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Overall staffing in newsrooms decreased more last year than any other year since 1978, according to the ASNE newsroom census released Sunday.
While that means lower numbers of minority journalists, there was virtually no change to the percentage of minorities in the newsroom, according to the ASNE.
The overall number of newsroom employees shrank by 2,400 jobs, or 4.4 percent. At the same time, the number of minority journalists in the newsroom fell by 300 positions to 7,100 this year.
The proportion of minority journalists working at daily newspapers, however, grew minimally to 13.52 percent of all journalists from 13.43 percent last year.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities made up 34 percent of the population in 2006. The recent findings show that newsrooms in America have a long way to go to reach the ASNE goal of parity with the general population.
Editors attending the 2008 ASNE Convention, who were briefed on the results, said they were frustrated with the dismal findings. “It is clear that our efforts to advance diversity in the newsroom are simply not working,” said Karen Lincoln Michel, president of UNITY: Journalists of Color, and Madison bureau chief of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “I don’t think you can call it progress.”
Deirdre Childress, national secretary for NABJ and Weekend editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said the current decline of minorities in the newsroom is becoming depressing to many people.
“Our country is becoming browner and we are not paying attention,” Childress said.
The 2008 census surveyed 924 daily newspapers and projected the data to estimate numbers for all daily newspapers in the United States. The survey has been conducted yearly since 1978, when just 3.95 percent of the daily newsroom workforce was made up of journalists of color.
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