Diversity Deadline Looms for Newspapers

By: This unsigned editorial appeared in the Dec. 1 issue of E&P.

When it comes to diversity, the newspaper industry suffers from a strange syndrome that combines attention deficit and seasonal affective disorders.

To newspapers, diversity is like baseball or hay fever: Something that does not get going until spring, and fades away as the evenings grow short and chilly. Industry attention to diversity follows a well-established cycle. In April, newspapers cluck about the usually dismal results from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) newsroom census of journalists of color. They murmur promises to do better, then bob and weave their way through the summer conventions of minority journalists, hoping to buy good will by sponsoring receptions and job fair booths.

In these late days of autumn, newspapers fret among themselves about the Christmas shopping season -- but not about their widespread failure to employ newsrooms as diverse racially and ethnically as the cities and towns they serve.

Newspapers should be warned, though: Procrastinating on diversity this winter could prove mighty embarrassing to the industry by this summer. Because just nine months from now in Washington, D.C., Unity 2004 will convene what looks to be the largest ever gathering of journalists of color. This Aug. 4-8 joint convention of the associations of black, Hispanic, Asian American and Native American journalists amounts to four days of reckoning -- under a glare of national media attention -- for the newspaper industry's diversity efforts.

Unity may well be the catalyst for a national discussion on the diversity of journalists that the Jayson Blair scandal was for reporter ethics, and the Federal Communications Commission decision was for media concentration. With the presidential campaign in high gear, pack journalists will descend on Unity, attracted by the Democratic nominee, who will speak, and by President Bush, who might.

The "b-roll" for these appearances will be the newspaper industry's lack of progress on diversity. By summer, the economy is likely to be in recovery, with papers at last hanging out help-wanted signs. The excuses about diversity employment that were barely plausible during the recession will be untenable.

It's surely too late in the calendar and too early in the recovery to push up significantly the numbers of the ASNE newsroom census, which last year found that journalists of color comprised just 12.5% of daily newsrooms in an America where 31% of the population are racial or ethnic minorities.

What can change is attitude and effort -- especially among the most laggard newspapers. The 377 daily newspapers who told ASNE last year that they employed not a single minority journalist should vow to put a person of color on the short list for their next hire -- and the 488 dailies that didn't even bother to respond to that census should this year give an honest account of their newsroom diversity.