'Diversity branding' at Unity confab

By: Mark Fitzgerald When Gannett Co. executives began pondering how to show off its commitment to newsroom diversity during Unity 2004, they figured it would take a village.

And so the company erected Gannett Village to house recruiters working the job fair that was the single busiest place in the sprawling joint convention held last month in Washington, D.C., by the four principal associations for black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian journalists.

Twisting the traditional concept of a straight row of booths, Gannett Village was a kind of cul-de-sac with a greeter at its entrance, individual booths along both sides for a dozen newspapers, and a common area where more than 40 editors from its 100 papers interviewed potential candidates and gauged their job and geography preferences. Notes, resumes, and clips were shipped across the Potomac to corporate headquarters in McLean, Va., where everything was scanned into a database.

On the first day of Unity, Gannett held a rally with 300 employees at its corporate headquarters, where Chairman, President and CEO Douglas McCorkindale talked up the chain's progress in increasing the percentages of journalists with ethnic and racial minority backgrounds. Journalists of color at Gannett papers, he told employees, had increased to 18.6% of total newsroom employment. Managers of color had increased in a year from 16.9% to that same 18.6%. And nearly 33% of new or newly promoted managers were people of color, McCorkindale reported. Then everyone was sent in buses back to the Washington Convention Center to spread the message.

This third edition of Unity 2004 took some shots from the local alternative paper for the plethora of corporate sponsorships, from the Microsoft and General Motors logos on the convention badges to the Toyota Prius hybrid car parked in the lobby. But the most aggressive branding efforts came from newspapers ? who were selling themselves as champions of diversity to an audience of journalists acutely aware that the demographics of daily and weekly newsrooms don't much match the makeup of the communities they serve.

"We had several goals in coming to Unity," says Richard Leonard, Gannett's director/news recruiting. "We did want to showcase in a variety of ways our company and our commitment to diversity, and our record on diversity. We wanted to tell that story, but, you know, we didn't want to tell it just to the rest of the industry or to job seekers ? we wanted to tell it to our own people, too."

Not surprisingly, the biggest newspaper chains pushed that branding message with sheer mass, lining up their booths to create long lines of smiling recruiters. The New York Times Co., Belo Corp., Dow Jones & Company, and Tribune Co. were all present at multiple booths. Knight Ridder papers crowded along two aisles under a banner emblazoned with its longtime and no-caps branding slogan: "diversity. no excuses."

A single Knight Ridder paper, the Detroit Free Press, fielded a crew of 20 recruiters who worked in morning and afternoon shifts of six to stay fresh. By the end, they had interviewed 270 potential job candidates. "We were kind of overwhelmed by the number of candidates," says Joe Grimm, the paper's recruiting and development editor.

What brought the candidates, Grimm believes, is the reputation the Free Press and Knight Ridder have helped along with diversity branding. "If newspapers come to conventions like these again and again, people come to check back," he says. "We didn't have anything special to attract people. We had no tchotchkes, no pens. We didn't even have any live job openings."

Newspapers are also finally tumbling to the fact that a presence at events such as Unity isn't just about finding job candidates ? but retaining the journalists of color they already have, says William W. Sutton Jr., deputy managing editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. Sutton and Juan Gonzalez, now a columnist for the New York Daily News, came up with the idea for the first Unity, held in 1994, when they were journalists together in Philadelphia.

This Unity attracted 8,158 registrants ? plus the glare of national media when both presidential candidates cleared their schedules to attend. Look for the same attention in 2008, because Unity has changed its five-year schedule to four to coincide with presidential elections. Robin Washington, editorial page editor for the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune and a Unity board member, says the controversy about the audience reactions the candidates received does not obscure the power and poise the organizations showed: "This was a sea change. It says we are serious. We are serious journalists and a force to be reckoned with."

Adds Sutton: "For papers of any size to skip Unity, it sends a message ? and it ain't a good one. When people come here and don't see their bosses here, it makes them more inclined to want to leave."

But even groups of smaller papers are engaging in diversity branding these days. Lee Enterprises was there, for instance, as part of its effort to "get it out there that our company is committed to diversity," says David Stoeffler, vice president of news for the Davenport, Iowa-based chain. "It's hard for us to compete with the Gannetts or the Knight Ridders or even the Tribunes in terms of the markets they can offer to people, so we don't try to. We say, we're different. We're a place you can really get to learn the profession or, if you're looking to break into management, we've got opportunities."

Recruiters for the family-owned Daily Herald in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights came away from its first-ever Unity with a ton of contacts from job candidates, journalism schools, training programs, and even other newspapers recruiters ? despite manning a single table in a remote end of the job fair, says Betsy Kmiecik, assistant VP and director of human resources.

Kmiecik says her recruiters spent a good part of the time walking around. "They would walk down the aisle of the Tribune [Co.] mega-booth and hand out cards to people who were standing in line, saying, 'If you're interested in the Chicago area, check us out.' They did a lot of outreach ? literally, physical outreach."