The lack of diversity among Oscar’s acting nominations has provided a lot of wagging fingers and plenty of grist for journalists and media watchers, but it has also prompted other professions to take a cold, hard look in the mirror.
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I’m not sure how the work environment is in television or radio, but in print, my minority status was hard to ignore. Being Asian in a leadership position was rare back then. Funny thing, the more management talked about increasing minority representation, compared to my time at the Maynard Tribune, the number of minorities in journalism seems to have declined as time passed.
I hope it is different in the big city newspapers but newspapers in the suburbs, which until relatively recent have been the domain – or, should I say, refuge – of Euro Americans remain largely white even as the suburban demographics are shifting with minorities seeking the American dream of home ownership. Today, the Beaver Cleaver neighborhoods – at least in the San Francisco Bay Area – are harder and harder to find and increasing the number of journalists of color becomes even more critical.
Yes, #OscarsSoWhite. But we must also examine why #JournalismSoWhite: https://t.co/P6sqOPkhKD @emergingUS pic.twitter.com/dVfNaaUdk2
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) January 22, 2016
Vargas, who started the organization Define American in his quest for citizenship, is a Filipino American who came to this country at age 13. It wasn’t until he was in his late teens that he discovered he was undocumented.
He won a Pulitzer while working with the Washington Post. He revealed his immigration status in a Huffington Post confessional. Since then, he has been in the forefront advocating for immigration reform, including a documentary about his situation and a TV doc “Dear White America.”
Continuing the #JournalistsSoWhite conversation, he tweeted these queries:
According to the American Society of News Editors’ census released last summer, the percentage of racial minorities at newspapers was at 12.76 percent in 2014. With minorities making up 37.02 percent of the U.S. population, our newsrooms are not representative of the society we live in.
RELATED:Find out how diverse the American newspaper industry is with our interactive.
Sadly, my anecdotal observation is also true, minority percentage of newsroom employment is on a downward track, falling to 12.76 percent in 2014. A year earlier it was 13.34 percent. ASNE president Chris Peck in a press release, hailed this as good news saying the stats shows employment of minorities as holding steady. I don’t know about that; to me it looks like its is getting worse.
It may be too late for the newspaper industry. Minority journalists are finding a place for themselves in the new media platforms which have younger and more daring owners who are more open to the diverse ideas those journalists bring with them. There is a fear that newspapers are the dinosaurs of media. Their inability to change and adapt to the changing demographics and technology may be its undoing.
The tech industry has been under heavy fire for its lack of diversity and opportunities for minorities and women but compared to the print media, they are light years ahead. Google, for example, said this year that 60 percent of its overall staff is Euro American. At Facebook, only 55 percentof the overall staff is white. Euro Americans while at Microsoft Whites make up 59.5 percent of its overall staff. (Of course those numbers are misleading because the inequities come in the board room with minorities clustered in the lower paying jobs and women in supporting roles.)
BuzzFeed founder and chief executive Jonah Peretti says that diversity is a priority for the company. “We care about diversity for moral reasons,” explains Peretti in a note to employees “but we also know a diverse staff is a competitive advantage that allows us to recruit from the broadest possible pool of talent and have team members with a wide range of experiences and perspectives.”
I’ve heard this song before and the news outlets on the internet have the advantage of not having a historic template that perpetuates the old boys networks.
I like to think that there will always be a place for good journalists. Tech skills don’t always translate to telling a good story. Digging for information, getting the facts straight and writing compelling stories are skills that will always be in demand, no matter the medium.
The Poynter Institute’s Kristen Hale, whose article inspired this discussion, wrote: