Minority employment in newsrooms held steady in 2012

Minority employees make up 12.37 percent of all newsroom employees in this year’s American Society of News Editors newsroom census, up ever so slightly from last year’s 12.32 percent.

ASNE counted 4,700 minorities overall, compared with 5,000 last year. The reason that a decline in the number of jobs held by minorities actually counts as a small increase in their representation in newsrooms? It’s that minority employment declined at almost exactly the same rate as overall employment in newsrooms. As in previous years, while many online-only news organizations answered the survey, The Huffington Post, Politico and Patch weren’t among them. Some of the bigger digital outlets that did respond had higher percentages of minorities than the industry average: 13.3 percent at SeattlePI.com, 15.2 percent at ProPublica, 34.6 percent at California Watch, for example.