Panelist: diversity continues to lag in newsrooms

By Andrew Bowen
NLGJA Reporter Staff Writer

Newsrooms are becoming less diverse, and that’s bad for the industry, readers and viewers, said the moderator of today’s lunch plenary.

“You can’t really report or cover a community if the members of that community are not present in your news-gathering operation,” said Jane Daugherty, moderator of “Losing Our Voices: The Decline of Newsroom Diversity.”

She said newsroom diversity has improved in the past several years, but it still has a long way to go. Daugherty is an associate professor of journalism at Florida International University, an NLGJA board member and co-chair of this year’s convention.

“There’s been progress made in hiring of minorities at newspapers and at broadcasting stations, but basically they were in response to the old historical minority numbers,” she said.

According to a 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors newsroom employment survey, less than 13 percent of employees at daily newspapers were members of racial minorities.

Daugherty said that while Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority in the country, they are the furthest behind in newsroom representation relative to their population.

“There is so much more to be done, especially in the area of Hispanic journalists,” she said.

Panelists today will be Helga Silva, vice president of news for Univision and Telefutura stations in Miami and Puerto Rico, and John Yearwood, world editor of the Miami Herald and NABJ treasurer.

“The reality is everybody talks a really good game,” she said. “Everybody pays lip service to the need for minority staff, but how many newspapers are run by minorities? How many newsrooms, how many broadcast news directors are minorities in the mainstream media?”

Minority representation is even lower in the higher levels of journalism, she said.

The numbers “get more and more depressing the higher you go in the organization,” she said. “The further up the ladder, the lower the minority representation is.”

The discussion will also touch on representation of the LGBT community in the newsroom, but Daugherty said it’s a difficult subject to measure.

There are still “plenty of newsrooms where people don’t feel comfortable being out, so we don’t have absolutely solid numbers on how many LGBT journalists there are working in the mainstream media,” she said. “Until that feeling disappears, I think we have to pay a lot of attention to it.”

The lack of newsroom diversity is a class issue as well as a race issue, Daugherty said.
“Now we have a much better-educated group of professionals in journalism,” she said. “There is some loss with that.” While those journalists may have a stronger educational background, she said, they may not cover issues affecting readers of a lower economic status as well as possible.

Many larger news organizations are appropriately addressing the issue of the lack of newsroom diversity and deserve credit for that, Daugherty said.

“Still, huge numbers of newspapers and television stations that have no minority staffs, especially in smaller markets … I think [that] has to be addressed much more aggressively,” she said.

On Tap
“Losing Our Voices: The Decline of Newsroom Diversity”
12:30 p.m.–2 p.m.
Americana Ballroom, Salon 4