Laredo (Texas) Morning Times

PERCENTAGE OF MINORITIES ON STAFF BEST OVERALL ACHIEVEMENT also winner 10,001 to 25,000 CIRCULATION  [Chart]

Diana Fuentes
Editor
Laredo (Texas) Morning Times
 
Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. I look at all the (Maynard) Fault Lines. It’s not just ethnicity or gender. The idea of urban vs. rural (in Texas, that’s a big thing) as well as conservative vs. liberal. I’m very cognizant of that. My approach is not just ethnic diversity. In all our decisions on hiring, it does play a big part. All things being equal, I want the best person for the job — that’s very important to keep in mind. Diversity is an important part of fairly representing a community.
 
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? Two things:
 
(1) Pay. Because those of us along the border generally get paid less, there’s a whole labor issue — salaries are depressed overall, even for professional groups. It’s hard to find people who will take the low pay.
 
(2) Bilingualism. You can function here if you are not bilingual, but it is harder. When I first came to Laredo, it would help if you spoke Spanish: if you didn’t, you’d learn it soon enough. The community has changed a lot — it’s now much more of a Spanish-speaking culture and not everyone is as adept at learning languages. It can be a problem if you don’t catch on. For example: City Council meetings are in English, but sometimes the citizen complaining about something is speaking totally in Spanish. Council members speak it and often replay in Spanish. There are no interpreters, so if you don’t understand Spanish, you miss a whole chunk of the meeting.
 
I have a couple of Hispanics on staff who are not fluent. That’s a harder problem for them here than anywhere else, because we have close to 87 percent of a population speaking Spanish at home.
 
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? There are a lot. Primarily, you have a better reflection of your community. This is especially so with so many different outlets for media — Internet, cable TV, satellite radio, niche publications, etc. Our focus has to be local, and the winner will be the one that can provide the best local news of interest. To do that, you need to reflect and understand your community.
 
Another payback is the experience. I have a couple of people on staff who come from Sherman (a small Texas town) and who can identify with Laredo’s small-town attitude. Because Laredo also has big city problems, I’ve hired staff from Houston and San Antonio, who are aware of those issues.
 
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? Diversity is more than just ethnicity. It’s geography, age, culture, sometimes urban vs. rural.
 
• Diversity in geography/culture:
 
One of my staffers grew up in Nuevo Laredo. He has family in Mexico and his knowledge about how Nuevo Laredo works has been invaluable in covering ongoing violence there. He knows how politics works there. He knows when people are covering something up and when they are not. It’s a whole different culture across the border. If you don’t know it, you can be misled. Right now, it is particularly important to have staffers who understand Mexico because a large part of our population increase is made up of recent Mexican immigrants and a lot of old-time residents are among the loudest voices for sending them back home. The old-time residents see great stresses on the school system and tax structure, and they see it as a drag on the labor economy (immigration keeps labor costs down while expenses go up). There is a difference between a Mexican American and a Mexican — so in your newsroom you need people who know both.
 
• Diversity in experience:
 
This makes a big impact on content. I have one staffer who was a realtor before becoming a journalist. He knows about the business. I hired him as a business writer, but now he covers city hall. Laredo has a burgeoning housing market (the city doubled in size between 1990 and 2000). He understands zoning, urban planning, etc. That’s diversity — different kinds of experience. ... Journalism in general and particularly at the community papers where the hours are long and not too great doesn’t lend itself well to family people. That’s what I’m missing in terms of diversity. That’s a different experience when you have children, have to deal with schools, etc. I wish we had more of that on staff.
 
• Diversity in age:
 
Hip hop and death metal have taken this city by storm. My paginators and designers are very into the scene, so they keep us updated on events and even have written stories.
 
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. We recently did a number of stories about colonias (poor, unincorporated communities that often lack basic services, including running water and electricity). One of the local colonias is incorporated, but was having difficulties as a city entity. There was a high rate on non-payment of taxes. The normal, knee-jerk reaction is that the residents are too poor, they can’t pay taxes, they just don’t care, etc. The reality is that most of the community came from Mexico where they don’t pay taxes. The practice is foreign to them.
 
Similarly, there was a hue and cry about trash collection – the city picks it up and charges a fee. If you lived in Mexico, younever paid a fee in your life and you think the city here is taking advantage of you. My reporter, who grew up in Mexico, understood that and wrote a story that explained it. As a result, the city has changed the way it communicates the fee structure. They realize that the people were unfamiliar, not unwilling. Now tax-payment rates are up. It’s not an earth shattering story, but it’s a newspaper's job to explain – that’s what we do. It’s something that really matters for us.
 
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? The biggest thing I would suggest for papers my size is to grow your own. I encourage editors to talk to their local high schools. Start judging local competitions. There’s a local Urban Scholastic League in Laredo, a high-school competition for journalism (headline writing, editorial writing, news writing — it’s an academic equivalent of high-school football). I have found good people that way. That’s how I found my current editorial assistant. I was blown away by her during the judging. She’s still in high school (a senior) and was just accepted at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. I’m hoping down the road that at the very least I can have her as an intern for one summer. Perhaps she’ll want to be close to home and come to work here. Even if she doesn’t come back, it certainly adds to the available pool of Latinas in journalism.
 
If you have time — and I know this is a little harder — I suggest a citizen academy concept, especially as more and more people are interested in blogging. Have a contest and say you’re looking for a citizen reporter. Set some limits, or even have a miniature boot camp. One day, have people come and learn how to write stories. I have done that. I didn’t hire anyone, but I got a lot of local PR from people who really needed help with what they were turning in to us. It’s really made a difference in the press releases we got. So you teach people and look among them for potential. You never know who’s in your backyard.
 
I also encourage people to keep the whole non-traditional hiring in mind, and I recommend you be realistic. We’re a small paper. I’m looking for good people who can be with me for a year — that’s really my goal. I work with the idea that we’re going to have turnover. I’d rather have talented people who I know I’m going to lose in 12 months than have a mediocre person who’ll stay here for 10 years.
 

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