These days, booths and recruiters’ chairs at minority job fairs for journalists are often empty of real human presence, replaced with stacks of business cards and signs referring job-seekers to Web sites. It is a signal, industry insiders say, that initiatives to create and maintain diverse newsrooms are being put on the back burner in many workplaces.
“The news industry is hemorrhaging jobs,” said Onica Makwakwa, executive director of Unity: Journalists of Color Inc., an alliance of minority journalism organizations.
Between Jan. 1, 2008, and September 2009, Unity reported, the journalism industry lost 46,599 jobs. And some in the industry are concerned that layoffs and buyouts in newsrooms are undermining diversity recruitment.
Since 2001, the number of African-American newspaper journalists has decreased by 18 percent, to 2,412, the American Society of News Editors reported in its 2009 census. In addition, while the Latino population in the United States has grown significantly since 2001, the number of Latinos in newspaper jobs has increased by only about 1 percent, to 2,087.
Most in the industry agree that the traditional media — in print, radio and television — are desperately in need of a new business plan. Advertising sales have slumped, and the loss of revenue has trickled down to newsrooms, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.
As the country grows more diverse, however, the industry must realize that to survive, it has to appeal to a diverse audience, said Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit focused on journalism education. To do that, he said, organizations must realize that diversity is “no longer just about creating numbers” and meeting quotas.
Renewed concerns about diversity in the newsroom come four decades after the 1968 release of the Kerner Report, which was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the racial unrest of the late 1960s. The report found that a factor contributing to race riots across the country was a lack of diversity in both general news coverage and reporting on black communities and issues.
A decade later, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (as ASNE was then known) set a goal to make the racial balance in newsrooms reflect that of the populations they served by 2000; when in 1998 the organization realized that the industry would not meet its goal, it set a renewed deadline of 2025.
Although many news organizations committed to this mandate, the industry “never reached these ideals,” said Neil Henry, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
According to the 2009 ASNE census, minorities made up 3.95 percent of newspaper staffs in 1978 and rose to 13.41 percent by 2009, hardly representative of the 34 percent of U.S. citizens who identify as minority.
To complicate matters, the shifting state of the journalism industry and the economic downturn have industry leaders pondering not the diversity of its newsrooms, but the future of its newsrooms as a whole, Henry said.
Mariela Dabbah, the author of “Latinos in College: Your Guide to Success” and a contributor to National Public Radio, said that at many journalism recruitment fairs, there has been a decided lack of enthusiasm on the part of participating companies.
“Many companies don’t want to go to fairs when they know they are not hiring,” she said.
Despite the grim outlook, some news organizations remain committed to recruiting and hiring minority journalists. Newsrooms including The Washington Post and The New York Times maintain internship and training programs known for their diversity in recruiting.
Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for personnel at The Washington Post, acknowledged that the industry had fallen short of its diversity goals. “We could be doing better,” he said. But he added that the numbers of minority journalists in newsrooms will inevitably decline as newsrooms get smaller because of layoffs and buyouts.
In one sign of optimism, CNN recently hosted a recruiting event at the Empire Hotel in New York that focused on providing individual attention to aspiring minority journalists. High-level CNN executives and a well-known CNN reporter, Soledad O’Brien, attended.
Dabbah, who attended the CNN event, said it demonstrated that even in hard economic times, the key to successful recruitment was human contact.
“Diversity and downsizing can coexist,” she said.
A version of this article appeared in print on page 8 of the Tucson 2010 edition of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.