Lack of Opportunity Cited : Newsrooms Losing Their Grip on Minority Staffers

Despite minority hiring gains, daily newspapers aren’t keeping pace with the nation’s growing racial diversity. One reason, experts say, is that minority reporters apparently are leaving newsrooms faster than whites.

“Unless newsrooms can hold on to more of those being hired, the industry can’t expect the total picture to change very much,” said Ellis Cose of Columbia University’s Gannett Center for Media Studies. “Minorities feel pigeon-holed in low-priority reporting assignments.”

Cose reported that because of widespread frustration “minorities had left the profession at three times the rate of whites” in a 1985 survey conducted while he headed the Institute for Journalism Education in Berkeley.

High Turnover Forecast

In a second study last October, he warned of a “high turnover among minority journalists,” noting that in 1985 “more than one-third as many minorities left newsrooms as were hired.”

In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors adopted a resolution pledging to employ editors and reporters in numbers reflecting the nation’s racial makeup by the year 2000.

“This goal is a moving target,” said the society Minority Affairs Director Denise Johnson, noting that the society is channeling $275,000 into minority efforts in 1986-87. “By the year 2000 it could be as high as 30%.”

“We have concentrated on the recruitment: persuading editors and publishers to hire (minorities),” said Christian Science Monitor Editor Katherine Fanning, president of the society. “We haven’t done enough on the retention.”

Percentage Inches Up

Minorities made up 6.5% of the reporters and editors on daily newspapers in 1986, according to an society survey released in April. The percentage has inched up from 4.8% in 1980, when blacks, Latinos, Asians and native Americans were 22% of the U.S. population.

But at the same time, factors such as immigration, larger family size and lower median age are causing the minority population to continue growing at a faster pace than the white population.

Members of minority groups were 13.4% of the graduating journalism seniors hired by daily newspapers in 1986, according to the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. But once hired, some minority reporters are soon frustrated by a lack of upward mobility.

Cose found that a higher percentage of minority journalists than whites wanted management careers. But he also found a larger proportion of whites than minority journalists had such responsibilities.

High Percentage Leaving

The 1985 study found that 13% of the experienced minority journalists surveyed had left newspapers and about 40% felt they would leave. Among whites only 22% said they expected to leave.

After leaving newspapers, minority journalists “tended to go into communication-related fields, like public relations, and some into teaching,” Cose said.

Fanning said she didn’t know “whether it’s stereotyping or whether it’s possibly because they haven’t been aggressive enough in promoting themselves” that so many minority journalists have left. The editors’ society Minorities Committee formed an advancement and retention subcommittee at the group’s convention in April.

Some news executives say white cronyism works against minorities when it comes to deciding who will move up the newsroom ladder.

Same Old Network

“Media in general still operate under the old-boy network,” said Al Fitzpatrick, director of minority affairs for the Knight-Ridder newspaper group. “They’re leaving in alarming numbers because they don’t get the opportunity to get promoted to top level positions in management.

“The main thing was getting (minority employees) through the door,” said Fitzpatrick, also president of the National Assn. of Black Journalists. “Then they said, ‘All is well.’ The industry didn’t prepare itself on what to do after they were in.”

“The problem . . . we all face having come up through this good-old-boy network is sensitizing ourselves,” USA Today editorial director John Seigenthaler said. “It’s very tough to change yourself, particularly if you were raised in a Southern segregated society.”

Some minority journalists whose careers began shortly after the 1968 Kerner Commission report pinpointed the need to integrate newsrooms say it’s harder for minorities today.

Civil Rights Movement

“We were a byproduct of the Kerner Commission report, of the civil rights movement,” said news anchor Maureen Bunyan of Washington’s WUSA-TV. “There is a feeling in many newsrooms that we have done enough for minorities.”

Some members of minority groups were drawn to journalism by the desire to effect social change, but left the newsroom out of frustration with inherent professional constraints.

Perhaps because of “who I am and my background, I may have felt more of a need to participate in social change rather than just writing about it,” said attorney Antoinette Cordero, who was a reporter with the Long Beach Press-Telegram before going to law school.

“The more I learned about things that were going on, the more I wanted to be active,” Cordero said. “But because as a journalist I felt I had to maintain some distance from those things in order to keep my credibility, I really couldn’t be as active as I really wanted.”

Still, retaining reporters can be a problem, regardless of race.

“I don’t think we should look at the issue of minority retention in a vacuum,” said Margy McCay, assistant personnel manager for the Associated Press. “It may be a problem, but it may be a problem for others too. I don’t know if it’s just minorities.”

Minorities represent about 6% to 8% of the editorial employees at Associated Press and 10% of the people hired by the news service in 1986, she said.

Tom Winship, former Boston Globe editor, said: “I don’t think it’s just happening with minorities, it’s whites, too. There seems to be a slight disenchantment among young reporters.”