How to Keep Journalists of Color in the News Business
A tuition-free college education will be beneficial, but that only addresses part of the problem.
The real tests aren’t in the classrooms.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFPIn January alone, Time magazine sacked 15% of its unionized workers. Sports Illustrated announced cuts so deep its own survival is on the line. The Los Angeles Times lost about 115 journalists — roughly 20% of its newsroom staff.
Even The Washington Post, owned by one of the richest people in the world, offered to buy out 240 employees in December, less than a year after slashing 20 newsroom positions and leaving 30 more unfilled.
There is an ominous undertone to the layoffs hitting some of the most recognizable names in media. Every loss chips away at the slow, labored process of creating newsrooms that look like the communities they cover.
Take the LA Times: About half of those who lost their jobs belonged to at least one of the newspaper union’s affinity groups representing Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and North African journalists. That’s a significant loss for a newspaper anchored in a city where only about three in 10 residents are White.
The layoffs received praise from diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — opponents who have tied themselves in knots trying to argue that “diversity” is synonymous with “less qualified” or “reverse discrimination.” It’s an absurd claim to throw at any industry, but for the news world, it is especially foolish. Hidden in plain sight is the notion that non-White people may be too biased or don’t have the chops to report and write about the politics, polices, technology, businesses that affect the country and, in turn, their communities.
How can that be? We are a part of all these stories. An equally important question: Don’t we go to school to get qualifications to do the crucial job of informing the public?
Aspiring journalists from historically marginalized communities do so despite not ordinarily having the means or luxury to embrace an uncertain career, which news has certainly become.
That’s why it was exciting to hear that the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York would be using a philanthropic gift of $10 million to put it on the path of becoming tuition-free in perpetuity by 2027. The school’s dean, Graciela Mochkofsky, framed it as a way to “eliminate the barriers that stand between the people who want to go into journalism and a successful career in news media.” It’s a particularly important effort in a school where more than half of the students are people of color or belong to other underrepresented groups.