“These benchmarks are designed to show us where we are and how much further we have to go by 2025. They will tell us if we are falling behind and where,” said N. Christian Anderson III, ASNE president and an architect of the benchmark plan.  “These benchmarks will complement the information we now get in our annual survey of the industry.”

According to the 1999 version of that survey, the Newsroom Employment Census, minorities now comprise 11.55 percent of the reporters, copy editors, photographers, graphic artists and supervisors at U.S. daily newspapers. On the other hand, minorities comprise an estimated 28.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2025, the minority population of the United States will grow to an estimated 38 percent; to reach parity, newspapers will need to increase their percentage of minorities in the newsroom by 229 percent.

The ASNE Diversity Committee examined and discussed the areas where progress was lagging and determined specific goals at three-year intervals for the five target areas. This should help ASNE and others in the newspaper industry determine where diversity efforts should be concentrated and if the programs implemented are effective.

“We have a lot of work to do to make America’s newsrooms look like the America they cover every day,” said board member Wanda Lloyd, chair of ASNE’s Diversity Committee. “We’d better get started today.”

Lloyd is managing editor/features, administration and planning of The Greenville (S.C.) News. Anderson is publisher and CEO of The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, with more than 850 members, is the main organization of directing editors of daily newspapers in the Americas. Founded in 1922, three of ASNE’s primary goals are increasing the diversity, credibility and readership of newspapers.