A Case Study in Newsroom Imparity
Posted on Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 2:22 PM
In the news: A city newspaper under the microscope for racial
imparity in its newsroom and content that fails to serve the community's
readers.
This week, Marion Renault of the Columbia
Journalism Review examined long-standing racial problems at the
Gannett-owned Columbia Dispatch. He opens: “The giant, light-up
sign visible from The Columbus Dispatch’s newsroom proclaims it
to be ‘Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper.’ A more honest description might
be ‘Ohio’s Whitest Home Newspaper.’ In its almost 150 years of
existence, the paper has consistently failed to reflect, and therefore
serve, Columbus’s residents of color.”
The newspaper
has long faced criticism about its lack of staff diversity and often
stereotyped depictions of Black and other minority residents. It’s a
systemic problem in the paper’s newsroom: Renault reports that “44
percent of [Columbus] residents are nonwhite, while the staff of the
Dispatch is 95 percent white.... The census shows about 5 percent of the Dispatch’s
full-time newsroom employees are Black, Hispanic, Asian, or two or more
races.”
The paper is finally taking preliminary steps to
rectify the problem, but there’s no quick fix. Summing up the paper’s
efforts, Renault reports, “The Dispatch’s previously
all-white editorial board [has] brought on two Black members . . . the
paper [has] hired a full-time general assignment reporter who is Black .
. . employees completed diversity and inclusion training, and [editor
Alan] Miller says he plans to keep diversifying candidate pools for
staff openings.... Gannett, has pledged newsroom gender, racial, and
ethnic parity by 2025.”
Read the full story here.
Also
Notable:
Hearst Invests in Editorial Content
Last
week, Hearst announced that it would invest several million into
improved print magazine quality. Sara Guaglione of MediaPost.com reports
that the program, dubbed Premium Print by Hearst, will allow “the
magazines [to] have larger formats, higher-quality paper and improved
editorial ratios.”
Hearst has some specific print-related
projects in mind, reports Guaglione. The company’s popular YouTube
channel Delish will start producing a quarterly print edition.
Elsewhere, Good Housekeeping will start running 10 percent more
editorial pages. Read more about the company’s expanded print initiative here.
Journalists
Turning to Subscription Newsletters
Some journalists are
rethinking their relationships with major media brands and trying their
luck with subscription newsletters instead. Last week, Marc Tracy of the New
York Times wrote about Substack, a subscription newsletter platform
that is particularly popular for journalists going this route: “Most
Substack writers offer a mix of paid and free email newsletters. They
make money through subscriptions, not ads. Writers own their
newsletters, and the platform takes a 10 percent cut. Substack also
offers a legal defense service to writers of paid newsletters in the
United States.” It’s a compelling option for journalists whose media
employers may be in decline (particularly in the Covid-19 era) or who
have garnered large enough followings on social media to try independent
content. Read more here.
Fact-Checkers
Teaming Up to Combat Misinformation
The September 24 edition
of Factually, Poynter.org’s newsletter about fact-checking,
examines the uphill climb fact-checkers face during this
misinformation-plagued election cycle. According to Harrison Mantas and
Susan Benkelman of Poyter.org, on September 18, Poynter’s International
Fact-Checking Network (aka IFCN) “launched FactChat, a bilingual
WhatsApp chatbot that brings together fact-checks from 10 American
fact-checking organizations with two Spanish-language broadcasters to
offer users 2020 election fact-checks in English and Spanish.” The
movement is taking root elsewhere, too: Mantas and Benkelman report that
Ghana Fact in Africa is looking to pool fact-checking resources before
Ghana’s election in December. Read more here.
NYT
Cooking’s Android Design
In a September 24 piece of
NYT.com, product designer Jayne Lee discusses NYT Cooking’s recent
design system development project. The piece lays out the guiding
principles that led the process and the system’s design and typography
elements. Read the full article here.
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