Articles Feature

News Outlets Fail to Report on Their Diversity

by richard01733

Missing Figures Force ASNE to Delay Annual Report

. . . Younger Sulzberger Calls Diversity a Priority

Aussie Newspaper Doubles Down on Serena Cartoon

Students at the joint conference of the American Society of News Editors and the Associated Press Media Editors interview Publisher Arthur G. Sulzberger of the New York Times about the Times’ decision to publish an anonymous op-ed from an administration official criticizing President Trump. (video) (Credit: News Leaders 2018)

Missing Figures Force ASNE to Delay Annual Report

Only 234 of nearly 1,700 newspapers and digital media outlets submitted data for this year’s annual newsroom diversity survey, the American Society of News Editors said Wednesday, forcing the organization to delay release of its 2018 figures.

It is a rare move for the society, which has conducted the survey since 1978. It decided two years ago not to release the figures for individual news outlets to avoid embarrassing those with low numbers, but that decision was quickly reversed as other members cited the need for transparency.

“The ASNE diversity survey is a valuable tool for news organizations to better plan their strategies and fill the gaps they might have in terms of newsroom staffing and how diverse and inclusive their stories are,” ASNE President Alfredo Carbajal, managing editor of Al Día at the Dallas Morning News, said in a release. “We ask and encourage news organizations to complete the survey before the Oct. 12 deadline to achieve a more representative percentage of newsrooms participating this year.”

The Emerging Leaders Institute is one vehicle for training journalists of color for newsroom management. (Credit: ASNE)
The Emerging Leaders Institute is one vehicle for training journalists of color for newsroom management. (Credit: ASNE)

In another development at the society’s News Leadership Conference, being held in Austin, Texas, with the Associated Press Managing Editors, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who on Jan. 1 succeeded his father, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as publisher of the New York Times, declared of diversity, “I’ve spent the most time on that than anything in the last year,” pointing to a report the Times issued in March that he said goes beyond the detail submitted to ASNE.

“For the first time, we are sharing detailed data about the ethnic and gender composition of our staff members — data that we intend to update and make public annually,” that report said.

It also said, “Over the past three years, representation of women has increased at every level of The Times. Over all, our employees are now evenly split between men and women. Women in News and Opinion leadership increased to 46 percent in 2017, from 38 percent in 2015, and in business departments, to 46 percent, from 41 percent.

“The trend is not as uniformly positive for people of color. There have been gains in places, including in business leadership, where people of color now make up 21 percent of the total, up from 16 percent in 2015. But gains like this have not been consistent ‐the charts below show declines in certain areas — and improving that trajectory is a focus for us. . . .”

Separately, ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors voted to merge “and become one voice for the industry.” After the required legal work, the new organization is to be known as the News Leaders Association, “expected to be in place by the 2019 News Leadership Conference Sept. 9-10 in New Orleans.” The new organization is expected to have about 600 members, Teri Hayt, ASNE’s executive director, told Journal-isms.

Additionally, in a Tuesday morning session, attendees discussed newsroom safety in light of the June 28 shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., that left five employees dead.

Sally Stapleton, managing editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tweeted, “Still processing details shared with courage by Baltimore Sun publisher @trifalatzas [Trif Alatzas] about @capgaznews attack to honor 5 colleagues killed: ‘As news leaders, we need to lead the charge here for newsroom safety. I implore you. We should be leaders in this moment.’ #newsleaders2018.”

Stapleton told Journal-isms by email on Wednesday, “Also speaking was Chase Cook, who wrote the memorable tweet: I can tell you this. We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.

“They both shared the moments of tears, waiting with family members, sequestered in a room, to learn from authorities what each feared was the case: that their loved ones were killed. And they shared the pain that remains and how they are dealing with it themselves and with their colleagues.”

According to Mary Freda of Ball State University, who reported on the session for the student convention project, called News Leaders 2018, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee of the Associated Press, told the group, “We want our newsrooms to be physically accessible so that people can come by and drop off stories, that’s the way we’ve operated for many years. Is there a subtle change that we have to make that there’s a way to still do that but it doesn’t necessarily impact us physically? I don’t know. “Those are the things that I grapple with. How do you keep that accessibility? How do you keep that transparency? How do keep yourself in the community but just give yourself just a little bit more protection or distance?”

Bob Papper, who conducts the diversity survey of local broadcasters for the Radio Television Digital News Association, said he has not had the problem of non-responsiveness that ASNE disclosed.

“If you go back a few years, you’ll see that their diversity numbers shot up … but it was really a byproduct of a change in methodology,” Papper said by email.  “They used to weight their data. When they stopped doing that, the diversity numbers soared, but I think it was just because the only papers that filled out the survey [were] the relatively diverse ones. Now they’ve been burned because so few did the survey. It’ll be a tough fix.”

As ASNE noted in its release, “The purpose of the ASNE diversity survey, launched in 1978, is to document employment trends in U.S. print and online publications and help newsrooms reflect the growing diversity of their audiences. The survey measures progress toward ASNE’s goal of having the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms nationwide equal to that of minorities in the nation’s population by 2025.”

In 2017, the survey of newspapers and online outlets (but not broadcasters) found that journalists of color comprised 16.6 percent of the workforce in responding U.S. newsrooms.

In 2010, Hispanics or Latinos were 16.3 percent of the U.S. population; blacks or African Americans were 12.6 percent; Asians 4.8 percent; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders 0.2 percent; and Native Americans or Alaska Natives 0.9 percent. The census counted 6.2 percent as “some other race” and 2.9 percent as two or more races.

ASNE also said Wednesday, “For the first time, ASNE is conducting interviews and focus groups with current and former news professionals during the annual conferences of several affinity groups, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

“The focus groups and one-on-one interviews will provide context about newsroom hiring practices and recommendations in relation to diversity.”

It added, “Since 2012, ASNE’s Emerging Leaders Institutes (known as the Minority Leadership Institutes until 2015) have trained nearly 400 up-and-coming and mid-level news leaders to develop the skills needed to lead and drive change in their organizations and in the industry. . . .”

National editor Marc Lacey tells New York Times interns in July about covering the Los Angeles riots, the Northridge, Calif., earthquake, the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle, D-Ariz., and others, and stories from the African wilderness. (Credit: Theodore Kim/Twitter)
National editor Marc Lacey tells New York Times interns in July about covering the Los Angeles riots, the Northridge, Calif., earthquake, the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and others, and the African wilderness. (Credit: Theodore Kim/Twitter)

. . . Younger Sulzberger Calls Diversity a Priority

Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger received his first spontaneous applause Tuesday when he said, “You cannot cut your way to growth.”

It was music to the 230 attendees at the News Leadership Conference in Austin, Texas, many of whom have had to endure newsroom cutbacks at the hands of owners whose background is in hedge funds and other non-journalistic ventures.

By contrast, Sulzberger, 38, worked as a reporter at the Providence Journal and the Oregonian in Portland, as well as at the Times as a metropolitan desk reporter and later as head of the Kansas City bureau.

He was perhaps best known for an in-house report leaked to BuzzFeed that “scolded The Times for being neither smart nor nimble enough in its digital expansion,” as Sridhar Pappu reported in 2014 for Women’s Wear Daily. “Among other things, it called for deemphasizing not only the front page but the print product as a whole. It also made the case for easing the separation between the business and news operations and likened The Times to Eastman Kodak, whose attempt to modernize itself, with the production of digital cameras, was crushed by the advent of smartphones. . . .”

Sulzberger also made news this year when he attended an off-the-record meeting with President Trump July 20 about Trump’s demonization of the news media, which Trump later revealed by tweeting about it.

The new publisher touched on some of those issues in his Q-and-A in Austin with Nancy Anchrum, editorial page editor of the Miami Herald. He said that there were too many videos, too many articles, too many words, too many podcasts online, often just for the purpose of having them.

He defended the Times’ decision not to fire Sarah Jeong, the newest member of the Times editorial board who responded on Twitter to disparagement of Asians by returning the fire satirically against whites, but ousting the newly hired Quinn Norton, who is white and was discovered to have used anti-gay slurs and the N-word. She also expressed sympathy for neo-Nazis.

Sulzberger described Twitter as “a cesspool,” among other explanations for Jeong’s reaction.

The new publisher also said that the presidency alone was not responsible for increased public anxiety; that one must also consider the global rise in populism, changing technology and climate change.

One answer to the anxiety lies in news organizations creating a space where “people of all stripes can come together and clash and leave the reader more informed about something,” he said.

To that end, Sulzberger noted that the Times has added more conservative and moderate voices to its opinion pages, increased its coverage from “out in the country,” invested in more investigative reporting from Washington as well as in technology, and pushed for more transparency of its own operations. “No one knows what datelines are,” he said, citing one example. “They think that is what the story is about,” not where the reporter actually reported from.

And he said that bringing more underrepresented voices to the news report requires more diversity.

Some have noted however, that the newspaper has lost at least six African American women from its news staff over the past couple of years: Dana Canedy, LaSharah Bunting, Diane Cardwell, Renee Michael, Catherine Saint Louis and Malecia Walker, even as it brought on new staffers of color. Canedy later became administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Moreover, Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the paper’s first African American editor, will turn 62 this year, and editors listed on the paper’s masthead, including the executive editor, must leave those jobs at 65. In a July story about the appointment of Clifford Levy as metro editor, the Times’ Michael Grynbaum wrote, “Among the other potential successors are the editorial page editor, James Bennet, 52, and the managing editor, Joseph Kahn, 53.” None is a person of color.

Asked Wednesday when he expects there will be another person of color as executive editor, given the Times’ diversity initiatives, Sulzberger responded through spokeswoman Eileen Murphy.

“A.G. views a diverse, inclusive and fair Times workplace — at all levels — to be an essential priority but he’s not going to prophesize about future executive editors,” she messaged.

 

The Herald Sun front page for Wednesday attacked the "political correctness" behind criticism of Mark Knight's cartoon about Serena Williams.
The Herald Sun’s front page for Wednesday attacked the “political correctness” behind criticism of Mark Knight’s cartoon about Serena Williams.

Aussie Newspaper Doubles Down on Serena Cartoon

“An Australian newspaper has doubled down on a cartoon of multiple Grand Slam tennis champion Serena Williams widely denounced as racist both at home and in the US,” James Griffiths reported Tuesday for CNN.

“In a statement Tuesday, Herald Sun editor Damon Johnston said the cartoon ‘had nothing to do with gender or race.’

” ‘A champion tennis player had a mega tantrum on the world stage, and (the) cartoon depicted that,’ he said, referring to a piece published by cartoonist Mark Knight Monday after the US Open final in which Williams had a dispute with the umpire over his allegedly sexist treatment of her.

“The cartoon showed Williams jumping up and down next to a broken racket and pacifier, with large, exaggerated lips and nose reminiscent of racist depictions of black people in the US during the Jim Crow era.

“Williams’ opponent, Japan’s Naomi Osaka, is depicted as a skinny blonde woman, to whom the umpire is saying: ‘Can’t you just let her win?’ . . .”

The Herald Sun’s Twitter feed was filled with pros and cons about Knight’s effort. Some noted the history of racism in cartooning.

The newspaper, based in Melbourne, is a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, one of the country’s largest media companies and co-founded by a member of the Murdoch family.

Mark Knight's cartoon
Mark Knight’s cartoon

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