Diversity remains an issue for news organizations despite strides that have been made in some newsrooms, according to two research projects presented by experts from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Assistant dean Kristin Gilger and Knight Chair in Journalism Stephen Doig spoke about their projects conducted for UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., an advocacy group for minority journalists, to a room of about 30 people Tuesday at the downtown Cronkite School.
Gilger’s project portrayed how minorities are represented in the Washington Newspaper Press Corps, which includes all of the Washington, D.C., bureaus of U.S. daily papers.
Gilger researched the percentage of full-time minority reporters, editors, correspondents and bureau chiefs in the nation’s capital. This year, 13.1 percent were minorities, up from 10.5 percent in 2004, according to the research summary.
While Gilger said she took this as a good sign, she stressed that news organizations have to keep working on bringing diversity into the newsroom. Homogenous newsrooms don’t represent the community, she said. Then, readers begin to lose faith in a paper that doesn’t represent them and readership goes down.
“It’s critical economically that we continue to make [minorities] a priority,” she said.
Some news organizations continue to focus on their diversity record, including USA Today, which jumped from 3.8 percent of minorities in Washington in 2004 to 20 percent in 2008.
“USA Today came out looking the best in 2008,” Gilger said.
Though some bureaus have improved the percentage of minorities in the newsroom, there are still some who fall behind.
“Nearly 80 percent of papers with their own staffs in Washington had no journalists of color working with them,” Gilger said.
Though many of those bureaus consist of only one person, it is still a staggering number, she said.
There were also problems retaining minority employers. Between the two surveys in 2004 and 2008, more than half of the minority employees left, according to the summary.
“We don’t do enough to try and retain minority journalists once we have them,” Gilger said. She said many began to feel that they were not needed in the company and left.
When surveyed, while most minority journalists claimed their race had no impact on moving up in the organization, nearly 40 percent said their race helps them advance, according to the summary.
Doig’s research also focused on newsroom diversity by creating a database of articles and journals about the topic.
Doig compiled the information to make it easier for professionals to confront the problem of too few minorities in news organizations.
“I wanted to create a database that would make it easier for professionals to try and do something about this,” Doig said. “It’s been a long problem that journalistic institutions have been slower to change then the demographic.”
There are currently 411 abstracts, or summaries of the articles and journals, on Doig’s database, available online at cronkite.asu.edu/unity, that can be filtered by subject.
The results of the abstracts show that in 2001 and 2003 there were the most articles related to diversity. Doig said the smaller number in recent years is due to newsrooms pushing the issue into the background.
“There’s some evidence of diversity fatigue, which needs to be fought against,” he said.
Reach the reporter at jolie.mccullough@asu.edu.
