The NAHJ and the Naples Daily News successfully launched the Parity Project in Collier County, Fla., on Sept. 30. More than 50 Latino community leaders attended a town hall meeting, hosted by the editor and the publisher of the Daily News and the NAHJ, to discuss the paper’s coverage of the Latino community.
The Parity Project, initiated in April by the NAHJ, aims to improve rapidly the quality of news coverage about Latinos as well as the hiring of Latino journalists in target cities around the nation. The project is a key part of NAHJ's five-year strategic plan, which aims to double the percentage of Hispanics working in the nation's newsrooms by 2008.
The first two papers to participate in the project have been the Rocky Mountain News and the Ventura County Star. Like the Naples Daily News, both of those papers are owned by the E.W. Scripps Co., the first major media chain to join NAHJ in this effort.
As part of the Naples launch, the Daily News and NAHJ staff convened a meeting of Latino community and business leaders in Naples on the evening of Sept. 30 to assess the quality of the paper's news coverage. In addition, NAHJ staff conducted cultural awareness sessions with the staff of the newspaper.
NAHJ will work with top executives to fashion a plan to improve coverage, hiring, as well as to develop programs to create a "bigger pipeline" of Hispanic students in journalism education.
In addition to the Scripps chain, Denver's KCNC-TV, a Viacom-owned station, and the North County Times, a Lee newspaper in Southern California, have also agreed to partner with NAHJ later this year.
"After just six months, we are off to a terrific start," said NAHJ president Juan Gonzalez. "We are confident the media companies that have partnered with us will show substantial changes in their coverage and hiring in a fairly short time."
NAHJ's Parity Project has received initial financial support from both the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the John S. Knight Foundation. The NAHJ board has set a goal of raising $3.6 million over the next five years to expand rapidly the Parity Project to dozens of target cities.
More on NAHJ's Parity Project
