Newspapers Struggling to Raise Minority Coverage : Journalism: Guidelines have been set up to alter perceptions of blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

Stung by criticism that they either ignore minorities or cover them in a negative, superficial and sensationalized fashion, a number of major newspapers around the country have made serious efforts to present a more balanced picture of minority life.

No paper has been more diligent or innovative in this than USA Today.

Almost every day, in keeping with its basic design formula, USA Today publishes four photographs on the top half of Page 1. Almost every day, in keeping with the original edict of its founder, Al Neuharth, at least one of those four photos shows a member of an ethnic minority (and at least one of the other photos shows a woman).

“Don’t tell me the f------ news of the day doesn’t justify that ‘cause that’s the formula,” Neuharth used to snap at subordinates who questioned his policy.

Neuharth retired last year, and Peter Prichard, now the editor of USA Today, says that he’s re-examined the formula in response to concerns raised by some editors at the paper.

“I decided to continue it,” he says. “If you don’t insist on it, somehow the minorities get cut out of the news.”

That’s why Neuharth ordered the formula in the first place.

Only by so doing, he says, would Page 1 of what he likes to call “the nation’s newspaper” accurately reflect the growing diversity of the nation’s population.

“I felt that if we did not have such a formula, we would be more likely to revert to the more traditional play or presentation of . . . picturing minorities only when they’re in trouble,” he says.

But doesn’t a rigid formula distort the news--especially on Page 1, a newspaper’s prestigious daily showcase, the contents and appearance of which editors sometimes debate with almost evangelical fervor.

USA Today editors “don’t have to stretch that often . . . four, five times a year maybe,” Prichard says--and he and Neuharth, both white, agree that an “occasional stretch” is fully justified “to try to bring into balance what’s been out of balance for so goddamn long,” as Neuharth puts it.

Besides, apart from truly major stories--a big election or earthquake, a crisis in the Persian Gulf or in the savings and loan industry--what’s “newsworthy” is largely an arbitrary decision made mostly by white male editors (which will be the subject of Thursday’s story in this series).

Placement on Page 1

On any given day, newspapers disagree on what stories and pictures belong on Page 1, based on widely varying criteria. For photos on Page 1 of USA Today, Neuharth just added one more criterion.

USA Today’s commitment to presenting the full diversity of our multicultural society goes far beyond Page 1 pictures, though. A determined effort is made to include minorities in every element of every section of the paper--in stories, headlines, photographs, cartoons, drawings, charts, quotations--on subjects ranging from car dealers to Christmas shoppers, from children’s toys to women’s fashions to veterans’ problems.

USA Today’s policy is not quite as all-inclusive as its Page 1 policy suggests, though. Like most other newspapers, the USA Today definition of “minority” is often limited to blacks. Sixty of the 65 minority pictures on Page 1 in the past two months have been of blacks. Moreover--again like most other newspapers--most of these blacks (48 of the 60) have been athletes and entertainers.

The design formula of USA Today’s Page 1, intended to maximize newsstand sales, has small photos in the upper left and right corners of the page, referring to stories in other sections. This make it easier to include minorities on Page 1--especially since one of these photos is almost invariably an athlete, and more than half the blacks pictured on Page 1 of USA Today in the past two months have been athletes.

But USA Today doesn’t limit itself to one minority per day on Page 1. About a third of the time over the past two months, there have been two (or more) photos of minorities on Page 1.

Minority journalists have responded enthusiastically to USA Today’s policies on people of color, and they say that this multiplicity of photos in particular pleases them; it makes them feel the paper doesn’t just have an obligatory quota--”OK, we’ve got our black for today”--an attitude that they say they often sense in other media and throughout society.

“I love that paper,” says Gayle Pollard Terry, an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times. “That paper makes me feel at home. . . . Sometimes I feel like there’s a little piece of me in that paper. . . . You can see the diversity within our community. It makes me feel normal. . . . USA Today has great stories about minorities in every section.”

Pollard Terry’s comments were echoed time and again by other minority journalists, some of whom were quick to say, however, that as much as they admire USA Today for its policies of racial inclusion, they don’t think of it as a first-rate newspaper overall, largely because it doesn’t treat enough serious subjects in depth.

Indeed, critics say that it is easier for USA Today to include more minorities in its coverage than do most other newspapers precisely because it does not purport to be a traditional newspaper of record, committed to covering the official activities of a white-dominated local Establishment, and therefore has more latitude in what it chooses to cover.

Moreover, since the paper takes a resolutely upbeat approach to the news--”happy news,” some call it--there’s a greater predisposition to include the stories of everyday life that most other newspapers routinely ignore, on minorities and whites alike.

But Neuharth dismisses that criticism as “an excuse” that other editors offer for their own failures.

“Any paper can do what we did,” he says. “All you need is a policy at the top that’s spelled out and implemented.”

Neuharth may have been more effective than most in enforcing a new policy, in part because of his strong personality and in part because USA Today was a new newspaper--a new kind of newspaper--less inhibited by the old habits and traditions that often prevent change in established institutions.

Outside Usual Beats

One reason newspapers have had trouble giving adequate coverage to minorities--among other subjects--is that the standard definition of news, the cultural architecture of news, is largely dictated by historic forms and processes. Newspapers have beats (the courts, the White House, City Hall) and sections (sports, business, lifestyle), and anything that doesn’t readily fit into those forms is often ignored or not even noticed.

That may help explain why newspapers were so late in discovering both the women’s movement and the mass migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, among many other stories.

But Neuharth felt that he was redefining newspapers with USA Today, and he wanted to redefine the news as well.

Neuharth wanted better coverage (and employment) of minorities not just at USA Today but throughout the newspapers of its parent company, Gannett Co., of which he was president and chairman before his retirement.

Gannett is the largest newspaper chain in the country, with 82 daily papers, and management has worked hard to encourage multicultural coverage (and employment) in all of them, even though most are in small and medium-sized cities without large minority populations.

Gannett newspapers are regularly evaluated on their coverage of minorities. Papers are graded on a 10-point scale and results are tabulated and published, usually annually, in the company’s in-house newsletter, “News Watch.”

In August, for example, the Huntington, Va., Herald-Dispatch and Visalia Times-Delta were listed as the best with scores of 9.5; the Ft. Myers, Fla., News-Press was the worst at 3.0.

Papers are praised in “News Watch” (and awarded points the company’s “All-American Contest”) for such practices as using minority columnists, comic strips and photographs; publishing minority wedding, birth and death announcements, and “mainstreaming” minorities--including them as examples and experts in routine stories, as opposed to stories specifically on minorities. (Increasingly, points are also awarded for hiring and promoting minorities.)

Gannett makes a particular effort to encourage “mainstreaming.” Thus, stories on Oprah Winfrey’s weight problems or the first Latino bank president or a Vietnamese chef in a Vietnamese restaurant don’t earn All-American points. But a Visalia Times-Delta photograph of an Asian-American pediatrician examing a black child was singled out for praise in “News Watch” last year.

Like USA Today, most other Gannett papers have also developed minority source lists--lists of experts and others to be interviewed when a particular issue is being written about--and top editors and corporate executives encourage and monitor their usage.

“Every good reporter keeps a personal file of experts for any occasion,” says Charles Erickson of Hispanic Link News Service. “Whether you need a psychologist to provide instant diagnoses of former hostages, an economist, a political observer or a medical or science expert, you go to your handy file--mental or written.”

But minority journalists have long complained that white reporters and editors don’t consciously try to develop such sources among minorities, so readers seldom see Latino or Asian-American surnames associated with expertise. Nor do they see photos of experts of color--just white.

Result: White and minority readers alike may be left with the erroneous impression that the only people in the world who really know much about anything are white people--unless, of course, the issue is poverty or gangs or some other specifically “minority issue.”

In response to those criticisms, several non-Gannett newspapers have also developed minority source lists in the past year or so, among them the Seattle Times (see accompanying story, page 31) and San Francisco Examiner. But K. Connie Kang and Raul Ramirez, both assistant metropolitan editors at the Examiner, say that the list is seldom used there, even though top editors endorsed it and it was made available to everyone through the paper’s computer system.

Reporters go to people they’re comfortable with and regard as “repositories of authority,” Ramirez says; cultural conditioning discourages most white journalists from regarding minorities as authorities.

Surge in Minorities

The development of a minority source list at the Examiner is part of an effort by editors there to provide better and more sensitive coverage of the area’s growing minority population--now about 54% in the city, 40% in the metropolitan area. Since April, Kang’s primary responsibility has been to try to get more stories on those communities into the paper.

How successful has she been?

“It’s not working as well as she wants or I want or anyone else wants, but it’s a heckuva lot better than we were doing,” says Managing Editor Frank McCulloch.

Although Kang is authorized to draw on various Examiner reporters to work for her, McCulloch concedes that some editors have been “resistant to parting with reporters and with space” and she has had to come to him to intercede.

Editors at the Examiner and elsewhere are “talking more about having to cover minorities now,” Kang says. “They’re saying all the right things. But then I think, sometimes, they mistake the talk for action. . . . I think, at this point in our history, the media really are, collectively, hypocritical.”

This complaint about “lip service”--much talk, little action--was voiced repeatedly by journalists, minority and white alike, in the course of interviews for this story.

True, some papers have occasionally published major series on blacks or Latinos or--especially in recent years--on Asian-American immigrants. Such series offer “wonderful windows” on minority life, says Michele Norris, a black reporter for the Washington Post. But then the press closes the window until three or five or 10 years later, when editors decide it’s time for another “special” report. In between, Norris and others say, there is rarely any routine, consistent coverage of minorities.

A few newspapers are now trying to change this, to become more inclusive and less stereotypical in their routine, daily coverage.

There’s been a “discovery by white American leadership, finally . . . that you cannot . . . ignore large percentages of your population and still be a healthy society,” says Robert Maynard, editor and publisher of the Oakland Tribune.

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, for example, all of which have long been criticized by minorities, are generally credited with having improved measurably of late, although none are perceived as being among the leaders.

Sydney Schanberg, who left the New York Times in 1985 after his column on urban affairs was canceled, says the Times, “like most other newspapers, covers the news through a prism that belongs to their constituencies, and their constituencies are not Latinos or blacks. . . . (That’s) one of the reasons I’m not there any more.”

Schanberg, who is white, says that New York Newsday, where he is now associate editor and a columnist, is “the first paper I’ve ever worked for that shows a commitment” to covering minorities.

New York Newsday (like Newsday itself, owned by the Times Mirror Co., parent company of the Los Angeles Times) is indeed widely perceived as generally doing a sensitive, responsible job of covering minorities--not an easy task in the superheated media climate of New York, where the media are quick to anoint black “spokesmen” and “leaders” of dubious legitimacy.

But even Newsday was roundly criticized last spring for publishing an inflammatory Page 1 headline (“City on the Edge”) alongside a picture of a flame and the city skyline while juries were deliberating the cases against two white men accused of murdering a black in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Emphasis on Blacks

The New York Times has largely avoided the sensationalism that marks the city’s tabloid newspapers, especially on racial matters, and in the past two or three years, it, too, has begun to provide more insightful coverage of minorities.

One day last summer, the paper published five major stories on blacks. Late last month, the paper published a Page 1 story on the black middle class. Last spring, the paper published two stories the same day explaining the black boycott of Korean greengrocers in New York from each side’s point of view.

Although the New York Times has also published a number of thoughtful stories on Asian-Americans recently, it has devoted far more attention to blacks than to any other ethnic minority.

The same is true of most other newspapers--including the Chicago Tribune. For the Tribune, that represents progress; for decades, the paper was widely perceived as being indifferent to all minorities, especially blacks, largely because of its staunchly conservative political stance.

But the racial makeup of the city has changed; it’s now only a little more than one-third white but 41% black and 19% Latino. The entire Chicago metropolitan area is now about one-third minority. With those changes have come a change in attitude.

The Tribune has published major series on the underclass, public housing and public schools in the city, and a twice-weekly feature, “About the Town,” now often tells the stories of minority residents and institutions.

In recent months, “About the Town” subjects have included a black hairdresser, a black tombstone dealer, an all-black private school and a multicultural art center.

Manuel Galvan, a member of the Tribune editorial board, says the paper’s coverage of minorities has undergone “a healthy change” in the 10 years he’s been there, but he worries that in the Tribune, as in most newspapers, minorities are “still not woven into the fabric of society, still considered separate.”

Galvan now heads a task force studying how the paper can best serve the city, and he hopes to address that issue in the course of the task force’s work. Meanwhile, blacks in particular continue to criticize some Tribune coverage.

In May, for example, when Sammy Davis Jr. and Jim Henson died the same day, the Tribune was the only major newspaper in the country to publish Henson’s obituary on Page 1 but not Davis’. Many blacks were outraged.

But the Tribune--like other papers--has found that even when it tries to do what it thinks is the right thing, it may stub its journalistic toe.

The paper’s series on the underclass was a massive undertaking--the work of almost 60 reporters, editors and photographers, 32 stories in all--designed to present what Editor Jack Fuller calls “the unvarnished truth about a very important subject.”

But many blacks were offended by the unrelievedly bleak portrait the series painted. Blacks were also indignant over the title of the series--”The American Millstone”--a characterization not likely to improve the self-esteem of any individual or group so described or to encourage others to think well of that group.

The Los Angeles Times encountered similar resentment with a series on the underclass in 1981.

The Times series began with a story that was headlined, across the top of Page 1, “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs.” Inner-city residents protested vigorously--and many still complain, almost 10 years later--about the “racist innuendo” of the words marauders and prey and the “senseless savagery” these “marauders” were said to inflict on suburban whites.

Critics were equally upset by the illustration that accompanied the story and ran across the top of a full page, with large arrows leaping like panzer divisions from South-Central Los Angeles into predominantly white suburbs.

The National Assn. of Black Journalists voted that story the “most objectionable news story” of the year and called it “reckless . . . preposterous . . . unpardonable journalism.”

Although Times’ coverage of gang activity, drive-by shootings and other inner-city violence continues to give the front page of its metropolitan section a police blotter feel at times, the paper clearly has become both more sensitive and more comprehensive in its coverage of minorities over the past two years or so.

One day last month, The Times published a story on Page 1 of the Metro section on a 25-year-old black who is both a preacher and a police officer; a story on Page 1 of the Business section on a Japanese company teaching mathematics to more than 35,000 American students; a story on Page 1 of View on a Chinese exile writing a book in Massachusetts, and another story on Page 1 of View on a blind black man who operates an unlicensed radio station in Springfield, Ill.

Some of The Times’ improved minority coverage derives from a renewed commitment to local coverage in general. But the city of Los Angeles is now one-third Latino, 15% black and 10% Asian-American; the Los Angeles-Orange County metropolitan area is 30% Latino, 9% black and 9% Asian-American--split almost 50-50 between whites and minorities. The resultant “collision” of cultures, the “interweaving” is the most interesting and exciting story in Los Angeles today, says City Editor Peter H. King.

That story has been told most compellingly (and sometimes controversially) in a continuing series of about 20 articles by Itabari Njeri’s in the paper’s View section and in a Page 1 story last March on the transformation of South-Central Los Angeles from “a segregated black community to a Latin barrio.”

The Times’ Coverage

The Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for a series of articles written by and about Latinos, has also written in recent months about several of the individual ethnic cultures in Los Angeles--Page 1 stories last month on recreation activities of Central American immigrants and on the Cham, Indochinese Muslims living in Orange County; a series of editorials on the black male; a cover story in Sunday Calendar on the interaction of politics and the arts in the Latino community.

The Times has devoted considerable attention to the city’s various Asian/Pacific communities and to their ties with their homelands, not only in news coverage but in cultural coverage in Sunday Calendar and in the Business section every Monday.

The thrice-weekly daily San Gabriel Valley section of The Times contains the paper’s most consistent Asian-American coverage. The western San Gabriel Valley is now about 30% Asian-American--up from 2% in 1970--and the section has a reporter covering Asian-American activities as a regular beat; every Sunday, the section includes in its “Calendar of Events” a listing for “Chinese Community” events, in both Chinese and English.

The Times also published a special section, “The Shattered Dream,” in Chinese and English after the upheavals in Beijing in 1989 and another, also in Chinese and English, early this year on “The Golden Decade” of the 1990s for Chinese-Americans.

But The Times is still no multicultural Mecca. Like other major papers, The Times is still widely criticized for omitting minorities from its routine news coverage, for ignoring stories of special interest to minority communities and for publishing too much negative news on minorities. Moreover, The Times--with bureaus in 41 domestic and international cities and nine special, geographically zoned sections or editions in Southern California--still has no bureau in South-Central or East Los Angeles and no central city zone section to cover those areas or the various Asian-American communities in and adjacent to downtown.

Some critics have likened this pattern to a bank’s red-lining map, designed to exclude minority neighborhoods from home mortgage loans.

Responding to Changes

Times editors argue that the paper can cover East and South-Central Los Angeles from its nearby downtown office, but critics say that there is no substitute for having reporters actually in a given community, every day, to see and hear and sense what people are doing and saying and thinking.

Moreover, since most metropolitan daily newspapers (The Times included) no longer cover routine community news, many use suburban zone sections (sometimes called “Neighbors”) to fill that void.

Newspapers that have no such section for minority communities miss what could be their best opportunity to cover what Sam Fulwood III, a reporter in The Times Washington bureau, calls “the ordinariness” of everyday minority life, an effective (if only partial) antidote to the steady media inoculations of news on the pathology of minority behavior.

Shelby Coffey, editor of The Times, says a task force is studying the paper’s entire zoning strategy, and “I would like very much to get a central city zone section going as quickly as we can”--a hope expressed often over the years by others at The Times but repeatedly postponed. Coffey, a white, also says that he would like to turn Nuestro Tiempo, The Times’ monthly, bilingual section serving the Latino community, into a weekly.

Nuestro Tiempo, which began as a periodic advertising supplement in 1987, became a monthly editorial feature early last year. Circulation is now about 450,000--90,000 distributed to Times subscribers, 350,000 mailed to non-subscribers--all free and all in heavily Latino areas. About 6,000 copies are included with materials purchased by schools participating in the Newspaper in Education program.

Nuestro Tiempo now appears 15 times a year, but Coffey says that because of the current economic downturn, no specific timetable exists for its expansion to a weekly, or for creation of a central city zone section.

Other papers have done more, and more quickly, on both fronts. The Miami Herald, for example, has a daily, Spanish-language newspaper, El Neuvo Herald, and the Herald, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlanta Constitution--among others--have special zoned sections for their minority communities, as well as for outlying white suburbs.

Critics say that the Los Angeles Times has been slow to serve its minority readers because the paper devoted resources instead to pursuing its traditional core white readers when they began moving out of the central city to Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, San Diego and elsewhere, but Times executives deny that charge.

Similar charges have been leveled at--and denied by--other papers, including the Miami Herald. In the early 1980s, the Herald expanded its coverage and circulation on the state’s Treasure Coast, north of its primary coverage areas, then retrenched, in part because Herald executives realized that they had to pay more attention to their home base, where circulation penetration was slipping.

Much of that slippage resulted from a shift in demographics even more dramatic than that experienced by Los Angeles. The city of Miami is now more than 60% Hispanic and almost 25% black; the metropolitan area is 41% Hispanic and 19% black.

“We are the minorities . . . and we have to change the paper so that it reflects that,” says Janet Chusmir, a white, who is executive editor of the Herald.

Toward that end, both Chusmir and Herald Publisher David Lawrence, also white, are taking Spanish lessons, and both speak with vigor about their determination to cover the fractious, multicultural area the Herald serves.

Lawrence, previously the publisher of the Detroit Free Press, has a reputation for caring deeply about minorities and for insisting that his newspapers cover them thoroughly and sensitively.

Although Lawrence, like most publishers, has had to cope with some staff dissatisfaction this year because diminished advertising had cut into news budgets, he is widely regarded, inside the paper and out, as unflagging in his commitment to pluralism in Herald coverage (and employment).

“I’ve met people in his position who have . . . . a commitment in principle,” says Fabiolo Santiago, managing editor of El Nuevo Herald. “Dave Lawrence does it. He’s had a major impact.”

Garth Reeves, publisher of the Miami Times, the city’s leading black newspaper, says Lawrence is a “hands-on guy . . . by far the best guy the Herald has had (in my lifetime).” Lawrence is going to “bring the community together,” Reeves says.

That may not be so easy in Miami.

There have been four race riots in Miami in less than a dozen years, and tensions remain high, especially between blacks and Hispanics.

Blacks have felt increasingly disenfranchised in Miami since the massive influx of Cubans that began when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and truly accelerated in the 1970s and early 1980s. At first, Cubans took many of the tourist industry jobs that had historically been filled by blacks. Soon the Cubans--many well-educated and successful in Cuba--found better jobs, started their own businesses and began to amass economic and political power.

Now they run Miami, and many blacks think that the Herald panders to the Cuban community at their expense (a charge that Herald editors deny but one widely believed by black reporters on the staff).

Just a few years ago, though, it was the Cubans who were upset with the Herald. It was a liberal paper, and the expatriate Cuban community, violently opposed to Castro, was conservative. The paper was regarded as “the biggest enemy of the Cuban people, the biggest friend of Castro,” says Barbara Gutierrez, then a Herald reporter.

Cuban press conferences in Miami often began with “20 minutes of violent attacks against the Herald,” Gutierrez says. On one occasion, she says, “I was scared for my life. I sat near a fountain, trying to hide.”

In October, 1987, the Cuban American National Foundation published a full-page advertisement in the Herald, attacking the paper for “neglect, manipulation and censorship of Cuban and Cuban-American news” and for a “blatant and basic disregard of Cuban-American values.”

The next month, the Herald began publication of El Nuevo Herald--so named because an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to capture Hispanic readers was called El Herald.

El Nuevo Herald is a three-section newspaper, about a third of it filled with stories translated from the main Herald, a third with wire service stories and a third written and edited by a separate news and editorial staff of 65, about 40 of whom are Cuban. The paper covers Hispanic activities in the Miami area and news throughout Latin America, even sending its own correspondents abroad on occasion.

The paper has tried to extend its original mission of covering Cuban news and now has reporters specializing in various other Central and South American countries as well. But Cuban news still dominates.

As Gutierrez, now city editor of El Nuevo Herald, says, “I’m the only city editor of a daily paper in the United States with a map of Havana on my wall. But we cover Havana as local news.”

The combination of El Nuevo Herald and the main Herald enables the paper to do “a better job than most” in covering minorities, says Ivan Roman, a reporter for El Nuevo Herald and president of the Florida Assn. of Hispanic Journalists.

“But saying the Herald does a better job than most papers is like saying you’re the tallest pygmy in camp,” Roman says.

Knight-Ridder

The Philadelphia Inquirer--like the Herald--is a Knight-Ridder paper, and the Inquirer, too, stands relatively tall in the generally stunted journalistic camp.

Acel Moore, associate editor of the Inquirer, says that in late 1982, Eugene Roberts, then executive editor, asked him to “evaluate how we cover the inner city.”

Moore examined the paper’s coverage for several months and concluded, “We were not doing an adequate or an accurate job of reporting the largest minority community in Philadelphia”--the black community.

Roberts, a white, asked Moore, a black, to conduct a series of racial awareness seminars for editors and other senior staff members over six months in 1983.

Because blacks are by far the largest minority in Philadelphia, Moore’s emphasis was on black culture and black life.

Simon Li, then a deputy city editor at the Inquirer and now deputy foreign editor at the Los Angeles Times, says that the seminars seemed largely designed to “expose the extent of your ignorance about the black community.” Li had some criticism of the program but found it a “useful” exercise.

Moore says that Inquirer coverage of blacks began to improve after the seminars, and the Inquirer now requires all new newsroom staffers to attend a session on minorities as part of their orientation.

Such training is not uncommon at Knight-Ridder newspapers, which--along with Gannett--is the industry leader in treatment of minorities; in many ways, the Detroit Free Press, under Lawrence, became the leader at Knight-Ridder.

Although there are some who say the paper’s commitment has slipped some since Lawrence left inthe fall of 1989, Free Press executives deny it. Even now, the paper is producing a massive series, involving 15 reporters, on blacks in Detroit.

Of course, the city of Detroit is more than 70% black--the metropolitan area is 21.5% black--and in such a city in 1990, one would expect thorough coverage of blacks. The same is true of several other newspapers in predominantly black cities--among them the Washington Post, Oakland Tribune, Cleveland Plain-Dealer and Gary (Ind.) Tribune.

These papers, in varying degrees, generally do a better job than most in covering everyday black life, in part because they have high-ranking black editors and in part because everyday black life is everyday life in those cities.

But Atlanta is also more than 70% black in the city (and 23% black in the metropolitan area), and critics there say that the Journal and Constitution, despite improvments in recent years, still don’t adequately reflect that reality.

But every city--and every newspaper--is different.

Washington is almost 70% black--and 27.6% black in the metropolitan area--for example, but because the federal government is the biggest story in town, and the people who run the federal government are still largely white, the Post--while covering its black community far more thoroughly than most other papers--still misses “much that happens” in black Washington, says Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam.

Managing Editor Leonard Downie says that the paper also falls short in its coverage of the growing Salvadoran and Asian-American communities in and around Washington.

The paper did publish a much-touted series on immigration, though, and another on successful blacks in the Washington suburbs, as well as several additional stories on everyday black life and lifestyle trends and on growing conflicts between blacks and Latinos in the area.

Nevertheless, while Washington has “more successful black families . . . than there have ever been in any community in the history of the United States,” in the words of Post Publisher Donald Graham, critics who say the Post has done “a much better job of covering” the black underclass and drugs and crime than this historic phenomenon “have a good argument.”

Joyce Sherwood and Peter Johnson of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.