The Roanoke (Va.) Times

PERCENTAGE INCREASE IN MINORITY STAFFING: 75,001 to 100,000 CIRCULATION  [Chart]

Mike Riley
The Roanoke (Va.) Times
 
Please describe your approach to increasing diversity in your newsroom. It’s simply non-negotiable. Increasing diversity must be one of the top goals in our recruiting and hiring, and it must be valued not only in the newsroom but across the company. Fortunately, The Roanoke Times and its corporate parent, Landmark Communications, have taken a unique and smart approach to increasing diversity in our newsrooms. We call it Leveraging Difference. I prefer the term difference to diversity, because that allows us to look at the importance of bringing and celebrating difference in our companies and our news coverage, without looking solely at ethnicity or race, though those are clearly key indicators.
 
During the past several years, we’ve talked about differences, ranging from race to thinking styles to personality profiles and on to religious affiliation and socioeconomic class. We’re working to identify those differences, which is the initial step, and often an eye-opening one. Then we strive to value those differences: We know that embracing difference changes the conversation by enriching it from a variety of perspectives. Next we work to understand those differences: What makes you different from me, and each of us different from other people in the newsroom? Finally, we make a conscious decision to leverage those differences around the table, which creates a more robust discussion about the challenges we’re facing and offers up more creative solutions to the problems we are facing.
 
It’s easy to see how this system works to enhance our news coverage, because we’re learning to think differently about our traditional paradigm of news. But, surprisingly — and thankfully — this approach, we believe, strengthens our entire business. As the world around us changes dramatically, we know that our commitment to leveraging difference will give us a leg up on our many competitors.
 
We owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Davidson, the person who masterminded the Leveraging Difference concept and teaches at the University of Virginia. The approach is paying off in wonderful ways.
 
What is the toughest obstacle to success and how have you worked to overcome it? The biggest obstacle for us has been making certain that we include difference, primarily race, as an important factor in creating our hiring pools. While we’ve stopped short of making that a mandate, we have been insistent, which has caused some initial distress. But the payoff is clear in our recent hiring choices and the strong contributions those people of difference have made to our news coverage and newsroom conversations.
 
What are the benefits/paybacks of greater diversity? It’s a no-brainer. We are the chroniclers of change, and if we understand difference well, that opens more widely the window for us to explore and chronicle completely our constantly changing world.
 
How does greater diversity in your newsroom affect content? It affects everything, from the sources we call to the projects we undertake. One of our signature efforts this year has been to help our readers understand the human side and real-life impact and implications of immigration in our region. While some readers have been dismayed, I believe most have deeper and more nuanced insights into immigrants who play a larger role in our world these days.
 
Please cite one example of a story that was impacted by diversity in your newsroom. That would clearly be our immigration project, Land of Opportunity.  We've profiled a legal migrant farm worker and his winter-time trek home to his village in Mexico, where he's treated like royalty, along with an illegal immigrant who found a way to get license plates for his car without producing a driver's license.
 
One slice-of-life story we told was about immigrants who lived in a tidy neighborhood and parked an armada of vehicles in their front yard, leaving it rutted and grassless. That ticked off the neighbors, and the story we ultimately were able to tell was about one American neighbor who decided to have a reasonable conversation (rather than an argument) with the immigrants to explain why this practice was unacceptable. Instead of sparking fireworks and conflict, the discussion bridged a cultural divide and prompted some shared understanding and a reasonable resolution to the problem. That's leveraging difference.
 
What advice do you have for editors seeking to improve diversity in their newsrooms? First, make sure everyone understands the reasons behind leveraging difference, and that it’s a crucial journalistic commitment to doing our work well. Then plant a stake in the ground, enlist editors to hire for difference and recognize them for their achievements.
 
[Mike Riley was editor of The Roanoke Times when it achieved its high-diversity performance and when he responded to the ASNE questions. He now is senior vice president and editor of CQ Communications.]
 

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