Sports Editors Shine Light on Own Lack of Diversity
The sports departments at daily newspapers in the United States and Canada, while covering a disproportionate number of athletes who are African American and Latino, have a diversity record worse than that of the sports they cover, a study commissioned by the association of newspaper sports editors detailed today.
“I guess I hope that any sports columnist who has chided a professional sports league for its lack of diversity will look at these results and decide whether they should be challenging their bosses to do better,” John Cherwa, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel and Tribune Co. sports coordinator, said. He released the “2006 Racial and Gender Report Card of the Associated Press Sports Editors” at the editors’ convention in Las Vegas.
The primary author of the report, Richard Lapchick, said in the summary, “When 94.7 percent of the sports editors, 86.7 percent of the assistant sports editors, 89.9 percent of our columnists, 87.4 percent of our reporters and 89.7 percent of our copy editors/designers are white, and those same positions are 95, 87, 93, 90 and 87 percent male, we clearly do not have a group that reflects America’s workforce.
“And in the world of sports, they are covering a disproportionate number of athletes in basketball, football and baseball who are African-American or Latino. On the high school and college levels, more than 40 percent of the student-athletes are girls and women.”
The highest percentages of people of color were at the sports departments at the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, 54 percent, largest at the biggest-circulation dailies; the Fresno (Calif.) Bee, 45 percent, greatest in the second-largest circulation category; and Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, 36 percent, highest at the third-largest circulation category. In the smallest-circulation category, all five staffers at the Laredo (Texas) Morning Times were people of color.
The study is the first of its kind. “The idea for this survey came out of the APSE convention we had in Orlando last year. Dr. Lapchick and Fitz Hill were doing a presentation for the group when a couple of sports editors spoke up and said, ‘Hey, we need to be held accountable, too,'” Cherwa said in a statement. “From there the leadership of the group was very enthusiastic about this idea and 12 months later it’s a reality.’ The APSE asked Cherwa to complete the project.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors conducts an annual census of newspaper newsrooms, but it does not separate out departments. ASNE’s latest survey reported that “the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms crept up from 13.42 to 13.87 percent.” It found blacks at 5.6 percent; Latinos at 4.51 percent, Asian Americans at 3.23 percent and Native Americans at 0.56 percent. This compares with the sports department study placing blacks at 6.2 percent; Latinos at 3.6 percent; Asian Americans at 1.3 percent; and others at less than 1 percent.
In 2002, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers reported that financial-news staffs might be more diverse than the rest of the newsroom. A survey of 21 newspapers conducted for the group by Baruch College in New York found that people of color comprise 22.7 percent of business-news staffs: 7.9 percent were Asian American, 7.6 percent Hispanic and 7 percent African American. At the time, the ASNE newsroom-wide figure was 12.07 percent.
The National Conference of Editorial Writers approved the idea of a census of editorial pages in 2001, but has made no significant progress on conducting one.
The sports department study found that as of June 16:
- “White men and women comprised 88 percent of the total staffs of all APSE member newspapers; African-Americans held 6.2 percent, Latinos 3.6 percent, Asians 1.3 percent, and “other” people of color less than 1 percent.
- “Women made up 12.6 percent of total staffs of APSE member newspapers.
- “94.7 percent of APSE sports editors were white while 90.0 percent were white males; African-Americans held only 1.6 percent; Latinos 2.8 percent and ‘others’ less than 1 percent. There were no Asian sports editors.
- “Whites held 86.9 percent of the assistant sports editor posts in the survey while people of color made up 13.1 percent. African-Americans were 5.3 percent, Latinos 5.5 percent, Asians 1.6 percent, and other people of color 0.8 percent.
- “There were more Latino editors and assistant editors than there were African-Americans in these critical categories. Neither was well represented compared to whites.
- “However, there were far more African-American columnists (7.7 percent) and reporters (7.5 percent) than Latinos, (1 and 3.2 percent, respectively) Asians (0.7 and 1.6 percent, respectively) and other people of color (0.7 and less than 1 percent, respectively) combined.
- “America’s sports columnists were 89.9 percent white.
- “Women made up less than 7 percent of columnists at APSE member newspaper sports staff.
- “Looking at opportunities for women in size ‘A,'” the largest circulation category, “the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel was tops with 24 percent. In size ‘B’ newspapers, Columbia [S.C.] State was first with 29.6 percent. The Bucks County [Pa.] Courier Times led size ‘C’ with 29.4 percent. The Iowa City Press-City, which employs nine people in sport, had 44 percent women to be tops in size ‘D’ newspapers.
- “Of all the ‘A’ circulation size papers, the Sacramento Bee totaled the highest percentage of diversity within its sports staff, with 54 percent being women or people of color. The Fresno Bee topped the circulation size ‘B’ papers with 50 percent of its sports staff being women or people of color. The Tallahassee Democrat along with the Duluth [Minn.] News Tribune led the circulation size ‘C’ papers with 50 percent of its sports staff being women or people of color.”
The report was published by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. The APSE, which represents almost every sports section in the United States and Canada, reported its data for sports editors, assistant sports editors, columnists, reporters, copy editors and designers, and support staff/clerks. More than 5,100 people were included in the study, the news release said.
Lapchick had been publishing “Racial and Gender Report Cards” on the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, the WNBA, Major League Soccer and college sport for two decades. He said in the release, “The media has been excellent at reporting the diversity records for professional and college sport. Yet the media had never turned the mirror on itself. When it did so through this study, APSE newspapers saw how little progress they had made regarding representation of women and people of color in decisions on what is covered, who covers it and who offers opinions on it.
” We have assigned grades to all categories in pro and college sport. While we will not assign official grades in this initial report compiling baseline data, if we did the print media would have worse grades for both race and gender than the sports themselves. That being said, I have to credit APSE for having the courage to initiate the study so there will be real transparency.”