No silver lining
Latest ASNE survey reveals disturbing trends for newsroom diversity

June 1, 2005

UNITY President's Message Mae Cheng

Let’s be clear. There was no silver lining in the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) survey data that was recently released. In fact, there were some very disturbing trends that the data highlights.

The ASNE numbers show that since 2001, the percentage of journalists of color in newspaper newsrooms has been increasing at about .5 percent each year. One might think that this shows a movement in the right direction. In reality, it shows no movement towards parity with the U.S. population.
Annually during the same period, the population of people of color in the United States has grown at the same rate, according to census data. This means that as an industry, we are just as far away today from reaching parity by 2025 as we were in 2001.

Beneath those overall numbers, there are other disturbing trends. Among those are:

• the failure to significantly increase the percentage of journalists of color in supervisory positions. Currently, journalists of color hold only 10.8 percent of all supervisory positions at newspapers. The same was true the year before.
• the failure to significantly increase in the percentage of journalists of color at newspapers with large circulations. In 2000, 18.4 percent of journalists of color worked at newspapers with circulation of more than 500,000. Today, the percentage remains the same.
• the failure to significantly increase the number of black and native journalists. In the past five years, there has only been an increase of 46 Native American journalists and 34 black journalists.

Let’s be clear. As an industry, we are far, far away from our goal of reaching parity. The most recent census estimates show that communities of color make up nearly a third of the U.S. population. In the nation’s newspaper newsrooms, they make up 13.42 percent.

In UNITY’s response to the latest survey data, we asked top editors across the country to make this personal. Every top editor in the country needs to own up to his or her share of the responsibility. Each one needs to take drastic efforts in his or her newsroom to hiring and promoting qualified journalists of color because up until now, the numbers show that we’ve only been crawling in place.
Let’s be clear once more. This is not an impossible task. For example, over the past two years that E.W. Scripps has partnered with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) in NAHJ’s parity project, there has been a 75 percent increase in the number of Latino journalists at Scripps’ participating newspapers. If every newspaper were to show a 75 percent increase in its numbers over the next two years, imagine the mountains we could move together by 2007.

Mae Cheng
President, Board of Directors, and chair, Executive Committee
UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.

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