The Dallas Morning News, Texas

PERCENTAGE INCREASE IN MINORITY STAFFING: 250,000-and-above CIRCULATION  [Chart]

Bob Mong
President and Editor
The Dallas (Texas) Morning News
 
Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. We have a very active recruiting team that includes caring representatives from all areas of our newsroom — including Dallasnews.com Al Dia, our excellent Spanish-language paper — human resources and the Denton Record-Chronicle (a sister paper near Dallas that parent company Belo owns). The team includes a very active diversity subcommittee. The team also is spending a lot of time on retention issues.
 
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? I would say uncertainty about the industry’s prospects is among the biggest looming issues we face. We’re trying to address this head on with honest discussion about the market’s ravenous appetite for news and information and the acknowledgement that we are a news and information company, not just a newspaper. We focus on the fact that our growth engines are niches such as Al Dia, Quick, Dallasnews.com and other new products we’ve created in the last five years. We also focus on training opportunities that will help employees operate on any media platform.
 
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? Our market is among the most diverse in the country. Nearly 20 percent of our population was born in another country. Neighborhoods are being transformed virtually overnight. These things are the ingredients of great journalism. Every institution we cover is influenced by elements of diversity, and it is critical that we better understand the texture and nuance of these currents. Otherwise, we become two-dimension figures in a 3-D world.
 
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? Greater diversity makes us smarter on every level. Diverse staffers make emerging cultures more accessible to our readers. The staffers often bring forth ideas first. A typical example: An African American approached me in the elevator saying she had seen a foundation report in which Dallas was listed as a top-three relocation destination for black professionals. We hadn’t known. That turned into a great page-one story.
 
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. One good example was the immigration march in downtown Dallas last spring that drew 500,000. Through their sourcing, Dianne Solis and Macarena Hernandez sensed turnout would likely be huge. Official estimates were as low as 20,000. Our managing editor, George Rodrigue, trusted the reporters’ instincts and organized a multimedia, multi-dimensional coverage plan that was spectacular.
 
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get complacent. Get into the high schools. Grow your own. Never give up. If you have a Spanish-language paper, work closely with the staff. ... Here, Gilbert Bailon has brilliantly insisted that the Morning News and Al Dia work integrally each day. We sit together in news meetings. We plan together. We go to retreats together. We work together on stories, both routine and in depth. The 30 bi-lingual, bi-cultural journalists at Al Dia make The Dallas Morning News a better paper, and we in turn make Al Dia better.

 

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