The American Society of News Editors Census: Newsrooms Became Even More White in 2008
New Orleans is roughly 62 percent African American, according to the most recent census data. Now, I’ve never done a desk-by-desk survey of the city’s newsrooms, but my experience – and some searches through websites of the The Times-Picayune and New Orleans City Business – leads me to believe that newsroom demographics don’t exactly jibe with those of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods. (The city’s only daily, The T-P boasts a 2:7 racial breakdown among its columnists and a similarly dismal black-white split among reporters. The top editors weigh in 100 percent white. City Business boasts exactly zero minority journalists on staff. )
And based on the latest newsroom census from the American Society of News Editors,, the racial disparity between the city’s population and the people covering it is likely to widen as newsroom budgets continue to shrink.
The national organization’s census, released at the end of last month, revealed that America’s newsrooms became less diverse in 2008 from the year before. The percentage of journalists of color in the nation’s newsrooms dropped from 13.5% in 2007 to 13.4% in 2008, with African-Americans and Asians taking the largest hits. The percentage of journalists of color in supervisory positions also declined, from 11.4% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2008.
Of course, the losses must be looked at within the context of our current newspaper holocaust, a crisis that last year sent 5,900 newsroom jobs into a black hole and reduced the number of American journalists of any color by 11.3 percent, to the level of the early 1980s. Yet even against this dismal backdrop, the loss of minority journalists is especially alarming because it threatens the progress that has been made over the last decade. Indeed, the number of minority journalists employed today stands at the level reported in the 1998 census, according to the ASNE.
“Industry layoffs affect people of color disproportionately and destroy the gains we have made during past years,” said Rafael Olmeda, president of UNITY. UNITY is a strategic alliance of four national associations representing more than 10,000 journalists of color.
One bright spot in the results is a two percentage point increase in online journalists of color. That spot of growth is not lost to June Cross, a journalist, and friend of the New Orleans Institute, who teaches at Columbia University School of Journalism. In a speech given at a workshop on diversity, Cross raises the hope that as we move towards internet distribution, a thousand voices will bloom on the internet.
“I would like to think that those who lose their salaried positions will find new careers in this new medium,” says Cross. I hope we all find time to work with citizen journalists, like my friend Karen Gadbois whose work with WWL’s Lee Zurik led to an Investigative Journalism Award and a Peabody over the past two days. We all need to remember that our own voices are precious. That our stories require attention. I hope that we will all remember those words of Samuel Cornish and John Russworm, who, in Creating Freedom’s Journal some 200 years ago, wrote a timeless editorial that begins: ‘We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.’
I recommend reading the entirety of the speech Cross gave at the diversity workshop. In it, she uses post-levee breach New Orleans to help illustrate the potential for diverse mainstream media outlets – and the obstacles that must be overcome within existing newsrooms structures.
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