic life when some stories get elided while others get privileged?”) to “Amplifying Community Solutions for Change” (“gathers participants in circle to build skills around deep listening as they eavesdrop on a diverse and intergenerational group of individuals discussing what change can — and should — look like.”). One particularly poignant moment for Cassutt and Laura Yuen, MPR’s editor for new audiences supervising reporters reporting on race, class, and communities, was when a woman described the pain of looking for information about her brother’s violent death and finding articles that quoted the police in describing his passing as gang-related, which she said was inaccurate. “She was so sad that that was how they portrayed him to be,” Yuen said. “One of our editors stood up at the conference and said ‘I’m going to commit to not just using it when a cop says it was gang-related — not to take that at face value and do more research before labeling it that way,'” Cassutt said.

At the same time, MPR’s newsroom was undergoing its own introspection. Before the conference, Yuen led newsroom discussions — one focusing on journalists of color, one on white journalists — on its own racial narrative. “If MPR was going to be part of it, we as a newsroom also needed to initiate these conversations about how well we are portraying indigenous people and people of color,” she said (no, this wasn’t in her job description). “I held brown bag conversations to carve a space to examine ourselves coming to the conference from a standpoint of humility.”

And after the aforementioned seven journalists of color departed, staff writer Mukhtar Ibrahim also left for the Star Tribune and then came back — sort of — to launch his own publication focused on reporting to and for the state’s immigrant population. (We wrote about his effort, which launched last month, here.) MPR is incubating Sahan Journal as it grows, which executive director Cassutt pointed to as one way MPR is continuing its commitment. “I think of him as growing the next MPR News audience because the demographics in the state are changing so quickly and he is serving that audience,” she said. MPR is also tracking the diversity of the people it quotes and puts on air, up 13 percent in the last quarter: “It’s not as if I’m setting targets, but creating a habit.”

The habit is the hard part. Six months in, what is sticking? “I know we’re on the right track, but we need a conductor to keep us on the rails,” KMOJ’s Bell said. “One conference is not going to do it. We need more of these refresher courses where we come together and see how we do and conduct a litmus test to understand exactly where we are and how we’ve improved.”

It sounds a bit like Table Stakes, the group effort funded by the Knight Foundation and Lenfest Institute to bring metro legacy newspapers together to unpack their financial strategies. Maybe this effort to bring together newsrooms to unpack their racial narratives is its own version of Table Stakes, too — or should be.

Image of Freddie Bell and Laura Yuen at a planning meeting courtesy of MPR.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/what-does-it-take-to-change-a-newsrooms-racial-narrative-minnesota-public-radio-built-a-coalition-to-try/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/what-will-the-correspondent-publish-in-english-a-look-at-the-dutch-site-offers-some-clues/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/what-will-the-correspondent-publish-in-english-a-look-at-the-dutch-site-offers-some-clues/#respond Thu, 02 May 2019 18:46:14 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=170538 Last summer, The Correspondent began signing up ambassadors for its crowdfunding campaign, which aimed to raise $2.5 million in just a month’s time. These ambassadors would be tasked with promoting the expansion of Dutch publication De Correspondent into the U.S. and English and explaining the reasons to support it.

One of the people recruiting ambassadors was The Correspondent’s first U.S. employee, Zainab Shah, and one of the people she reached out to was Mariam Durrani, an anthropologist who teaches at Hamilton College and whose research focuses on Muslim youth.

Durrani tentatively agreed. One of the topics she studies is the growth of Islamophobia, something certain news organizations have played a role in. “I’m interested in news media that tries to challenge some of the status quo discourse,” she told me. But before she would commit fully, she said, she wanted more information about what The Correspondent would actually be, beyond a set of appealing principles.

“I was still waiting to hear more substantively about what it was going to do in the U.S.,” she said. “They have no record in the U.S. And as the campaign developed, I thought at some point there would be a teaser, a preview: ‘Here are some of the kinds of stories we’ve been talking to people about.'”

But that substance never came. For Durrani, the organization wasn’t being transparent enough about what it would publish in the U.S. She decided she didn’t have enough information to be a U.S. ambassador, and declined.

After spending all those hours reading De Correspondent, I grew fond of it. Since the correspondents’ faces are featured at the top of every post, they became familiar over time, even though I was reading them only in translation. The design is nice. The fact that De Correspondent is both ad-free and for-profit is genuinely interesting. And in the instances where reporters reached out directly to readers (more on that below), I saw some promising examples of how that relationship can bear fruit. Also, while I didn’t read every comment closely, De Correspondent has a genuinely active and seemingly troll-free comment section.

What I didn’t see, though, was anything revolutionary. Many of the things that I liked about De Correspondent (efforts at reader engagement, reporters’ transparency about how they work, a focus on membership) can also be found in various forms across many American news sites we’ve written about.

And some of the things I dislike about American news coverage are true of De Correspondent, too.

Diversity is severely lacking, as has been pointed out in the Dutch press (more on that below): In the six-month period I looked at, 98 percent of the articles were written by white people. (About 19 percent of the Netherlands is of non-European ethnic origin.)

Nearly twice as many stories were written by men than by women, and the coverage areas tended to fall along stereotypical gender lines as well. Male columnists tackled politics, EU politics, economics, sports, and war — all topics quite prominent on the site — while women covered animals, nature, and family (and those pieces were in shorter supply).

It was disappointing to realize — to actually see in the numbers — that while The Correspondent raised $2.6 million in part by stressing diversity and inclusivity, tapping ambassadors like DeRay Mckesson and Baratunde Thurston, the Dutch site is not a model of that diversity.

I also spoke to several Dutch women of color who asked to remain on background for fear of retribution (the media in The Netherlands is more tight-knit, insular, and male than it is in the U.S., they said, and speaking out previously had brought out Twitter harassment in force) but what I heard repeatedly was that De Correspondent’s problems with diversity had been there since its launch in 2013, that the issue had been raised over the years, that the four white male founders had said in various public forums that they’d do better, and that they hadn’t, really.

I saw that a lot of people are disappointed with the new Correspondent apology and I just wanted to say: any media analyst from outside The Netherlands trying to understand what is going on should probably look at the way Dutch culture operates vis a vis white powerful men

— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) May 1, 2019

I also asked about diversity issues in my emailed questions to Wijnberg and Pfauth last week. Pfauth’s reply: “Our diversity strategy hasn’t changed: we seek global diversity in our team. We want to collaborate with correspondents and members from all over the world — including the U.S. — to cover the greatest challenges of our time.”

This is what I found. You can see my spreadsheet here.

I grouped each of the 317 articles into one of seven categories, using my best judgment. Those categories are:

• features — “big” stories or profiles, often those touted as De Correspondent’s “story of the day,” usually including original interviews and other reporting, generally demarcated with a lot of art or illustrations — though art is prominent across De Correspondent’s site
• analysis, including explainers, and generally not including original interviews — the exception was Michiel de Hoog’s lively soccer reporting, which almost always included outside interviews
• columns, including op-eds, usually about politics, of which there were many; many of the columns are sent to readers as email newsletters
• essays, often on personal topics
• reviews, of movies or books
• book excerpts taken from the books that De Correspondent publishes
• miscellaneous, a catchall that includes reporters’ calls for help or updates on what they are working on, as well as short posts that didn’t fit into any other category

As you can see, features are the largest single segment, and they’re substantial stories, averaging about 2,800 words. But columns and analysis together, each relatively light on original reporting, make up a larger share.

Here’s the breakdown of the type of articles published:

Gender diversity: Men had roughly twice as many bylines as women; just 31 percent of all articles were written solely by women. If you count bylines rather than articles — because some articles have more than one byline — 34 percent of bylines were from women.

That second byline-counting method is the one used by the Women’s Media Center in its annual look at byline diversity. If De Correspondent had been one of the news organizations this year’s report analyzed, it would have finished 8th out of 9 in women’s representation: behind HuffPost, MSNBC, Vox, CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. (It edges out The New York Times by 1 percentage point.)

Men got 55 percent of the bylines on features and 72 percent on columns. Columns were generally about Dutch or EU politics.

Ethnic and racial diversity: 98 percent of De Correspondent’s articles over the past six months were written by white people. A total of five stories were either written solely by a person of color or included a person of color in the byline. Of those five, two were written by the same reporter, two were written by black freelance journalists, and one had a joint byline between a white reporter and a black freelancer. (I should note it’s possible I’m surmising someone’s race incorrectly; this obviously isn’t foolproof, and doesn’t take ethnicity into account.)

The extreme whiteness of De Correspondent’s output is a striking contrast to the way it marketed The Correspondent in the United States. Its launch video puts Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist, front and center in the thumbnail. The first person on screen is How to Be Black author Baratunde Thurston (who has since apologized to anyone who felt “duped or disappointed” by The Correspondent’s decision to have no U.S. newsroom). After cofounder Wijnberg appears next, we see Zainab Shah (who has since described that decision as “a betrayal…we had raised funds on false pretense”).

In all, people of color are on screen for 60 percent of the video’s first 45 seconds, with Mckesson, Thurston, and Shah all talking about being underrepresented in media alongside b-roll of African Americans walking outside a South Carolina barbershop and dribbling a basketball outside a Chicago corner store.

“The stories I grew up with about people who looked like me made me feel bad about being me. That story, of all that negativity, is infectious.” “You’re like: I’m not here.” “Where am I? How come I can’t see myself?”

On The Correspondent’s about page, a grid of supporters and ambassadors is half white, half people of color.

so my first question to you is how diverse will the staff be? are native black americans involved in this project at all?

— Daryl Seaton (@redsroom3) November 26, 2018

Thanks for the q, Daryl! We're deeply committed to diversity. It's one of the reasons 'being as inclusive as possible' is a founding principle. @zainabshah is our first US hire and we'll continue to bring in sharp, diverse minds once we reach our $2.5M funding goal.

— The Correspondent (@The_Corres) November 26, 2018

thanks for the response. how do you define diversity exactly?
good luck with your funding goal.

— Daryl Seaton (@redsroom3) November 26, 2018

Hi again, Daryl. Diversity as defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and worldview.

— The Correspondent (@The_Corres) November 26, 2018

Criticism about diversity, racial and otherwise, is also not new for De Correspondent.

That 2013 piece we ran pre-launch noted that “one prevalent point of critique was that Wijnberg’s correspondents were an elitist club of celebrity journalists.” In 2014, in a piece marking the site’s one-year anniversary, editor Karel Smouter acknowledged (in Dutch) criticism that “we have been too white” and said De Correspondent was committed to seeking new voices “outside our comfort zones” and “outside our own ‘circles.'”

On the day the campaign for The Correspondent launched in November, Flavia Dzodan, a feminist and writer based in Amsterdam, tweeted about the gap between its rhetoric and hiring practices when it comes to diversity.

I love that The Correspondent is trying to build credibility in the US by trying to attract PoC but someone should ask them how they treat PoC in The Netherlands: how many they employ & what their writers think of "identity politics" (hint: that they use such naming says enough)

— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) November 14, 2018

and now they are using all these US big names to crowdfund 2.5 million dollars in the US. Someone should ask how many Black people they have in the payroll in The Netherlands AND how many people who actually have similar ideas to DeRay.

— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) November 14, 2018

In the six months of articles I looked at, I saw at least one decrying the “identity politics” that Dzodan describes. From that article: “The strange thing is that many writers can get angry about side issues. Such as identity politics…As soon as you hear the word ‘diversity,’ alarm bells must always ring. Nine out of ten times diversity is interpreted very narrowly.”

In a Medium post in response to Dzodan (though it didn’t mention her specifically), Wijnberg said the company needs to do better and noted, “We have also hired staff of color in non-editorial (management) positions and improved the gender balance in key leadership positions. De Correspondent’s two editors-in-chief and our publisher are women.”

Wijnberg to Leendert van der Valk, a reporter from De Groene Amsterdammer who was with The Correspondent team at the time and is now writing a book on De Correspondent: “You never have enough diversity. That is difficult in this discussion, which statistics would critics be satisfied with?”

We very much agree with the need for more diversity, Flavia. We see our international expansion as part of our approach to making that happen. And we have made strides in NL as well thanks to criticisms like this. I wrote more on our efforts here: https://t.co/LUqRgXUT2R

— Rob Wijnberg (@robwijnberg) November 26, 2018

Beyond diversity issues, two elements I was looking for most in De Correspondent were to what extent they engaged readers in the reporting process and to what extent their stories were specifically about The Netherlands. (In the debate over what The Correspondent was promised to be, one element is to what extent should we think of the sibling sites as being defined by nations — a Netherlands site and a United States site — or by language — a Dutch-language site and an English-language site.)

On the first point, only 12 percent of the articles I read either explicitly solicited or specifically mentioned some sort of reader contribution or participation. I tried to be generous when categorizing this and included general calls for comment. When a reporter asked readers if they knew of second-hand clothing stores, for instance, or included a phrase like “I prefer to ask these questions in conversation with you,” I counted it.

In a few cases, reporters involved readers quite directly. This was highly reporter-dependent: Thalia Verkade, a reporter who covers mobility and city life, included reader feedback or participation in almost all of her stories in a series on traffic safety in The Netherlands. Smouter brought readers together online to debate tourism, then wrote about the experience and what he learned. But the vast majority of De Correspondent’s stories don’t seem to involve reader engagement in any particular way beyond the norm.

De Correspondent does have very active comments sections, with many posts receiving hundreds of comments. It has a “conversations editor” whose job is to interact with readers and help incorporate their feedback and expertise.

On national focus, 43 percent of the articles I looked at were clearly Netherlands-specific, focusing on topics like Dutch politics, Dutch soccer teams, and the Dutch provinces. One ongoing series focuses on people who live permanently at Dutch holiday parks, which are sort of like campsites or trailer parks; it’s an impressive series with a lot of original reporting and photography.

Another 17 percent of the articles focused on the European Union (Brexit, Europe-specific migration, and so on).

The remaining articles I looked at were thematic and not strictly tied to one region. I liked De Correspondent’s ongoing focus on climate change and environmental harms caused by the clothing industry, and the coverage around themes like aging. But the heart of the site — the place I repeatedly saw journalism that was memorable and creative, even after being put through the ringer of Google Translate — was coverage of The Netherlands.

One of De Correspondent’s founding principles is that reporters shouldn’t be objective. Not only is that not possible, it’s not desirable. Wijnberg wrote last year:

Journalism is moral through and through, and it’s supposed to be. It’s about what we as human beings, as citizens, as a society consider important, valuable, and relevant — or should consider as such. All good journalism, then, begins and ends with a set of deeply held ideas and beliefs —  beliefs about good and evil, about what is just and unjust, about what is relevant and trivial, and about what is true and false.

If you order journalists to check their moral judgments at the door, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll have no clue what to report on and go home without a story, or they’ll figure it out in the only other way possible: by adhering to a silent consensus of what the news should be, determined by others who set the news agenda.

I happen to agree with De Correspondent on this. Does my analysis of De Correspondent include a spreadsheet? Sure, but, as we should all know by now, that isn’t a guarantee that it’s scientific or unbaiased. My take on the site, even my collection of data, is doubtless shaped by my own worldview, which actually matches well with De Correspondent’s stated founding principles: I believe that newsrooms need to be diverse and that, rather than adhering to outdated “objectivity” standards, reporters should state exactly where they are coming from — and then be clear when they change their minds.

So let me do that now. I went into reporting on De Correspondent without a pre-existing opinion on the site; like most journalists in America, I had no idea what kind of content it ran, and had only a vague notion that we should overall be supportive of it. When I interviewed Rob Wijnberg and he told me this wasn’t a story, it made me want to keep going. Through my reporting, I came to believe that the Dutch women who have been telling us for years that De Correspondent isn’t what it seems are right.

Photo of a De Correspondent tote bag (“Read More”) by Momkai Studios used under a Creative Commons license.

1. “Start a newsroom in the US.”

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