Majority of journalists agreed that diversity is valuable; answers lie in commitment, communication and training

"A news staff should reflect society in terms of racial and ethnic makeup," (77 percent of whites and 94 percent of minorities agree) and "Employing a diverse newsroom staff strengthens news coverage and credibility" (86 percent of whites and 96 percent of minorities agree).

In other words, the majority of journalists - men and women, whites and ethnic minorities - see diversity as positive.

What this indicates is that newsroom leaders need to do a better job of managing diversity. This means communicating - talking about what works and what doesn't and dealing openly with issues of resentment and misperceptions.

ASNE can help. First, there is ASNE's "Multicultural Newsroom: How to Get the Best from Everybody" workbook, which provides step-by-step guidelines for incorporating diversity into the newsroom. It offers help for defining a newspaper's diversity goals, suggestions on how to create a diversity committee, sample workplace audit questionnaires, and resources that a newspaper can use in this process.

This fall, the ASNE Diversity Committee held a workshop in Denver prior to the APME convention at which about 30 participants created the "ideal newsroom" of 2000.

At our ideal newspaper, coverage of all communities is balanced, resentment and misperceptions among staff members regarding diversity have been corrected, and minorities have been hired, retained and promoted in management positions.

The qualities of the ideal newsroom, and how the workshop participants achieved it in this how-to session, could be useful to editors who want help in managing diversity. This is the picture:

Newsroom 2000, free of resentment and misperceptions, is a nurturing one where trust and openness reign, where dialogue about diversity issues is institutionalized, where the newsroom reflects the community and readers see themselves reflected in the newspaper's coverage. Cultural barriers have become cultural bridges. There are fewer managers and more leaders, learning is on-going, there is high morale, less turnover, and people have fun in their jobs.

Sounds nice, but how do we get there? One key is to have managers commit to diversity. They must be able to clearly communicate why it is important to the newspaper's goals and provide a strategy to achieve diversity in the workplace and in coverage. They must provide time and resources - money and people - for training and education in cultural issues and diversity.

The ideal newsroom of 2000 must have managers who share one vision and involve all staff members in setting and achieving goals; carrying out the plan must be part of everyone's agenda. Rewards for fostering diversity should be built into the compensation system.

To balance coverage of ethnic communities, the ideal newsroom of 2000 provides access to the community (both inviting people in and getting staff members out to the communities), avoids stereotyping, conducts follow-up on coverage such as content audits, and creates a sense of kinship between the newspaper and the communities it covers. This last point does not mean that the newspaper shies away from muckraking stories or exposes. But if you give success stories equal play with negative stories, readers will feel their communities are being covered in a fair and balanced way.

Finally, the ideal newsroom of 2000 has a diverse staff on which minorities have been hired, retained and promoted. This is a newsroom open to diverse issues, where management training programs exist for all staffers, where minorities are given opportunities to manage projects and other leadership opportunities. ASNE can help editors in this area through our most recent workbook, "Mentoring in the Newsroom: Keys to Success." The publication offers examples of mentoring approaches, as well as a sample mentor agreement.

At the ideal paper, there is a greater understanding of cultures, which, along with a multicultural perspective of the staff, leads to more interesting coverage. Of course there is higher morale, people want to come to work here and this newspaper becomes a model for the industry.

Sound impossible? It's not. But it requires commitment, communication, and continuing education for the staff, from the publisher on down.

ASNE's diversity resources are available for $5 each:

• The Multicultural Newsroom: How to Get the Best from Everybody

• Mentoring in the Newsroom: Keys to Success

• Covering the Community: Newspaper Content Audits

• Hispanics on Deadline recruitment video

Zacchino is associate editor of the Los Angeles Times and chair of the Diversity Committee.