 The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Miss.
PERCENTAGE OF MINORITIES ON STAFF: 75,001 to 100,000 CIRCULATION [Chart]
Ronnie Agnew
Executive Editor
The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Miss.
 Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. When we recruit, each editor is reminded of the makeup of our Metropolitan Statistical Area (48 percent African American) and Jackson (71 percent African American). One strategy that has worked for us is to continue recruiting even when we have no openings and to develop an internal database of possible candidates. Even when we have a full staff, we make recruiting trips to colleges and professional conferences. Another key strategy is to develop mentoring relationships with journalists of color all over the country. How has that helped us? Our business editor, a Delaware native, was mentored by our executive editor for three years at NABJ before he became a staff member. A night police reporter from Illinois and a features reporter from Ohio are two other examples of extended mentoring relationships that have paid off for this newspaper.
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? We often find ourselves in competition for talent with much larger newspapers. It’s especially difficult to attract minority journalists to Mississippi. We’ve had success overcoming obstacles by selling our newspaper’s great track record at growing talent. Gannett newspapers are located in some of the country’s most desirable markets. We use that as a recruiting tool. We tell candidates about the challenging work they’ll have the chance to do here, and we tell them that at the appropriate time we will help them move to the next level. One of our most successful selling points is our ability to show candidates major promotions received by Clarion-Ledger alumni. Of course, the most important thing we tell them is to focus on the job they have right now and to avoid looking ahead prematurely.
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? In a market as diverse as ours, we cannot imagine how we would conduct business if we didn’t have a range of opinions around the table shaped by people from different backgrounds. We have people of color in the top three positions in the newsroom. People of color make up more than 30 percent of our professional staff and more than 40 percent of our management team. Our entire management team is an excellent mix of racial, gender and age diversity. That helps us serve our readers in ways that are rich and deep. In Jackson, it often surprises people that a newspaper with a civil-rights history of its own would have such an assembly of people. Many of our citizens, and newsmakers, simply don’t expect to see the level of diversity that they see when our staff members attend civic meetings or cover news events. Making that connection builds trust. It builds credibility.
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? Our diversity helps lessen the chance that we’ll miss events occurring in our communities, even obscure ones. It ensures that we have spirited debates around the story-budget table on sensitive topics. In all honesty, it puts some community members at ease to know that the person on the other end of thephone, or across the conference room table, has an understanding of an issue.
We are honest about where we live and the views held about Mississippi. Instead of running from that type of content, we run toward it. We’ve done packages on Jackson’s changing demographics. We’ve done packages on new black leadership that has emerged since the economic shift to suburban communities. By no means have we avoided tough issues on people of color. The key element here is that we’ve done our job with a group of decision-makers around the table who have intimate knowledge about a race or group.
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. The Changing Face of Jackson series we did a couple of years ago, and have revisited, is a direct result of diversity in the room. It came about after newspaper editors noticed a dramatic shift in political and economic power in Mississippi’s capital city. Our analysis showed that white citizens were leaving the city at a rate of 1,000 a year because they no longer felt this was the city of their origin. Public safety was an issue. Public schools, which are 98 percent African American, were out of the question for white citizens.
Through many public forums, we found that there was a lack of trust between the races, even at the highest levels. Prominent white business people, once the backbone of the community, felt their views no longer mattered. When we assembled black citizens, they wanted the same thing as their white peers: Good schools, economic opportunities, housing. The series was illuminating and is still talked about around town. It is among our projects for 2007. Having diversity among our reporting and editing ranks made this project successful.
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? Don't take the easy way out. Developing a diverse newsroom takes work and doing that should not be a priority only in times of crisis. The responsibility should not rest solely with top editors. You must establish partnerships with colleges, other newspapers and papers with newsroom recruiters. Recruiters often run across students and working journalists who may not be ready for their newsrooms.
It is important that you offer a person more than a job. You must offer a future. You must be prepared to tell him or her the skills the person will get from your newsroom. You must be prepared to say that you or your designee will devote time to help him or her develop. You must also lay out a career path, especially if your paper is smaller. Employees want to be at a place where they know their supervisors will look out for them. Mentor, mentor, mentor. Ask departing journalists to spread the good word about your paper. Spread that word yourself. Once you’ve built the framework, you’ll find that candidates will find you.
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