Newsrooms Get Whiter - Latino Journalists Say Press Fails to Take Diversity Seriously
Despite mercurial population growth, Latinos working in the newsrooms of U.S. English-language daily newspapers dropped both in number and as a percentage of total staff last year. It marked the only decline in the two decades such records have been kept.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors shared the news April 3 with the release of its annual diversity survey at ASNE's convention in Washington, D.C.While the decrease in Hispanic newspersons was slight, the overall drop in non-white newspersons has created fresh consternation in the community and the industry.
ASNE has set a goal that calls for newsrooms to reach racial and ethnic parity by 2025.
Here are diversity figures compiled at the end of the past two years, including the percentage each group comprised of total newsroom staffs:
While the percentage of Hispanic newspersons crept from 1.2% in 1982 to 3.7% last year, the U.S. Hispanic population, excluding Puerto Rico, bounded from 6.4% (16.4 million) to 13.0% (35.3 million) in the same period. "It is incomprehensible how the number of Latinos in the general population continues to grow and our newsroom numbers remain stagnant,'" said NAHJ President Cecilia Alvear.
The ASNE survey found retention to be the main reason why the figures for journalists of color dropped. Six hundred journalists of color were hired into their first full-time jobs last year, it found. But 698 others quit their positions during the same period. ASNE President Rich Oppel called this year's survey results "simply not acceptable." The ASNE board on April 2 launched a multiyear initiative to examine newsroom management and practices, including a study on how top and middle managers can improve the newsroom environment for journalists of color.
Frank Burgos, editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Daily News, suggested to Weekly Report that many journalists of color leave the industry because there are more career choices these days that pay better. "It is not a well-paying industry, especially in the beginning," he said. Rick Rodríguez, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, added the comment, "Elementary and secondary schools are failing the Latino community." Among other concerns he expressed: there's a perception among many Latino journalists that they lack sufficient opportunity to advance in the field. New York Daily News columnist Juan González challenged the industry: "The numbers show that editors across the country are only paying lip service to diversity. If they produced these kinds of numbers for circulation, they would be dragged on the carpet by their publishers." He supported the contention that it is difficult to rise up in the ranks. "After a while, journalists of color have no choice but to go elsewhere because the glass ceiling is colored brown and black." Liz Balmaseda, The Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning-columnist, labeled diversity a fleeting trend, saying that white management feels more comfortable hiring journalists in their own image. The only time a journalist of color seems to be hired is when there is an aggressive campaign to do so, she said. "Diversity has to happen on purpose," added Ricardo Pimentel, columnist for the Arizona Republic and former editor of The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif. "We have not been paying enough attention as an industry." He rejected the notion that there are not enough qualified Latino candidates, stressing that newsrooms need more journalists of color who have "the radar and sensitivity" to cover an increasingly diverse society. The (news) pages need to be more diverse, more than conflict-driven. "They must stop seeing Latinos as a problem, he said. "Latinos have been part of our nation's fabric for a very long time.
