Washington -- For the past two years, the annual employment survey of the Radio & Television News Directors Association has reported a significant decline in the percentage of journalists of color working in local radio and television stations.

That decline is both significant and alarming -- from 21.6% minority employment at local English-language television stations in 2001 to 16.7% last year, and from 10.7% in radio in 2001 to 6.5% last year.

Furthermore, the report states that since 1990 there has been no significant, meaningful change in the percentage of minorities in television news.

Given the growing diversity of our nation's population, we at NAHJ believe this backward trend constitutes a genuine crisis for broadcast journalism. Because of that we agreed to participate in an emergency Jan. 9 summit called by RTNDA and our partners in UNITY: Journalists of Color, along with senior executives from the nation's major broadcast news networks and broadcast ownership groups.

We applaud RTNDA President Barbara Cochran and UNITY President Ernie Sotomayor for convening the historic summit and all the executives who participated for reaffirming their commitment to newsroom diversity.

The off-the-record meeting produced a frank and serious exchange on the failures of the past, a better sense of some gaps in research that must be filled in order to identify the root causes of those failures, and it also examined some possible solutions.

We were encouraged by several of the media executives who signaled that their companies are willing to explore creative new joint efforts with the UNITY member organizations to address the problem. NAHJ intends to actively pursue those individual offers.

But while the encouraging signs from the summit make us hopeful, some of the views expressed during the meeting give us cause for much concern. The discussion made clear that:

1) Some broadcast executives do not see a crisis when it comes to diversity in the industry.

2) Industry leaders, for the most part, remain reluctant to release the employment data necessary for the public or their own investors to gauge whether real progress is being made. Such data could help identify which companies or chains are doing the best job and which are lagging the most in minority hiring. We fully understand that federal regulations do not require companies to release such data, but the newspaper industry has for years routinely made public its employment information. We believe broadcasters should do so as well.

3) Industry leaders also appear reluctant to increase their monetary investment in new diversity efforts, especially if it does not immediately generate greater ratings and revenue.

If we fail to achieve consensus among most sectors of the industry that there is a crisis, if we do not have the necessary data to understand the extent of that crisis and fashion appropriate strategies, and if individual media companies do not summon sufficient will and resources to attack the crisis, we fear that significant progress in newsroom diversity will continue to elude us all.

For NAHJ, such continued failure is not an option. Our organization is proving with our newly-created Parity Project that newsroom diversity can be achieved in a rapid and cost-effective manner, and that such diversity produces better and more comprehensive news coverage.

Last week's summit was an important prelude to this year's UNITY Convention in August -- the largest gathering of journalists in American history. We urge all broadcast companies to spend the next few months developing concrete new efforts around diversity and to unveil those at UNITY.

NAHJ was founded in 1984 and has close to 2,000 members. The goal of the association is to improve news coverage of the Latino community and to increase the number of Latinos working in our nation's newsrooms.