The Miami Herald

PERCENTAGE OF MINORITIES ON STAFF: 250,000-and-above CIRCULATION  [Chart]

Tom Fiedler
The Miami Herald
 
Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. Diversity must be a core value of the newsroom and the company, and it must be forcefully conveyed. There can be no wiggle room for hiring editors when assembling a pool of candidates for every vacancy; that pool must include candidates who are not only diverse but who also have the skill set to compete for the job and to succeed in it.
 
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? The major obstacle is assembling the resources to develop a recruiting system that identifies potential candidates for virtually every position and remains in active contact with them. Maintaining that “head-hunting” apparatus is costly (it entails travel to numerous job fairs, college campuses, minority-journalist conventions, etc.) and consumes resources (an editor’s time and talent). A related challenge is to have a retention program in place so that you can hang on to — and develop further — the diverse talent that you have. The job of creating a diverse newsroom doesn’t end when a diverse candidate gets hired; you’ve got to keep that person and find others.
 
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? We serve a market that is among the most racially and ethnically diverse in the United States. We could not possibly connect to the communities that make up this market without building a staff that had holistic connections to those communities.
 
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? Readers value journalism that reflects their lives and their communities. By having a staff that has roots extending from the newsroom into these diverse communities, we are better able to find that meaningful journalism.
 
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. Examples are legion, but one that might provide an unusual example came out of the tragic story of a pregnant farmworker in rural Miami-Dade County who, fearful of losing her job, delivered her baby in a port-o-let. The baby died, either in child birth or shortly thereafter, and its remains were discovered. The female farmworker, an unregistered immigrant from Central America, was arrested and faces prison. The Miami Herald, because of our emphasis on hiring diverse reporters, has an exceptionally large number of journalists who are bilingual, particularly in Spanish. The reporter assigned to this story was among those with this skill. Her editor decided to broaden the story beyond that immediate tragedy to also answer the question of how a young woman from a remote village in the mountains of Central America could wind up in a farm field in South Florida. The Spanish-speaking reporter traveled to that village and returned with a poignant story about a young woman whose desire to see a bigger world led her to sneak into the United States and follow that migrant pipeline. Again, powerful journalism like this isn’t likely to happen in an un-diverse newsroom.
 
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? Never be satisfied that the newsroom is diverse enough. It won’t be, and it can never be. The hiring and retention culture must put a premium on diversity, including making it a part of every hiring editor’s annual evaluation. Also, look for diverse candidates in unusual places, such as other professions and among former military personnel. And when you have diverse staffs, let them be all that they can be (apologies to the Army for stealing that slogan). Success breeds success. The Miami Herald is fortunate in having a reputation for being a welcoming place for diverse staff. It is among our most valuable assets, and we must do everything we can to maintain and bolster that reputation.
 
[Tom Fiedler was editor of the Miami Herald when it achieved its high-diversity performance and when he responded to the ASNE questions. He has since retired.]
 

Back to top