September/October 2000 | Contents

GUESS WHO'S LEAVING THE NEWSROOMS
Too Many Journalists of Color Don't Stick Around. Why?

BY PAMELA T. NEWKIRK

Angelo Henderson wanted to write stories that sprang from his experience. He pitched ideas that came out of his cultural milieu -- his church, his movie theater, his shopping mall. But they were often given short shrift. He spent many years feeling undervalued and alienated as a reporter, and depressed. One editor went so far as to tell him he was not cut out for the business.

It was not until he went to The Wall Street Journal in 1995 that editors began to tap his reservoir of remarkable stories with enthusiasm. Henderson is African-American, and he noticed, for example, how movie theaters in his Detroit neighborhood accommodate so many young men in trendy-looking wheelchairs. That led to his discovery in 1995 that the highest growth in wheelchair use was among African-American men, because of the epidemic of violent crime.

He noticed that funeral homes in his neighborhood were handing out full-color glossy magazines about the departed, leading to a story about that cultural phenomenon. Last year Henderson won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for his story on the aftermath of a robbery attempt in which a white pharmacist killed a black robbery suspect.

"You have to value my difference," Henderson told a group of journalists recently. "You can't make me what everyone is."

Henderson told his tale to a hushed room full of reporters, editors, and producers at a workshop at Columbia University this summer, an annual affair called "Let's Do It Better." The workshop both honors a handful of journalists for their quality work on stories about race and ethnicity and pairs the honorees with editors and producers who want to analyze and improve their coverage. This year's three-day event offered a window into some of what is both so encouraging and so discouraging about race and journalism at the turn of the century.

While Henderson found a way to bring his own perspective to his stories, many others do not. Their frustration is surely a contributing factor to this stark fact: journalists of color are leaving newspapers at about twice the rate of their white counterparts.

Much has been done on the racial hiring front since 1968, when the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders condemned the news media's lack of diversity. Yet newspaper newsrooms are still, at 88 percent, overwhelmingly white. U.S. dailies employ three and a half times as many journalists of color as they did two decades ago, but that brings the total only to 12 percent in the newsrooms. And with the nonwhite population steadily increasing, the ratio of minority employees to minorities in the total population remains unchanged.

There is another reason for that as well. A Freedom Forum study by Lawrence T. McGill -- released at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in April and discussed at the Columbia workshop -- found that an average of 550 journalists of color were added to newspaper newsrooms each year between 1994 and 1999. But each year during the same period, about 400 journalists of color went out the door.

This retention problem is not a new one. It was detected as early as 1985 in "Quiet Crisis," a survey conducted by the Institute of Journalism Education. A year later, "Musical Chairs: Minority Hiring in America's Newsrooms," also published by IJE, argued that "As much as in hiring, it is on the battleground of retention that the struggle for full parity will be won or lost."

Many journalists of color leave the news business, of course, for the same reasons that white journalists do: they get burned out or want more money; they come to the realization that their interests have changed or that their talents lie elsewhere.

Yet there are also differences between the races in the reasons people cite when they leave the business. McGill's study, "Newsroom Diversity: Meeting the Challenge," provides some clues as to what those differences are. Where 39 percent of white journalists cited lack of advancement opportunities as a major reason to consider leaving, 63 percent of African Americans, 60 percent of Asians, and 58 percent of Latino journalists did so.

And where 35 percent of white journalists pointed to the inability to cover stories that interest them as a reason to leave, 60 percent of Latino, 54 percent of Asian, and 42 percent of black journalists said that might cause them to leave the field.

There is another revealing clue in the study: while just 39 percent of white journalists said "the desire to make an impact" had been "very influential" in their decision to become newspaper journalists, 67 percent of journalists of color did.

Meanwhile, nearly half of black journalists, 42 percent of Hispanics, and 34 percent of Asians expressed some preference for covering stories affecting people of color.

Keith Woods, an African-American journalist, left his job as a columnist and editorial-page writer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1995 to join the Poynter Institute as a diversity trainer. Woods explains that while he was fulfilled at the Times-Picayune, he felt he could make more of a difference at Poynter. "I think journalism feeds the spiritual self no matter what the race of the journalist," he says. But he adds that for journalists of color, that kind of satisfaction often comes in the form of "the feeling that they can make a difference in the way their world -- their very specific world -- is being run.

"I think the things that we struggle for and against are about trying to see to it that we and our families and loved ones can continue to live free and unencumbered by racism," he says. "I don't think of it as a hang-up, but a vocation."

On the other hand, some journalists work to escape what they see as racial pigeonholing. E.R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News, on leave to serve as ombudsman for The Washington Post, did this while she was at The New York Times. She now thinks that she was censoring herself, she explains in a recent book of essays (The Business of Journalism/The New Press). But at that time, she did not want to be seen as a diversity hire. So "I would not volunteer to do black stories, stories about Harlem and Bed Stuy, about gangs and dysfunctional families, about long hot summers to be." She did not want, Shipp writes, to be "stuck in the job of urban affairs reporter or race relations reporter."

Two years ago, the American Society of Newspaper Editors retreated from its goal of reaching a racial balance in newsrooms that matches that of the population by 2000. The nation is now 28 percent nonwhite. ASNE gave itself another twenty-five years -- until 2025 -- to achieve its goal, after it had become clear that the industry would fall far short.

In television, meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia put an end to the Federal Communications Commission's affirmative action policies in 1998. Those policies had effectively doubled the percentage of minority group members in broadcasting between 1969 and 1998 and helped television's minority percentages climb well past the newspaper industry's. Where people of color held 11.85 percent of newspaper jobs, last year the percentage of minorities in television news reached an all-time high of 21 percent, according to the year 2000 annual survey by the Radio-Television News Directors Association and Ball State University.

Numbers are not the whole story, nor is statistical diversity the same as diversity of coverage. "I know black editors who know less about Harlem than many white folks do and could not care less about how, or whether, it is covered," Shipp writes.

To hear the June workshop participants tell it, achieving true diversity of coverage requires working through a challenging series of racial puzzles. How, many of the white managers at the workshop wondered aloud, do you confront black or Latino reporters about disagreements over stories on race? How relevant is the race of the reporter on racial stories? Some of the managers admitted they were intimidated by the apparent anger of some of their minority reporters. Rather than challenge them, many admitted to simply retreating in silence, which insures that conflicts go unresolved. "My anger won't hurt you," Lonnae O'Neal Parker, a Washington Post feature writer who is African-American, said at one point in the discussion. "You'll be fine when the exchange is over."

And some journalists of color, in turn, don't voice their frustrations. Unlike Angelo Henderson, Arthur S. Hayes, who now teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says he found himself pushed to "think like a middle-class white man" during his stint at The Wall Street Journal. Hayes once wrote a page-one piece about what has been called the Bronx Jury Syndrome, in which juries in urban settings tend to lean toward defendants in criminal cases. Hayes, who is African-American, thought that these juries had a certain sophistication about the way cops testify in cases in the ghetto. But the story was "flipped," he says, rewritten from a perspective that wondered "why these juries don't get it.

"You go along with it. You don't want to get tagged as uncooperative," he says. "So you start writing that way and thinking that way." But then, he says, you begin to feel that you are betraying something. "You get into this business because you want to speak the truth, and you know you are not speaking the truth. You eventually think, 'I don't want to be with this paper.'"

A number of the editors at the conference vowed to do more to crack these puzzles of race and ethnicity. It's one thing to have journalists of color in the newsroom and quite another to welcome the diversity of ideas that they bring.

"There's a lack of trust," conceded Charlotte Hall, a vice president and a managing editor at Newsday on Long Island who is white. "It's been a lonely path for people. It's the trust-building that needs to go on." Rosemary Goudreau, managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, and also white, was sobered by Angelo Henderson's story: "I see Angelo, who was told he's not cut out for this business," she said. "I've heard this said about a young lady in my newsroom." She said she would reach out to her.

Throughout the weekend, meanwhile, the journalists at the conference bore witness to many examples of excellence in reporting, stories written and produced by participants whose work was being honored. There was a five-part series on race relations and social change in the Silicon Valley by The San Jose Mercury News. There was O'Neal Parker's searching look at race through the lens of her relationship with her white cousin, published in The Washington Post. And there was a 20/20 feature on young blacks who underachieve so as not to appear to "act white."

At one event during the three-day workshop, CBS news anchor Dan Rather and CBS News president Andrew Heyward were honored for their general excellence in racial coverage. This included a moving -- and, at thirteen minutes, remarkably lengthy -- segment that Rather anchored on the 1998 racial killing in Jaspar, Texas.

But after the piece was shown, Rather and Heyward were grilled about the paucity of minority journalists assigned to the story. How, someone in the audience asked, could a story of such magnitude virtually exclude black reporters?

Heyward shot back: Why did you need black reporters? Could not white reporters tell that story, which was as much about whites as blacks? Rather pledged to take greater personal responsibility for diversity at CBS. Sidmel Estes-Sumpter, executive producer of Good Day Atlanta at Fox's WAGA-TV, countered: "A lot of us are tired of hearing that after twenty, twenty-five years in the business. Where is the proof in the pudding?"

The question hung there, nearly overshadowing Rather's superb newscast. For just a moment, at least, isolated excellence did not seem to be enough to repair the tattered good will between the industry and the people of color within it.

Pamela Newkirk is the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, published in August. A former reporter for the New York Post and New York Newsday, she teaches at New York University. (More about the Columbia workshop on covering race and ethnicity, including the print and television stories that were honored, is at www.jrn.columbia.edu/workshops).