When I read the headline on this New York Times story, “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It”, I clicked over to see whether it was about the Republicans or the Democrats. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be about the New York Times:
ONLY two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far. Of The Times’s newly named White House team, all six are white, as is most everyone in the Washington bureau.
Traveling to other departments, Metro has only three Latinos among its 42 reporters, in a city with the second largest Hispanic population in the country. Sports has one Asian man, two Hispanics and no African-Americans among its 21 reporters, yet blacks are plentiful among the teams they cover and the audience they serve. In the Styles section, every writer is white, while American culture is anything but.
The executive editor, Dean Baquet, is African-American. The other editors on his masthead are white. The staff with the most diversity? The news assistants, who mostly do administrative jobs and get paid the least.
I wish the story had more about the backgrounds of the people who were hired by the NYT. My guess is that the pool of candidates from which the NYT draws its reporters, editors, etc. is a pretty rarified one. I’m guessing they don’t recruit a lot of cub reporters from Central Park East High School.
We’re having related issues in kidlit. Everyone agrees we want more diversity in editorial, no one wants to face the real problem which is that a starting editor is paid too little to support life anywhere near New York City.
Typically editors are hired out of a seven sisters college. It isn’t hard to see that if you recruit from very expensive colleges, and offer a job that is barely minimum wage, you’re going to end up with employees who are relatively well-off. People not overly concerned with paying off student loans. People who can rely on a friend network or parental subsidy to survive the early years in NYC. In other words: rich kids or at least upper middle-class kids.
The number of people of color graduating from Brown with a degree in English Lit is tiny to begin with, and the number of those willing to work for chump change in a declining industry must be close to zero. I imagine much the same situation exists in newspaper publishing but substitute Columbia for Brown.
I’ve been making my observations somewhat inartfully but the reality is that rapid demographic changes introduce problems that can’t be accommodated overnight. You’ve got to think about the qualifications that are actually necessary for whatever field it is.
Take Fortune 500 CEOs, for example. Today’s demographics might be nice to fantasize about but the pool Fortune 500 CEOs are drawn from is 90% white. We can’t suddenly whip up a batch of tens of thousands of native-born Hispanics with college educations and twenty years of big company business experience.
The implication of that is that there are lots of areas that aren’t going to “look like America” for decades to come if ever. Unless we suddenly start hiring 16 year old high school drop outs for upper management positions or as doctors or lawyers.
There are ready solutions for that. If your thinking isn’t stuck in the 1950s. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about publishing industry bosses.
It’s a case of turning an oil tanker. If the system is that elite high schools send kids to elite colleges to then be recruited in publishing, that’s going to take decades, as you say. They could raise pay to make the job more attractive and manageable, but of course what they’ll actually do is push more work to free-lancers, and since free-lancers aren’t employees, they won’t show up in diversity numbers on either side of the ledger.