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.

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.

“Journalism isn’t typically a matter of life and death, but it’s as much a listening profession as medicine. In telling stories, we care for our communities, just as doctors help ensure the health of our bodies. Can journalists use similar techniques to provide more representative coverage of communities that are unlike them?”

That’s the mindset P. Kim Bui uses to open her report on empathy strategies in newsrooms for the American Press Institute, published Thursday.

Every conference, every meeting I go to, this is the question on journalists' minds – how do they reach communities they know they're not covering well, and how do they do it with care? Glad to see this study – API is doing great work on listening, empathy, & change in newsrooms. https://t.co/RJjyHz1sh4

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) April 26, 2018

Empathy has been a recurring need for journalists, from connecting with your sources in person to developing virtual reality material that encourages users to take action. As trust in media teeters, building positive relationships with people who interact with the media doesn’t hurt, either.

“You’re not the first one [from the media] to come,” said Keith Woods, vice president for newsroom training and diversity at NPR. “And the last one that came, came with nothing. And the one before that.”

He described the art of empathy for the report as “understanding the perspectives of the people in that community and letting them tell their own stories.”

Here’s how Bui identifies the three types of empathy:

Cognitive: This is the ability to see the world through another person’s perspective.

A reporter can employ cognitive empathy to approach an underserved community, using techniques that help him understand people with opposing views and from different backgrounds.

Behavioral: This is the verbal and nonverbal communication that indicates someone understands another person or her perspective.

Reporters can also practice behavioral empathy by using verbal and nonverbal signals to show they’re working to understand another person’s feelings and ideas. These signals can be simple, like putting your pen down to let someone cry or looking into his eyes as he speaks.

Affective: This involves physically and emotionally experiencing another person’s emotions.

The third kind of empathy, affective empathy, makes many journalists uncomfortable. They believe sharing a source’s emotions is a sign they’ve gotten too close and jeopardized their impartiality.

Bui also compiled an exhaustive list of recommendations for reporters, photojournalists, videographers, editors, managers, and news directors for incorporating more empathy into their work, with specific examples and case studies from editors and journalists throughout the report.
The full report is here.

— Jonathan Stray, longtime Nieman Lab contributor and project lead for the Overview Project, an open-source document archive analysis system for investigative journalists, a project of the Associated Press and the Knight Foundation.

— Meredith Artley, managing editor and vice president of CNN Digital. Before coming to CNN, Artley was executive editor of LATimes.com and editor and director of IHT.com. She’s on the boards of the Online News Association and the Global Editors Network.

— John Davidow, executive editor for digital at WBUR in Boston. He is also the recipient of a 2010 Knight News Challenge award for WBUR’s OpenCourt.us, an effort to open up courtroom proceedings to the wider public.

Jonathan Stray

Nate Silver’s successful election predictions exposed an awkward fact: Journalism hasn’t quite come to grips with certain important ways of finding truth — such as statistics.

There were enormous advances in truth-finding techniques in the 20th century — the controlled experiment, modern sociology, Bayesian statistics, the experimental demonstration of cognitive biases. Journalists typically aren’t taught these techniques, especially the quantitative ones.

As both information and misinformation become far more widely available, journalists are being called to “move up the food chain” and pass judgment on what is truth. The fact-checking movement demonstrates this. But without the right training, there will be certain topics where journalists won’t be any better at knowing what is true than anyone else. Quotes from an expert will no longer cut it — not least because the expert is often speaking publicly anyway.

What Silver did was make it obvious that there was a better way of knowing than the pundits.

These tools for knowing probably won’t apply to most stories, but they will apply to some. When there is a need for certain kinds of understanding, I want journalists to know of the existence and the uses of these remarkable ways of figuring something out. I want them to be able to produce state-of-the-art critiques of knowledge — and equally, to be able to understand and admit when something can’t actually be known. Just as crucially, they need to be able to explain the logic of their knowledge to the audience, and listen to criticism honestly.

This isn’t to say the path forward is obvious. It’s often unclear how tools from other disciplines can be applied within the demands of news production, and there will be a balance between journalists applying the tools themselves versus curating sources that do. It’s all a brand new territory to explore.

Meredith Artley

There were many great threads this election year, but what jumps out to me is how stunningly social the election was, with narratives and memes exploding with every soundbite.

Responsive design gained more steam. There was the resurgence and triumph of the animated GIF. And lots of innovations around video, like HuffPost Live — and I’m naturally partial to CNN’s debate video experience with the live clip-and-share feature.

BuzzFeed had a quite a year – they seem to be having a lot of fun over there and made great hires like Kate Aurthur and Richard Rushfield out in L.A. and Dao Nguyen as director of growth. They are an organization to watch.

My hope is that we’ll see more story-form experimentation in 2013. We have all these different formats in the mix nowadays — social forms, big data viz and multimedia projects, GIFs, galleries, lists, and so on — but the default storytelling vehicle for most orgs is still a newspaper-esque article plus photo or video, maybe with some comments at the bottom. We’re going to take a renewed push at this at CNN Digital this year, and I hope others join us.

And with social and mobile coming on stronger than ever, some expansive thinking and action around conversational, interactive journalism is a must. We see more than ever that stories are active, evolving, connected conversations that ripple beyond the point of origin.

I’m enjoying reading the Tow Center report from Emily Bell and gang on post-industrial journalism; it contains thoughts worth contemplating over the holidays and carrying into 2013, starting with summing up the past decade in our industry as: “Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom.”

John Davidow

This year, I think that the CPB-funded initiative to create a race and ethnicity vertical with NPR will provide a much needed spark for years to come. Whether one is talking about politics, economics, education, art, music, love, or life, this new initiative will provide a platform for thoughtful coverage and engagement on the central role diversity plays in all of our lives. I’d be remiss in not giving a special shout out to NPR’s Ellen McDonnell, Keith Woods, and Spark Camp cofounder Matt Thompson for their effort and initiative to make this project a reality in 2012.

The most-hyped idea from 2012? The problems with the iPhone 5. I think the Saturday Night Live Tech Talk segment captured perfectly the hipster hype, hysteria, and hypocrisy. It’s definitely worth another look before year’s end.