Investigating Newsroom Diversity

Can daily newspapers deliver on minority recruitment and retention?
By Ronald Roach

As with many minority journalists, Lynne Varner, an editorial writer for The Seattle Times, has long demonstrated a commitment to attracting and recruiting Black, Latino, Asian American and American Indian students to the journalism profession. That interest has prompted Varner to help coordinate high school journalism workshops and mentor journalism students and reporting interns who are in college. Yet in stark contrast, the commitment shown by her newspaper employers to cultivate and promote Varner in the newsroom has proven disappointing to her over the course of 14 years in the news profession.
"I had to announce my resignation from (The Seattle Times) before they agreed to promote me into my current position," Varner says.
While the recruitment of minorities into college and university journalism programs and into newspaper jobs is seen as a high priority in the newspaper industry, minority journalists are at odds with their employers over their failure to nurture and promote minorities in the newsroom. The inability to secure timely promotions and getting overlooked for prestigious assignments are common complaints uttered by minority journalists.
"The question we have on the table is why are (minority journalists) leaving the profession at a disproportionate rate than non-minorities," says Wanda Lloyd, executive director of the Freedom Forum Institute for Newsroom Diversity. The Freedom Forum is an international foundation committed to free speech and a free press that supports American newsroom diversity as one of its goals.
The retention issue surfaced decisively earlier this year when the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) released data showing that the number of minority journalists fell for the first time since ASNE started tracking daily newspaper staffing figures in 1978. The ASNE survey revealed that the portion of African American journalists at daily newspapers also declined.
"The newspaper industry took in about 600 journalists of color in 2000 and watched 698 leave. More shocking is that the percentage of African Americans dropped from 5.31 percent in 2000 to 5.23 percent in 2001," declared Will Sutton, the outgoing president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), to ASNE members at the group's April plenary meeting in Washington. "Folks, we're going the wrong way."
According to the ASNE census, more full-time professional journalists of color were hired in 2000 than in any of the past 10 years, yet the proportion of non-White journalists fell from 11.85 percent to 11.64 percent in 2001. On the radio and television news side, minority journalists account for 22 percent of newsroom staffs, according to the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA).
Lloyd says the retention issue, like the recruitment and training of journalists of color, represents an issue needing high-level attention by the newspaper industry. The challenge for minority journalists, journalism educators and newspapers is to continue to increase recruitment and training programs while taking on minority retention in a serious way, according to Lloyd.