Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

DIVERSITY INDEX 75,001 to 100,000 CIRCULATION  [Chart]

Jeannine Guttman
Editor and Vice President
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram
 
Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. Since our newspaper was purchased by the Blethen family in 1998, we have made staff diversity a core value of our newsroom and our newspaper. In 2006, staff diversity was among our major newsroom goals.
 
Our goals read: “Continue efforts that increase the diversity of our news staff and the diversity of our news reports. Our aim is to more accurately reflect our diverse community, bringing more voices and perspectives into our daily coverage.”
 
For our newspaper, staff diversity is a vital ingredient of journalistic excellence. If we hope to accurately reflect our community, which is growing more diverse by the year, then we need a diverse staff of journalists to build the daily report of this place.
 
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? Although growing more diverse, Maine has been one of the whitest states in the country. A decade ago, that statistic blocked serious endeavors to try to diversify our staff. A common misperception was that journalists of color wouldn’t feel comfortable living in Maine because it was too white, so why bother to recruit?
 
That notion, then, became an excuse for not pursuing an aggressive recruitment and outreach program. In truth, journalists, white and of color, are attracted to Maine for universal reasons — it’s a beautiful place to live, and it’s a very welcoming place in which to live. Staffers also are attracted by the journalistic quality of our newspaper and its independent family ownership.
 
Still, perception is a powerful thing and knowing that, we established the Blethen Maine Newspapers Minority Graduate Program in 2002. At the time, there were no full-time journalists of color on our staff.
 
Although we did sponsor minority summer internships, the graduate training program was designed to be a year-long mentoring experience. Here’s how it worked: A minority journalism graduate spent the first six months working at our Central Maine Newspapers — the Waterville Morning Sentinel and the Kennebec Journal. The second six months were spent working on the Portland news staff. All costs associated with the program were paid for by The Seattle Times, which owns our newspaper.
 
Our company’s objective: To take a leadership role in providing training and development opportunities for entry-level journalists of color, and to help mentor the next generation of journalists. Through this program, we wanted:
 
• To build a dynamic hiring pool of candidates who, as graduates of this program, would have a high degree of success in securing full-time newsroom employment;
 
• To further our diversity initiative and become recognized as the employer of choice for journalists of color, and
 
• To increase the diversity of our newsrooms, enabling us to understand and build a more accurate daily report of the communities we cover.
 
The program was a major success, leading to the hiring of a number of participants as full-time staffers.
 
Although the year-long internship program has been suspended for budgetary reasons, it enabled us to gain a national reputation for being serious about our commitment to staff diversity. Our summer minority internship program, through which we hire two interns, continues to flourish, and we receive a growing number of applications each year. We also make regional and national minority job fair attendance a high priority for our editors.
 
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? Newsroom staff diversity leads to more accurate news coverage, period. It should be a core value of any newspaper serious about accuracy.
 
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? I don’t think an accurate news report can be achieved without a diverse news staff because the community you are covering is a very diverse place.
 
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. I suppose I could give a specific example, but I think that would place unfair boundaries on the values and impact of staff diversity. Having journalists of color on our staff has opened reporting windows to our communities and created wholly different kinds of news discussions in our newsroom.
 
When a news staff has a rich diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, that experience enriches and expands all facets of newsroom life -- from story conversations at the water cooler to staff meetings, from initiating major projects and changing beats to understanding and seeing our community.
 
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? Don’t let barriers, conventional wisdom or naysayers stop you from seeking more diversity — which translates into more points of view and experience — for your newsroom. If a newspaper in one of the whitest states can achieve a Pacesetter award for diversity, then a newspaper in a more diverse state certainly can do the same. If newsroom staff diversity becomes an important goal that is shared at all levels of the newspaper, then it will be achieved.
 
 

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