Newsrooms struggle to look more like the audience

While hundreds of minority journalists are in Boston for a conference this week, industry leaders are trying to tackle a growing concern: how to preserve diversity in the nation's newsrooms. As part of the annual Asian American Journalists Association convention, which is expected to draw more than 650 journalists, labor organizers, media corporations, and representatives from US minority journalism groups plans to discuss how to maintain diversity among the press. The meeting comes at a time when the industry is struggling with revenue losses and massive job cuts because of the recession and readers' and advertisers' migration to the Web. The industry has grappled with how to make newsrooms more diverse in order to more accurately reflect the changing demographics in the United States at least since the 1940s, but industry leaders say having multicultural perspectives is even more necessary now. Minorities make up about a third of the US population and are expected to represent half by 2042, with rates for Asian and Hispanic Americans growing the fastest, according to the Census Bureau.