Will journalism schools continue to pursue students of color now that the American Society of Newspaper Editors has scaled back its commitment to diversity?

Journalism educators say they remain committed to increasing the numbers of minority students and faculty members in journalism schools despite a recent decision by the nation's leading newspaper editors association to scale back its twenty-year-old goals for increasing newsroom diversity.

In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) pledged that by the year 2000, minority representation in newsrooms would be at parity with national demographics. People of color currently constitute roughly one quarter of the nation's population. Their representation in newsrooms, however, is only at 11.4 percent. In April, less than two years before the year 2000 deadline, the society conceded its original goal was unattainable, proposing a more "realistic" goal of 20 percent minority representation by the year 2010.

"It's too early to tell whether ASNE's decision will have any impact at journalism schools," says Dr. Karen Brown Dunlap, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. She adds that journalism schools "didn't have that great a record to brag about anyway. The will to [increase diversity] has not been there on a widespread basis."

About 6,000, of the nation's 54,700 newspaper reporters, photographers, and editors are African American, Hispanic, or Native American, according to an ASNE survey (see Incredible Whiteness pg 40). These constitute three times the percentage they had in 1978 when ASNE set its goals. But journalists and educators say that the number of minorities entering the profession has remained stagnant, while the country's minority population has grown far beyond the 15 percent ASNE had projected for 2000. In 1994, nearly 26 percent of the nation's population were members of minority groups, but the number of minority journalists increased just one-tenth of 1 percent in the last year.