Growing up in north Philadelphia, Nia Ngina Meeks noticed that whenever her neighborhood was in the news, the stories were about murders and drug deals. She saw children on her block who spoke German. Some of her friends played chess. Neighbors owned homes and drove cars. But where were the stories about those people?
Meeks, a black woman, decided to become a journalist herself. She made her way to the Virginia Beach bureau of the Virginian-Pilot, where she wrote about the city’s massive Filipino population, recruited and mentored minority interns, and tried to give greater coverage to issues of diversity.
Edmund
Tijerina
Age: 35
Mexican American
“I believe that a lot of white journalists have some of the frustrations that minority journalists have, a sense of feeling very limited, that they’re not going to get a very broad experience where they are.”
Nia Ngina
Meeks
African American
“People are more than novelties, and the more we start to look at people as people, maybe we’ll have some depth reporting and maybe we’ll have reporters who feel more comfortable in the newsroom.”
Louis
Aguilar
Age: 34
Latino
“Either you’re on the fast track or not, and if you’re on the fast track you stay in the business.”
Responding to Diversity
Joe Grimm, the recruiting & development editor for the Detroit Free Press. says the key to retention is serving both minority and non-minority staffers. The story
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“I see the class coverage of people who are in the editors’ positions,” Meeks says. “Maybe they went to Brown, or Darmouth. … They’re writing for their friends and neighbors, and that’s fine, but there aren’t a lot of people like me writing for my friends and neighbors.”
She found herself fighting a battle on two fronts: in the newsroom and in public.
“You’re getting heat from both sides. Out on the street you have to defend the paper that doesn’t always make the best coverage decisions,” Meeks says. “Sometimes you get tired of being super person, so it doesn’t make it as difficult to leave.”
In 1999, she decided that she was too tired and left, wooed away by a source who recruited her to teach ninth grade English.
Meeks is part of a growing tide of minority journalists who are packing up and departing their newsrooms.
In 2000, the number of minority journalists working at daily newspapers fell for the first time in 23 years, according to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In its 2001 newsroom census, ASNE attributed the decrease to the fact that more minority journalists were leaving than were being hired.
Nearly 600 minority journalists got their first full-time newsroom positions in 2000, while at the same time, nearly 700 departed their jobs. In 2000, the minority retention rate dropped to 90% from 96% the year before. By comparison, the retention rate for white journalists was 95%, almost unchanged from 96% the year before.
ASNE’s census and an earlier survey conducted by Unity in 1999 show that people aren’t just leaving for other papers but for other industries in greater numbers, says Victor Panichkul, president of the Asian American Journalists Assocation.
“They’re getting fed up because newspapers as a whole have similar atmospheres,” Panichkul says.
For decades, diversity efforts have focused on recruiting more minorities. Retention has tended to fall by the wayside.
When Lynne Varner first arrived at the Seattle Times six years ago, there were many African-American journalists in the newsroom, she says. Today, she can count them on one hand. (According to the 2001 ASNE diversity survey, minorities make up 21.2 percent of the Seattle Times’ newsroom staff.)
“What I’ve seen here is that a few have left for other newspapers; the majority have just left the business entirely,” says Varner, a regional director of the National Association of Black Journalists. “I didn’t see my black colleagues leaving for anything spectacular; I just saw them trying to get the hell out of here. That’s led me to believe that the problem is more in retention than recruitment.”
Varner says recruitment efforts can sometimes exacerbate the retention problem.
“You can see the pattern because when papers recruit, they take from other papers,” she says. “Instead of there being new black journalists coming into the field, what you see is a lot of older black journalists leaving, going into other fields. The ones who stay are very highly prized.”
Michael Getler, ombudsman of The Washington Post, says more attention needs to be paid to what happens once a person is hired.
“There’s a lot of effort that goes into attracting people of different backgrounds into newspapers, but probably not as much attention into the question of what happens to them once they get inside,” he says.
Minority and white journalists want to feel engaged, respected, and rewarded by what they do, says Jill Geisler, group leader for the Leadership and Management faculty at Poynter. When they don’t feel that way, they tend to leave.
People interviewed for this story stressed that minority journalists often have a different idea of what it means for their news careers to be rewarding. There are white journalists who care passionately about coverage of minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. There are minorities that don’t consider diversity a personal priority. But for many minorities in news, the desire to see more informed coverage of their communities is their main reason for being in the profession.
“A lot of journalists of color get into the business … having this tremendous fire about wanting to go to poor communities and really get their stories,” says Ed Tijerina, a reporter. “Instead, they’re being told to write very few stories and to cover wealthy white suburbs.
“I had always been into cooking, and it was funny because the less fulfilled I felt at work, the more I threw myself into my cooking,” Tijerina says, laughing. In 1998, he threw himself into his cooking full-time, leaving his job at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to open a Mexican restaurant.
The ‘Taco Beat’
The Washington Post thought they had done all they could to attract and retain a young Hispanic journalist named Louis Aguilar.
Three years later, he left.
Aguilar was 28 years old, and only three years out of college, when the Post contacted him. It was his first day at a Denver alternative weekly and the Post “called out of the blue,” he says. The woman on the phone said she had noticed his stories on the wires from his previous job at the Colorado Springs Gazette.
“I thought it was a joke,” says Aguilar. “I literally thought it was one of my friends playing a joke on me, and I hung up on them.”
A few months later, Aguilar found himself at one of the world’s most respected papers with a two-year internship (it was later extended for a third year). He was also one of the youngest reporters in the newsroom. But he yearned to write stories that would matter to the communities he had come from.
“It was remarkably demoralizing to pick up the paper and read the most intricate details about things like Bosnia, but yet when it came to understanding my experience — which is inner city, Latino kid growing up and going to college — seeing none of that in the paper.”
When he pitched his ideas to his editors, they told him it would take several more years in the highly competitive Post newsroom before he would be able to write what he wanted. Aguilar couldn’t wait. He left in 1998 to write a book about his hometown of Detroit and pursue art projects; today, he is a business reporter at The Denver Post.
Even those minority journalists who are allowed to write about their communities may find it is not a desirable beat.
“I’ve seen papers pigeonhole people,” says Tijerina, now a reporter at the San Antonio Express-News. “Because they express interest in covering some minority issues, they get immediately shoved onto the ‘minority beat’ and they are never heard from again. And they’re stuck covering Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth.
“You might hear some Hispanics refer to it disparagingly as the taco beat,” Tijerina says. “A lot of papers, I think, have moved beyond that, but a lot have not.”
Some reporters adverse to covering the diversity beat call it “ghettoizing,” says Keith Woods, a member of the Poynter ethics faculty. “They accurately perceive the level of priority the news organizations give it,” Woods says.
“The news organization has to elevate the significance of stories about communities of color” Woods advises. “Those stories have to be seen as part of the path to success and not part of the path to obscurity.”
Stanching the Flow
Lynne Varner was promoted from staff reporter to editorial writer at the Seattle Times last year, but only after deciding to leave the paper. She had been asking for the promotion for three years.
She stresses that she is very happy now at the paper, but says that “came at the expense of some pain and some years.” If her newsroom had had better mentoring, more opportunities for people of color, and educational opportunities, and an eye on retention, she would not have considered leaving, she says.
The retention problem may best be addressed in the context of a wider retention efforts for all employees, some say.
“Mentoring, regular and honest career development advice, coaching, and opportunity can all be effective retention tools, but they should not be applied selectively,” says Joe Grimm, recruiter at the Detroit Free Press. “Everyone deserves these things.”
News organizations will also have to address the broader concerns of diversity in their editorial products.
Nia Ngina Meeks says she still considers herself a writer first. Walking away from journalism was a very difficult choice to make — was she letting down her community?
Two years later, readers still see her as their voice. “People still e-mail me or call me with a story idea, and they say, ‘Who’s covering this?’ ” says Meeks. “And it pains me sometimes to see that the stories don’t get covered because I’m not there.”
