Published Friday, April 6, 2001
Minority departures: who and whyBY
BY JEWEL GOPWANI
ASNE Reporter
Carolina Garcia, managing editor of the San Antonio Express-News, wants to know “what happened. Why did they leave?”
These pressing questions refer to minority journalists who are leaving the industry faster than they are entering it. ASNE hopes that by this time next year it will have some answers based on the results of an in-depth survey the organization has decided to launch, said Ms. Garcia, the new chairwoman of ASNE’s Diversity Committee.
“We need to find the people who left and find out why they left,” she said.
The annual ASNE Newsroom Employment Survey, released Tuesday, showed 698 minority journalists left the field in 2000, but fewer than 600 were hired.
“The reason these numbers are declining is because … too many editors have not made it important,” said William Sutton Jr., president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Mr. Sutton spoke at an ASNE panel discussion Thursday titled, “Advice on Keeping the Best and Brightest Minorities in Newsrooms.”
Mr. Sutton, deputy managing editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., distributed a booklet detailing stories and comments from seasoned and novice black journalists and college students on whether they feel comfortable at their newspapers. “Voices of Anger, Cries of Concern: Some NABJ Views of the Retention Problem – and Some Solutions,” features thoughts on experiences in newsrooms, retention problems in the industry and how to solve them.
“Anyone who walks in a newsroom and stays must have some feeling of value and voice,” wrote Cindy George, city government reporter for the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal.
The booklet also asks newspaper editors to specify what they can do to increase the number of black journalists in their newsrooms and reply within the next 90 days.
NABJ will evaluate the responses and work with individual papers to keep black journalists in their newsrooms, Mr. Sutton said. “We need specifics in action.”
But some people fear newspaper budget cuts could jeopardize solutions.
Already, one casualty of tightened budgets is The Oregonian’s two-year minority internship program. A hiring freeze prompted the paper to cancel the program, scheduled to begin in September, and turn away applicants, said George Rede, The Oregonian’s director of recruiting and training.
“We can’t fill the positions,’’ Mr. Rede said. “We are taking every step we can to contain newsroom costs. Personnel is always going to be the primary cost.”
But training is one of the keys to retaining minority journalists in the industry, agreed members on the ASNE panel.
“The thing that has kept me to this point is the ability to grow,” said Lonnae O’Neal Parker, a staff writer for The Washington Post.
The consensus at Thursday’s discussion is that newspapers need to do more to help minorities advance, or they will seek other opportunities.
“The career path in new media, for me, led me to management at a faster rate than if I stayed in the print market,” said Edna Negrón, who has worked at Newsday and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most recently, she was deputy editor of Solella.com, a bilingual Web site geared toward Hispanic women.
Searching for solutions, ASNE’s Diversity Committee plans to collect any available data regarding why minority journalists leave the business and to enlist the services of a minority consulting firm to follow up. The committee also will explore finding some answers with the help of the four minority journalism organizations, which already offer some training programs to their members: NABJ, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.
The Freedom Forum also is overseeing a new million-dollar initiative to help small newspapers combat a high turnover rate of minority journalists.
The effort, also sponsored by ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors, calls for supplementing the salaries of minority journalists who commit to working at a small newspapers for two years. The groups hope to place 50 journalists at newspapers by the end of the year.
“The goal is to level the playing field by offering a $20,000 Freedom Forum stipend over two years to journalists of color who work at participating papers under 75,000 circulation,” said Charles L. Overby, chairman and chief executive officer of The Freedom Forum.
In addition, The Freedom Forum has four “diversity fellows” visiting colleges with large minority populations that have students who are interested in journalism but are unaware of how to break into the industry. The fellows will link students with internship programs and provide information on interested newspapers. They also will introduce students to minority journalism associations to help them find mentors.
The Freedom Forum plans to sponsor a second intern for papers with circulations less that 50,000 that struggle to attract an intern who would be the only minority on the staff.
“This addresses the isolation issue and puts twice as many interns of color at that paper and in the pipeline,” Mr. Overby said.
