Diversity: Employment

For 40 years after diversity finally became a principal value of American journalism in the late 1960s, news institutions endeavored earnestly, but with only qualified success, to make news coverage and newsroom staffing representative of society's diversity.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) defined diversity in 1978 when its members vowed to increase the proportion of ethnic minorities in daily journalism equal to their percentage of the population by the end of the twentieth century. The editors' manifesto, formalizing diversity efforts ASNE had begun in early 1972, quickly was followed by similar actions within other press organizations and journalism education groups who set goals and adopted similar diversity standards for racial and ethnic representation in their ranks. The Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) began tracking minorities in broadcast news jobs in 1972. By 1978, minorities made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but only about 4 percent of daily newspaper journalists.

ASNE sought to ensure that its goal of fully inclusive journalism—known as the “Year 2000 Plan”—would endure by issuing a yearly progress report on the diversity drive over the next three decades. But journalism's diligence in measuring diversity far outstripped its effectiveness in meeting the widely publicized goal. By 1998, with press diversity at about 11 percent and the U.S. minority population totaling nearly 25 percent and rising, ASNE extended its projected employment deadline to 2025.

With rare exceptions, each year of the ASNE census did see a slight increase in minority newsroom employment, though gains were usually fractional. Yet on the eve of the 30th anniversary of its original pledge, ASNE's yearly census found diversity dipping from 13.9 percent in 2006 to 13.6 percent a year later, while the percentage of minority-group Americans had soared to nearly 35 percent.

By this time, broadcast journalism had labored for nearly a third of a century pursuing the goal of more representative newsrooms, with no more to celebrate than its print news counterparts. In July 2006, RTNDA reported nonwhite journalists in radio newsrooms had dropped by two-thirds, from 16 percent in 1998 to about 6.4 percent (albeit during a period when all radio journalism employment was in sharp decline). Television newsroom diversity showed a slight gain, rising by about one percentage point to 22.2 percent.