As much as any fixture of modern life, newsrooms have been canaries in the coal mine on matters of social change. The presence of women and minorities in the newsroom has been regarded as a bellwether of a better modern society, an indicator of its transformative possibilities, and a righteous assault on one of the last redoubts of white male hegemony.
That’s changed in recent years, and certainly in recent months. As technology has evolved, people moved away from the generational habit of reading newspapers; for many, social media fully replaced the newspaper. Hiring practices that started to level the playing field began to retrench, and institutional inertia led to a lack of sustained effort in making changes.
Now journalism, like every other industry, copes with life amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While in recent decades women and people of color assumed positions of leverage and influence in U.S. newsrooms, the diversity numbers have pulled back more. News organizations were already tasked with reducing hiring and headcount across the board because of widespread economic pressures. The global coronavirus rampage has made POC newsroom hiring, already a relative rarity, almost nonexistent.
Transparency issues
As a result, some news organizations have given up even trying to keep track of minorities in their newsrooms. It’s been too much for Meredith Clark of Northwestern University, who told The Associated Press in October that she was, “deeply discouraged that the journalism industry isn’t as transparent about its workforce in the way that it expects other industries to be transparent about theirs.”
It’s all a long way from the lofty promise of 1978, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors announced its oft-cited pledge to match the number of people of color in American newsrooms with their percentage in the population by the year 2000.
People of color in TV newsrooms increased to more than 26 percent between 2000 and 2020, approaching the 39.3% of their percentage in the overall population, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association. But even that increase was countered with news that, in the same period, people of color in TV news leadership positions declined among black and Latino journalists.
Survey: Newsroom diversity matters
A 2021 Reuters Institute survey found that, generations after the importance of and need for diverse newsrooms was first widely acknowledged, the journalism industry still doesn’t get it. “In the light of the Black Lives Matter movement and greater awareness of historic injustices, ethnic diversity remains the biggest priority for media companies – identified by 35% as the single most important priority in terms of improving newsroom diversity, followed by gender diversity (26%) and greater diversity from less advantaged groups (17%),” the Reuters survey reported.
Newsrooms being a step or more behind the times, in itself, is not a new issue. But the industry’s hidebound tendencies aren’t isolated to matters of gender, race and ethnicity, either. Almost two years after the advent of the pandemic, newsrooms have been slow to make hard, pivotal choices on the value of remote or hybrid work locations for their employees.
However reluctantly, the journalism industry will have to address hybrid work or WFH as the next attack on its historical comfort zone. The Reuters Institute survey found that hybrid work will likely be an everyday thing for many journalists, eventually, since only 9% of news companies plan to bring back a pre-COVID workplace strategy – and 89 percent of newsroom leaders support that.
Bias: Same arena, new metric
Even this far into the most devastating public-health crisis in 100 years, the journalism industry struggles to respond with anything close to a united front on working remotely. Only one-third (34%) of news organizations have a remote or hybrid working model in place, according to the Reuters report. Some 57% of news orgs said they were still deciding the best way to make hybrid work, work.
According to the report, newsroom managers are increasingly concerned about another kind of bias than the one they’re historically used to dealing with. The issue of bias in journalism has, ironically, evolved. Historically and today, the focus has been on who works in the newsroom; as WFH grows in stature, the issue’s also becoming who doesn’t work in the newsroom.
“More practically,” the report continues, “managers worry about issues like ‘proximity bias,’ where the voices of those working remotely get ignored whilst those physically in the office and so close to decision makers benefit by being there in person, as well as how to get people physically together and foster team spirit. Managers feel they are bearing the brunt of major changes to operational working with the extra burden of communicating with and motivating staff they rarely see face to face.”