Minorities in the Newsroom and Community: A Comparison

Since the American Society of Newspaper Editors set minority hiring goals in 1978, the number of minorities working in newsrooms has crept up from about 4% to nearly 8% by 1990. But the goal of racial “equivalency” to be met by year 2000 finds the minority community growing so fast that gains are being wiped out. Comparing individual newspaper minority news staffs with the actual minorities in the circulation area, this study finds successes and failures for a large sample of newspapers for which data are available. Daily newspapers that achieve minimum minority hiring goals are in communities with, proportionately speaking, small numbers of minorities. When communities have minorities of at least 15%, newspapers, whether large or small, cannot seem to match that percentage on news staffs.