posted 12-03-2001 10:31 PM               

As a footnote to this, I recently found myself in sort of a gatekeeper role. I'd been put in charge of redesigning most of the new marketing materials (brochures, newsletters) for the financial institution where I work. In the past, most, if not all of the photos in our ad materials featured whites. Granted, we used very few photos because they were expensive but when we did use them they were of white children, white babies, and young white families. I went out and purchased a relatively inexpensive photo package that allowed me to choose from over 50,000 photo images when designing new brochures. Armed with my new toy, I made a conscious effort to put people of all races and ages in the new materials. When the brochures were sent around to management for approval, I expected some comments - not negative, just something. You know what I got? Nada. No comments at all. I don’t think anyone noticed. Part of me thought that was great. "Cool, it should be normal to have our advertising materials reflect the actual population we're trying to reach." But the other part of me thought, "Great, if I hadn’t done this, would it have occurred to anyone else around here?"

posted 12-03-2001 10:35 PM               

quote:

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But that's hard, especially for
papers in towns like the ones in central Pennsylvania, where minority populations are small, communities have little to offer outsiders and newcomers, and where minorities may actually be met with outright hostility. Financial incentives are difficult, since paying someone more for being a minority is clearly unethical, and besides, newspapers have little enough money to pay the reporters already on the payroll.

The problem is one that faces not only newspapers but entire communities. As the world becomes smaller and more integrated through population shifts and technological improvements in communications, it becomes more and more important for individuals to face their perceptions of people who don't look like them, pray like them, or love like them.

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I'm troubled for two reasons, and they may seem paradoxical at first. First, because I can see the truth in Newkirk's statement, which makes the statistics Kevin points out about minority employment very disturbing. What disturbs me more, though, comes from what Kevin says about the smaller papers that don't have very large pools of potential minority employees to draw from. There has to be some way for whites and blacks and Asians and every other group to achieve some level of empathy and see beyond their experience, or we're all screwed. Based on your research, Kev, is there any step a newsroom can take to boost the racial awareness of its staff, even if that staff is not a very diverse one? There has to be, or else we're left with no other recourse than to have white reporters report on white experiences, black reporters on black experiences, etc., which would leave homogenous communities with homogenous news coverage. And that just doesn't sound like a healthy answer, especially if one thing that we might hope the media can do would be to show people that the global community is very different from their local community -- and not to be feared, pitied or hated because of those differences.

posted 12-04-2001 12:50 AM               

Now, of course, to a large degree, where race and ethnicity are concerned, the problem is going to be one of numbers, especially where minorities that comprise a considerably smaller segment of the population are concerned; if there are fewer of a certain type of person, there will -- theoretically, at least -- be proportionally fewer people from that group who want to be journalists. And at some point, the number of newspapers is going to exceed the number of journalists of a given stripe.

So it would be counterproductive for newsrooms to be letter-strict about hiring people to reflect census data in their community. And it's also not as if race is the only factor. Some studies -- I can't right now remember which ones, but I know they're out there -- have shown that many newspaper writers, for as much as we like to whine about being underpaid, make considerably more money than lots of the people they're writing stories about and for. Usually this is pretty evident in the food sections of dailies, which offer restaurant reviews that reflect more "upscale" tastes and recipes for people who have lots of time to cook and can afford expensive ingredients. So clearly race isn't the only factor involved in the modern newspaper's ability or inability to reflect its clientele.

And while Dave's comment bears a lot of weight, hiring is a big way to address the problem. It's amazing what difference having a new voice in the newsroom, one that's had life experiences dissimilar to the rest of the staff, can make. The first newspaper I worked at was staffed almost entirely by people over 50. After I was hired, management hired a few other people in the 22 to 30 age range, and the difference in content was dramatic. And that's just from hiring people of a different age. We were all white and middle class.

It's not impossible for newspapers to better reflect their communities if their staffs remain monochromatic, but it is a lot harder. At the Times-Picayune, friendships were ended, tears were shed, and subscriptions were cancelled, all because staffers were willing to do whatever it took to challenge their own views on race and consequently make themselves better reporters. Other papers can do the same, but editors and writers have to understand that giving serious thought to their own views on race, class, religion, or whatever, can't be done halfway.

That said, there are some things editors can do to get their papers started on the road toward developing relationships with the people they may not be covering so well. They can seek out new sources on stories. They can call the pastors of minority churches and be brutally honest: "Hi, we've done a lousy job of covering the (insert group here) community in this town and we'd like to encourage members of your congregation to submit more wedding and engagement photos." They can sponsor town meetings and invite people to talk about their relationships with and feelings toward people who don't look, love or pray like them. They can invite members of groups like the NAACP or GLAAD to speak at employee luncheons or join editorial board meetings. But most of all, the reporters, photographers and editors can dig as far into the community as they can possibly go when they write their stories and take their pictures, and then they can go farther.

posted 01-14-2002 10:52 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Ott:

It's not impossible for newspapers to better reflect their communities if their staffs remain monochromatic, but it is a lot harder. At the Times-Picayune, friendships were ended, tears were shed, and subscriptions were cancelled, all because staffers were willing to do whatever it took to challenge their own views on race and consequently make themselves better reporters. Other papers can do the same, but editors and writers have to understand that giving serious thought to their own views on race, class, religion, or whatever, can't be done halfway.

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