diversity – Media Nation

What j-students think about newsroom diversity; plus, Bezos whines, and a new editor at the Monitor

Pioneering Black female news leaders, from left: Vanessa De Luca, editor-in-chief of The Root; Lindsay Peoples, editor-in-chief of The Cut; and Kiran Nazish, founding director of the Coalition for Women in Journalism. Photo (cc) 2022 by Collision Conf.

I asked my media ethics students today to think about diversity in newsrooms — what it is, why it matters and how news organizations can foster it at a time when there’s not a whole lot of hiring going on. I took notes, and I thought you’d be interested to see some of their ideas.

How would you define diversity in news?

Ensuring that members of marginalized communities are properly represented.
Encompassing a broad range of diversity — not just race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation but a diversity of opinion, age and life experience.
Aiming for diversity not just inside the newsroom but in the people we seek out for interviews.
Understand that though journalists are supposed to keep their political beliefs out of their coverage, a range of views matters because it informs the way we approach our work.

How can a news organization benefit from diversity?

Reporters can interact more effectively with organizations that represent different groups such as African Americans or the LGBTQ community.
A diverse newsroom can ease polarization by representing a wider range of voices, thus enhancing democracy.
A diverse newsroom will set a different tone than one that is predominantly white and male.
There is less chance of underrepresented groups being mischaracterized in stories.

How can newsrooms become more diverse in an era of financial constraints on hiring?

Thorough DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) training for the reporters who are on staff can be helpful even if the staff itself is not especially diverse.
News organizations should network extensively at organizations representing affinity groups such as Black journalists, LGBTQ journalists and the like so those contacts are already in place when hiring opportunities arise.
Think about diversity in recruiting not just for your own news organization’s internal benefit but to serve the community better.
Offer fellowships to young journalists of color to create a pipeline of people who could be hired when openings occur.

Pretty smart stuff, I’d say.

Bezos’ not-so-fine whine

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wrote a self-serving commentary in which he attempted to justify his last-minute cancellation of the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement.

Among other things, he said that his decision, which he admitted was poorly timed, was aimed at helping to overcome distrust in the media, writing that endorsements help feed the perception of bias:

Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working….

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Bezos’ take on media trust is facile and shallow. The top-line numbers tell us that public distrust of the media has been growing for a generation or two. In reality, though, that’s an artifact of media fragmentation. We all trust the media that we use; liberals and Democrats tend to trust mainstream sources like The New York Times, public radio and, until this past weekend, the Post. Today’s MAGA Republicans trust Fox News and Donald Trump himself. This analysis by the Pew Research Center is four years old, but you get the idea.

The steaming pile of trouble that Bezos just dumped on his paper is that the Post has morphed overnight from a news source trusted by its audience to one that is getting the side-eye from just about everyone.

David Folkenflik of NPR reported Monday that the Post had lost more than 200,000 of its 2.5 million digital and print subscribers in just 24 hours after the Harris endorsement was yanked. That’s on Bezos, and it’s certainly not a sign that his arrogant disrespect for the Post’s editorial board has done anything to engender trust. Quite the opposite.

A new editor at the Monitor

Whenever I want to read the news and not feel like my hair is on fire, I take a look at The Christian Science Monitor, a great news organization that inspires optimism and emphasizes solutions. It’s especially strong on international news, though it covers the U.S. as well.

Once a full-service newspaper, the Monitor has shrunk to a daily newsletter and a weekly newsmagazine aggregating some of the outlet’s best journalism. The Monitor is located down the street from us at Northeastern, and yes, I’m a paid subscriber.

The Monitor announced this week that a new editor will be taking over soon. Christa Case Bryant, a veteran Monitor journalist whose duties have included building up the digital side, running the Jerusalem bureau and covering Congress, will succeed Mark Sappenfield.

In 2009 I wrote a lengthy feature about the Monitor for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon) that gets into the paper’s history.

White ex-employees sue Gannett over diversity

A news organization can’t do its job as well as it should unless its journalists are as diverse as the community they cover. The giant newspaper chain Gannett, for all its faults, has long enjoyed a reputation for taking diversity seriously. Now the company is being sued by former white employees who claim they were laid off while less qualified Black staff members kept their jobs. Taylor Telford reports (free link) for The Washington Post:

The case is among the first to test the legality of corporate diversity practices in the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision has sparked a wave of litigation aimed at racial considerations in the workplace, including claims that corporate efforts to increase diversity have disadvantaged White employees.

I’m sympathetic toward anyone who loses their job, but I’m not sympathetic to the argument that the plaintiffs are making. News organizations are like police departments and school systems in that racial diversity is an intrinsic part of serving their community. Who is seated at the table when decisions are being made about what stories to cover and how to cover them? I hope this lawsuit doesn’t go anywhere, but I suspect my hopes will not be fulfilled.

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Veteran editor Greg Moore on local news, diversity and life after Alden Global Capital

Greg Moore. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

On the new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Greg Moore, former managing editor at The Boston Globe and longtime editor of The Denver Post. During his 14 years at the Post, the paper won four consecutive Pulitzer Prizes. He’s led coverage of major stories, including the Aurora movie theater shooting in Colorado and the case of Charles Stuart in Boston. Greg is now editor-in-chief of The Expert Press, which helps connect specialists with media. He’s still in Denver.

As one of the most senior Black journalists in the country, Greg has been at the forefront of advocating for more diversity in the media and for a new path forward for local and regional news. In fact, Greg resigned his position at The Denver Post in 2016 after he decided he couldn’t tolerate any more cuts to his newsroom at the hands of the Post’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. As he put it in an essay for the Pulitzer Prize board, of which he is the former chair:

Local journalism is where accountability journalism matters most. It is focused on how dollars are spent and how priorities are set on the local level. It is often that base level reporting that becomes the seed corn for bigger national stories with datelines from the heartland and the tiniest suburbs.

In the Quick Takes portion of the podcast, I’ve got some bad news: people don’t like us. There’s been yet another survey showing that public trust in the news media is at an all-time low. But there are some problems with the survey, as there usually are — and those problems underline why the trust issue isn’t quite the steaming pile of toxic waste that it might seem, especially for local news.

Ellen has some good news for folks in Akron, Ohio. A local news startup called the Akron Signal has launched with a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation.

You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Meredith Clark on race, power and why the media have fallen short on diversity

Meredith Clark. Photo by Alyssa Stone / Northeastern University

On the brand new “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Professor Meredith Clark, our colleague at Northeastern University. Dr. Clark is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern as well as founding director of the university’s new Center for Communication, Media Innovation and Social Change.

Before arriving at Northeastern, she was a faculty fellow at Data & Society, an independent nonprofit research organization based in New York that examines some of the questions being raised by the massive increase in the use of data in all aspects of society.

Dr. Clark’s research is on the intersections of race, media and power, and she’s studied everything from newsroom hiring and reporting practices to social media communities. Her media diet is wide-ranging and eclectic. Our interview touches on many cultural icons, including poet Audre Lorde and Captain Olivia Benson, the fictional “Law & Order SVU” crime-solver.

Meredith is perhaps best known in news circles for her work in trying to revive an annual diversity census conducted by the News Leaders Association, an effort that fell short earlier this year after just 303 media outlets responded out of the 2,500 that were asked to provide data. Ellen and I asked Meredith why so few were willing to participate — and what can be done to encourage diversity at small start-up news organizations.

In Quick Takes, I discuss Gannett’s recent move to dismantle some of the chain’s regional editorial pages, which I see as not entirely a negative, and Ellen tips the hat to two of the 2022 recipients of the prestigious Freedom of the Press Award: Wendi C. Thomas, founding editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and Mukhtar Ibrahim, founding publisher and CEO of Sahan Journal.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

News organizations need to stop stonewalling on layoffs and diversity data

The Poynter Institute has published an important story on the difficulty of tracking layoffs of journalists, especially journalists of color. As Kristen Hare writes, very few news organizations let it be known when they’ve eliminated positions. “For an industry that prizes transparency,” she says, “we’re experts at asking for it and rotten at actually offering it.”

She’s right, and it’s something I’ve found pretty frustrating whenever I hear reports that newspapers owned by Gannett or Alden Global Capital have downsized once again. Since many news organizations follow the practice of last hired, first fired, journalists from underrepresented groups tend to be disproportionately affected — but finding out exactly what happened is difficult if not impossible. Hare offers three explanations for why this information is so hard to come by:

“Lack of public notice about who was laid off and where
“A reluctance among some journalists to say anything publicly
“Growing use of nondisclosure agreements that include non-disparagement agreements”

Hare also quotes my Northeastern journalism colleague Meredith Clark, who’s been working with the News Leaders Association to revive its annual survey of newsroom diversity — a survey that was suspended several years ago because so few news organizations were responding. Dr. Clark puts it this way:

The thing is, journalism as an institution, as a business, has a vested interest in continuing to isolate people in terms of their knowledge of what the field actually looks like. And the corporatization of journalism helps with that because it’s easy to say, “Oh, this is a problem for HR,” or, “Oh, because of legal we can’t do this.”

Clark is absolutely right, and it extends well beyond layoff and diversity numbers. I’ve been covering the news media for more than 25 years, and though I’ve found a great deal of openness to the idea that journalists should be as transparent as they expect their sources to be, I’ve encountered plenty of examples of the opposite, too.

Unfortunately, we can’t file public-records requests or demand the right to attend meetings at media outlets. Rather, we have to rely on news executives to do the right thing. If they think government officials should be compelled to release data that casts them in an unfavorable light, then why do they think it ought to be different for media organizations?

Marty Baron on the rise of specialized communities

Marty Baron at The Washington Post. Click on image to watch interview.

Based on recent statements they’ve made, I’m wondering if Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron may have a more sophisticated view of what the Internet has done to newspapers than the Post’s incoming owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, who visited the Post’s newsroom earlier this month, seemed to endorse a classic paywall model, arguing that he was convinced people were willing to pay for the “daily ritual bundle” that The Washington Post represents. That brought a retort from Post blogger Timothy B. Lee, who wrote:

That daily ritual got blown up for good reason. Trying to recreate the “bundle” experience in Web or tablet form means working against the grain of how readers, especially younger readers, consume the news today. In the long run, it’s a recipe for an aging readership and slow growth.

Indeed, many news observers have been arguing for years that one of the Internet’s most profound effects on journalism is “disaggregation” — that in a post-industrial environment, with news no longer tied to the enormous costs of printing and distribution, it makes no sense for international and local news, obituaries and comics, grocery store coupons and the crossword puzzle all to appear in the same place.

Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe until late last year, comes up with another metaphor, not original to him but nevertheless key to understanding what has happened — the decline of geographic communities and the rise of communities built around shared interests. In an interview with fellows from the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Baron talks about the difficulty of putting together (to cite one example) a newspaper sports section for Red Sox fans when there are speciality media devoted to nothing but sports.

This development, Baron says, was furthered by the rise of Twitter and other social media, which bring readers in to a news site to read just one article. How can news organizations make money from that? Baron puts it this way:

My sense is that people are going to their passions. Their passions aren’t always based on geography. Newspapers have traditionally been based on geography. We have a community here. We have a community in Miami, a community in Boston, a community in Los Angeles. The assumption was that people were members of that community actually would want to have a product that covered the full range of things in that community. What I observed over time was that, in fact, the sense of community wasn’t nearly as strong as the other passions that people had. In fact, community wasn’t necessarily such a strong passion. It was much more important to them that they were an aficionado of a particular type of music, or that they were a member of a particular religious denomination or that they were obsessed with a particular sports team, than the fact that they lived in Los Angeles.

Unlike some journalists, Baron thinks it was perfectly logical to give away news for free in the early years of the Internet, both because of the need to get big online in a hurry and because there was every reason to believe that advertising would pay the bills. It was only after ad revenues failed to materialize (and even began to drop because of the ubiquity of online ads), he says, that news organizations reluctantly moved to paywalls.

The transcript of Baron’s full interview is here, and it is well worth reading — or watching, as there is a video version of the interview as well.

Baron was one of 61 people interviewed for “Riptide,” a project carried out by Shorenstein fellows John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz and Paul Sagan. (The site was designed by the Nieman Journalism Lab, which also hosts it — but which played no role in the editorial content, as Lab director Joshua Benton explains.) “Riptide” is a comprehensive, valuable resource — but it has proved to be controversial since its release because it’s not comprehensive enough.

As Kira Goldenberg writes for the Columbia Journalism Review, all but five of the 61 interview subjects are men, and only two of the subjects are non-white. Goldenberg says that efforts have begun to produce a counter-report that will be more diverse. In offering a few nominations of her own, Northeastern University graduate student Meg Heckman adds:

It’s unfortunate that, in telling the latest chapter of journalism history in a fresh, narrative format, the authors of Riptide make an old mistake by continuing to devalue the contributions of women.

My own view is that “Riptide” represents a good start — but that there’s no reason for Huey, Nisenholtz and Sagan not to keep going so that it eventually grows into a truly comprehensive, diverse history of how the Internet disrupted journalism.

(Disclosures, of which there are several: I am an unpaid contributing writer for the Nieman Journalism Lab. I have long had a friendly relationship with folks at the Nieman Foundation and at the Shorenstein Center. Heckman is a student of mine, and I am a student of hers.)