Black, Latino, Asian and White: Diversity at NPR

When National Public Radio announced the hiring of Gary Knell as CEO in October, Joel Dreyfuss of The Root, an African-American oriented website, published an open letter challenging Knell and NPR to work harder to diversify its staff and programming.

So, over recent months, I have been building my own notes in an attempt to measure just how good a job NPR is doing now. What I find so far is that, racially and ethnically, NPR is not doing badly, and is getting better. To see if Latino, black and Asian listeners find programming that appeals to them, I broke down NPR audience figures by higher education and income. I discovered that within these categories, the levels of representation of the minority groups and whites are not far apart. Minority staffing in the newsroom and on air, meanwhile, continues to improve. NPR does significantly better than the industry averages in radio, television and newspapers. But then, we expect NPR to do better.