“There were born leaders around the newsroom who can carry this message of diversity as a core value,” said Suki Dardarian, senior editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. “If this is happening around the country, then we’ve created a whole group of leaders — and that’s exciting.”

 “One thing that unites everyone in the newsroom is that they want to put out a good paper, one that is well-regarded in the community and is truly serving the public,” said Dardarian, who also is vice chair of the APME Diversity Committee. “And that gives this issue the respect that it deserves.”

Looking at diversity as a matter of accuracy, which is at the heart of journalistic values, goes “to the core of what we do every day. The key is how well we report on our communities,” she said.

Yarnold said he had been trying to find a way to have a meaningful discussion in his newsroom at the Mercury News about diversity. He wanted to avoid considering diversity as political correctness or as good business and focus on diversity as speaking to the core of journalism values.

The name for the week was inspired by Clinton Wilson of Howard University, who said to Yarnold that “the idea of calling time out to think about this issue is really valuable.”

So did leaders of the ASNE and APME, who already had decided to join forces around the issues of diversity, credibility and wire watches. In February, ASNE President Chris Anderson and Vice President Rich Oppel met with APME President Pam Johnson and Vice President Jerry Ceppos to approve the National Time Out as their organizations’ first joint project.

“It is part of a larger partnership we are undertaking with APME,” said Anderson, publisher of The Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif. “One of my goals as president was to find areas of common interest between the two organizations … to build stronger support for editors. I think the Time Out is a great way to get editors to take time to step back and ask, ‘How are we connecting to our communities?’ ”

Leaders of other major journalism groups, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, also endorsed the Time Out. The results will be a highlight of the Unity ’99 conference in Seattle this month.

The Time Out occurred six months after an October decision by the ASNE board to adjust the diversity goal it had set in 1978: to achieve racial parity by 2000. ASNE’s 1998 newsroom census found minority journalists comprised 11.5 percent of the professional newsroom work force, while minorities were 26 percent of the population.

The new goal is to reach racial parity by 2025. The ASNE board also adopted a mission statement that said that, at the least, “all newspapers should employ journalists of color and every newspaper should reflect the diversity of its community.”

Rick Rodriguez, executive editor of The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, said the renewed focus on diversity began when he was chair of the ASNE Diversity Committee as the Year 2000 Goal loomed.

“For a period, there’d been a kind of diversity burnout,” Rodriguez said. “We thought that we should jump-start it because we knew we weren’t going to reach the Year 2000 Goal. We knew we had to get a dialogue going. It was something that we needed to do and really focuses and re-energizes it for the time being.

“I think it’s good that we’re looking at content, and my guess is that it’s an easier sell than to look at what some would consider quotas,” he said. “Most journalists care about accuracy and, in that context, maybe the light goes on.”

Added APME President Johnson: “When it gets right down to it, it’s about what we do in the newsroom.”

About 150 newspapers, 43 AP bureaus, a number of Reuters bureaus and Gannett News Service participated in the Time Out.

“They all were talking about these issues, and all in different ways, from the perspective of their communities,” said Johnson, executive editor of The Arizona Republic. “It’s pretty significant that that many journalists stopped and talked about this issue in our newsrooms.”

With the help of The Freedom Forum, the ASNE-APME group sent out a five-part package to all ASNE and APME members that asked them to sign up and offered suggestions for creating a Time Out. It also included a discussion guide, a content audit form based on the Maynard Institute’s formula, an explanation of the Time Out and a feedback form to collect the results.

The goal was to make diversity as an accuracy issue important to the industry as a whole — not just to editors and publishers, but to the entire newsroom. Another goal was to reach beyond race to age, socio-economic levels, gender and other classifications as issues of diversity and accuracy in content.

“We thought we’d have to recruit newspapers to get involved,” Dardarian said. “Then we launched the registration effort and it was an onslaught. Papers all over were signing up. If we got the word to them, they responded. There was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. We just asked them to do something; we weren’t telling them what to do. There’s everything from conversations to full-blown content audits.”
 
Getting on the bus

The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun had one of the more original Time Outs: It sent its entire staff on a bus tour to learn about the city’s black history, which had been largely ignored by the paper as recently as during the 1960s civil rights movement.

“We believe that the history has to be known when framing the context of current events,” said Executive Editor Dick Schneider. “A few summers ago, there were five church burnings in the South. We had numbers one, three and four on the list. That’s when we realized the city’s civil rights history didn’t exist in our paper or elsewhere.

 “We have to look for solutions to the problems of our time. The Jackson Sun has tremendous turnover and, with that, you lose institutional memory. This (bus tour) is being proactive. We believe it is important enough that everyone took a half-day off and got on the bus.”

The three-hour tour was narrated by two experts on the community’s African-American heritage. The journalists saw an area southwest of Jackson called Denmark that had a big population of free blacks prior to the Civil War, then visited downtown to learn about urban renewal plans of the ’60s, which Schneider said pushed out a number of black neighborhoods. The guides pointed out the first black medical college in Tennessee and told the history of Shannon Street, where famous Delta musicians played, and other historic sites.

After the tour, the staff participated in a panel discussion involving African-American community members.

“I think it adds depth and sophistication to the coverage,” Schneider said. “The great fear that a lot of editors have is that because of high turnover, are you getting beyond the veneer of coverage. Do your reporters know more than your readers? I really don’t believe you can cover the entire community, particularly the African-American community, without knowing the whole history.”
 
Too much testosterone?

The Philadelphia Daily News concentrated on gender issues during its Time Out, which included a review of demographic research and staff discussions led by a consultant.

“As our newsroom staff becomes more diversified, we’ve found that the differences in how men and women communicate sometimes causes us problems,” said Debi Licklider, new initiatives editor. “Plus, our news pages are sometimes accused of being too testosterone-driven. Since we are making big changes to woo women back to the paper, we figured it would be good to start by making our workplace more female-friendly.”

Licklider said the gender issue made newsroom staff more nervous than a discussion about race, but she reassured them: “This is not about sexual harassment, this is not about legal stuff. This is about how we communicate in the newsroom.”

The only complaint was that the discussions were not provocative enough, “too kumbaya.”

“Approaching it from the point of view of accuracy was appealing, rather than just because it’s a nice thing to do,” she said.

Another Knight Ridder paper, the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, surveyed newsroom opinions of the paper’s coverage of women and minorities to see how they compared to a similar survey it undertook six years earlier for its “Question of Color” series, and conducted an audit of its main and local section fronts.

The newsroom staff then discussed the results and determined that the main area in which the paper does not reflect the diversity of the community is in its coverage of senior citizens, who comprise 10 percent of its circulation area, the poor, children and the disabled, said Gloria Irwin, the paper’s public editor.

“The content analysis showed us we need to put in more information on occupation, class and age. We also decided we didn’t want a formula that 7 percent of sources should be minorities, following our demographics,” Irwin said. “We did conclude that we need to think of diversity as more than race. And we still have some work to do in racial areas.”
 
Coverage of black and white bikers

The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., used major news stories occurring the weekends after the Time Out as its diversity training project.

“We’ve gotten criticism in the past for our coverage of the two weekends, especially when comparing the two,” said Managing Editor John X. Miller. “The first is Harley-Davidson bikers, middle-aged white bikers. The others are young black bikers. We got a lot of feedback from the community, as well as internal feedback, that our coverage wasn’t that fair over the past years. Especially when talking about business, we reported that the Harley weekend was better for the business community, and the black biker weekend wasn’t so good. The truth was somewhere in between.”

The newsroom used the issue of the coverage of those two weekends, particularly being aware of ethnic and racial diversity, to study how to broaden coverage in general. Miller said the paper also may begin a regular content audit.

Time Out within a paper’s context

A number of papers modified the Time Out recommendations to fit ongoing diversity or training efforts.

At Newsday, Time Out activities were incorporated into the paper’s “Newsroom U” format, a series of editorial seminars. The focus was on diversifying sources in reporting because the paper’s ongoing content analysis, which started nine months ago and involves staff regularly examining how the paper represents people of color and women, found that diversity in sources was an area that needed work, especially in fast-breaking news situations.

“We wanted to keep the Time Out activity low-keyed and make it part of our routine for a couple of reasons,” Managing Editor Charlotte Hall said. “First, our own content analysis, an ambitious and high-priority undertaking, is ongoing and we didn’t want to impose another type of audit. Second, like many journalists, we don’t take well to movements or to marching to someone else’s drummer.”

The discussion on diversifying sources, creating a “rainbow rolodex,” was led by a Queens College librarian and was followed by an update on the content analysis results.

“Demographically, looking out, Long Island as a white suburban community is changing. By 2020, 40 percent of the island will be people of color. It’s something we have to address both as a journalistic enterprise and as a business,” Hall said.

The Greenville (S.C.) News already has regular content audits, reviewing its mainstreaming efforts at the daily news meetings, said Wanda Lloyd, managing editor/features, administration and planning, and chair of the 1999-2000 ASNE Diversity Committee. She decided to look at demographic projections for the future and discuss the challenges they will bring in news coverage. She also wrote a column about diversity as a benchmark of accuracy.

“A lot of papers have done a lot of good things, so we should celebrate what’s good (about news coverage),” Lloyd said. “If you’ve ‘been there, done that,’ challenge yourself to do a little bit more.”

The San Francisco Examiner’s existing Diversity Committee set out an ambitious plan, including a content audit, a survey of newsroom attitudes, which was reporter Julie Chao’s suggestion, and daily meetings led by reporters, not managers.

“This was staff-driven and staff-run,” said Managing Editor/News Sharon Rosenhause. “Each day the meeting was different, one day contentious, the next thoughtful. We’re having people take notes — no names — to continue the conversation. There was lots of talk about source lists, photos, hiring. It has raised everybody’s antenna. This is not going to end for us.”

The wire services had to tailor the Time Out materials to fit their different needs, where the community they cover is a state or a region.

Marty Thompson, AP’s director of state news, said the bureau chiefs at the 43 main bureaus were given the Time Out kit and asked to involve the staffs in determining how well the diversity of the state is reflected in their stories and identifying areas of improvement.

The bureau chiefs reported their results, including ways to address problem areas, and those reports were shared with all AP editorial staff. “We’re trying not to focus so much on counting things but simply using our own good judgment to assess whether our reports reflect the people of the state. To do that, you have to list your state’s diversity, which takes a little introspection by the staff,” Thompson said.

Reuters undertook a more formal content audit to analyze its stories for sexist language, terms like pro-life or ethnic cleansing, how race and gender are defined in economic reports, and using sources from the communities it is involved in. The results were reviewed in meetings at major bureaus around the country.

While the staff generally was enthusiastic about the chance to reflect on news coverage, said Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters’ diversity coordinator, there was some resistance. That also was true at several newspapers.

“Inherent in questioning our coverage is the idea that we’re not doing it well. Mostly, though, there was skepticism about … whether it was just aimed at satisfying the norms of political correctness.”

The business imperative

Stephen Jukes, Reuters America editor and executive vice president, said Reuters participated in the Time Out both because “it is the right thing to do in absolute terms” and because it will improve story content.

He admitted the commercial benefit is unclear for a news wholesaler like Reuters, whose many clients in the financial markets may not be concerned about diversity in news coverage.

However, as Reuters increasingly sells its news online, Web users let the agency know if they perceive bias in stories. “We’ve never had this feedback before. It’s invaluable,” Jukes said. “So we have to reflect the population.”

For newspapers, the business imperative of diversity in coverage is clear, said Rodriguez in Sacramento.

“I don’t think there’s another biz in the country where diversity is more intertwined with success,” he said. “We’ve always been about attracting numbers. If, in California, the growth is Latinos and Asians, we’d better go after them.”

Newsday’s Hall said newspapers’ futures depend on broad penetration and, as the U.S. population shifts to larger percentages of people of color, who traditionally do not read newspapers at the same rate as whites, it will have serious implications for newspapers as business.

 Diversity in news coverage is an area where “journalistic imperatives and business imperatives mesh,” she said. “This is not seen as a marketing project in the newsroom. We’re happy when everyone reads us, but what really motivates us journalistically is that we have a responsibility to serve our community though our journalism.”

Yarnold said the Time Out had three goals: enlisting 100 newspapers, a clear focus on accuracy and outcomes at newspapers that involved creating significant changes that would improve their journalism.

“Whether we achieved goal three is yet to be determined, but I know that The Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News, they’ve been charged with coming back with a specific set of changes that they intend to make,” he said. “We’ll measure (Time Out participants’ efforts) again in a year and see what people did in terms of changes they said they would make.”

The results of the Time Outs found in the feedback forms will be presented at the Unity Conference at a prominently featured town hall-style meeting and again at the APME meeting in October, where they will be presented as a report.

Several APME and ASNE leaders suggested it’s likely the two groups will sponsor another Time Out in 2000.
 
Non-participants

Some of the nation’s largest papers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, didn’t participate in the Time Out.

USA Today’s new editor, Karen Jurgensen, had just arrived so the timing was bad, but the paper does intend to use the Time Out materials later, according to her assistant.

At The Washington Post, a diversity committee meets regularly and there are 112 minorities working in the newsroom, said Deputy Managing Editor Milton Coleman, a member of the ASNE Diversity Committee.

“This is in the tradition of the Post often doing things ourselves and on a regular basis as opposed to going along with various industry-declared days. Within the industry, there are some times that the problems that we face are somewhat different than the problems our colleagues in the industry face. But we don’t want to become aloof or stupid and think those issues don’t affect us.”

If the Time Out is repeated in the future, efforts will be made to include top newspapers like these.

Johnson of the Arizona Republic said the 150 papers that did participate have millions of readers combined.

“When I think of Dallas and Elkhart, Ind., and Phoenix and Seattle and Minneapolis and Akron — we’re talking about papers that have a huge responsibilities in their communities,” she said.

“The variety and level of participation is amazing. We’ve stopped and thought and talked, and that is something that isn’t built into newsroom culture. It underscores the importance of taking these pauses on a lot of things we do — to examine our journalism and methods.”
 
Shearer is co-director and editor of Medill News Service in Washington.