Refocusing on newsroom diversity

[Commentary] Robert C. Maynard—journalist, editor, newspaper publisher, and former owner of The Oakland Tribune—spent much of his career trying to improve diversity in journalism. His namesake organization, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, is devoted to that effort. Twenty years after his death, the organization is headed by his daughter, Dori Maynard, who is troubled by what she sees as a decrease in attention paid to diversity in newsrooms.

“As one industry leader said a few years ago, ‘When it comes to diversity, it’s not only on the backburner—it’s not even in the kitchen,” she noted. About 90 percent of newsroom supervisors are white; only 12.37 percent of those in the newsroom are minorities, even though they make up 37 percent of the US population. The problem, Maynard said, is that when the journalism business model changed abruptly with the advent of the Internet, people went into “freefall panic” and diversity, she said, became an afterthought. But diversity is important. Robert Maynard, in his last public address before he died, said that “The country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told only by one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front door access to the truth.” So what’s to be done? Maynard´s daughter said that the Institute is commemorating the anniversary of her father’s death by refocusing on increasing the number of minorities in the journalism industry pipeline and retaining them once they’re there. The Institute is planning a possible series of online conversations that looks not only at what has gone wrong, but also at what has gone right—at coverage that works and why. She said they want to gather examples of how having a diverse staff adds “nuance to story and subject.”