What does a "diverse" news organization look like? What goes on in such a place?
For all the talk about diversity in the media, you'd be hard-pressed to find many news organizations with the big-picture plan that would answer those questions. For the longest time, our industry has been almost singularly focused on another question: How?
How do we get more stories about Latinos in the paper? How do we get more Asian faces on the six o'clock news? How can we hire more people of color? How do we colorize the list of contacts or stretch our coverage to the south side, the east side, or whatever side of town is code for undercovered? How can we include poor people, gays and lesbians, faith communities, and the range of folks who haven't historically measured up to journalism's definition of valued news?
Those are important questions. Please keep asking them.
Last summer, though, a group of media leaders, nearly all of them people of color, took on more fundamental questions: What are the characteristics of a "diverse" news organization? Who are the people leading the way? What makes them effective? What stands in the way of success?
The group is part of the McCormick Tribune Fellowship, a seven-year-old program funded by the McCormick Tribune Foundation with the aim of directing more thought and energy in the industry toward matters of diversity. For the past three years, the foundation, working through the National Association of Minority Media Executives, has surveyed the group and issued a report on the findings. They've hired me to write each of those reports.
The 2004 report, to be released this week at the American Society of Newspaper Editors' convention in Washington D.C., is called "Leading The Way: Making Diversity Real." (We'll post a link to the PDF as soon as it is available.) In it, the Fellows offer a means by which news organizations can plot out a course for company-wide diversity that's deeper than counting heads, more meaningful than coverage of a Cinco de Mayo parade, and reaches from the front office to the janitor's office.
It's called the "McCormick Scale," and it describes five stages of a news organization's development.
Awareness: The company recognizes the depth and breadth of the diversity challenge it faces.
Course Correction: Historic disparities are addressed. The company ends practices that sabotage diversity efforts.
Doing Diversity: The work of inclusion begins in earnest.
Ingraining values: The value of diversity is understood by all, reflected in the workplace, and a benefit to the bottom line.
"A state of being": The ills of bias and discrimination have been put to rout.
The Fellows put meat to that skeleton by talking about the things, big and small, that should be happening at each stage. What's intriguing about this attempt to define diversity at a molecular level is that it reveals both the source of such a tool's greatest potential and the reason this work can be so perplexing.
The potential is everywhere. Each stage of the scale is an invitation to not just measure a company's progress, but to examine and debate its values.
The fifth stage –- what a Fellow called a "state of being" -– is a prime example. In describing what diversity "success" would look like, black Fellows almost unanimously spoke of a place where diversity is talked about all the time. It's a factor in every decision. For many of the white, Latino, Asian, and Native American Fellows, a company has succeeded when there's no more need to talk about diversity.
The contradiction is pregnant with discussion points. If your company's pushing for diversity, have you stopped to talk about what success looks like?
The frustration is a different matter. What comes out clearly from the Fellows, particularly people of color, is that everyone's not on the same page when we're talking about commitment. The industry gauges commitment and success by high-profile things like hiring statistics, head counts in stories, and the occasional, big-time promotion. As the newsroom numbers ooch forward, many media leaders call it progress.
Others, especially people of color, measure commitment on a broader scale. They're watching how the company corrects disparities throughout the organization, not just in their departments. They're paying attention not just to who's at the table, but to whose voice gets heard. They're not just interested in how undercovered communities get covered, but how much time, effort, and money the community relations department is spending there.
Journalists notice where the newspaper is circulated (and where it is not). Promotions managers pay attention to how people are portrayed on the news. Editors care which vendors the company employs. As those numbers remain static, the Fellows say, they question the company's commitment to true diversity.
With the McCormick Scale, the Fellows have pulled this conversation out of the parochial world of the newsroom and out of the narrow arenas of hiring and coverage. For anyone paying attention, it shouldn't be hard to see how all that might change our understanding of the relationship between a company's overall work on diversity and the morale, motivation, and retention of those who hold diversity dear.
The "Leading The Way" report is hardly the end of a creative process. Tap into the minds of these leaders –- executives from news and business as well as top managers from every floor of the company –- and you'll find grist for some of the most important conversations news organizations need to have if they're serious about succeeding.
- What does it mean to be a strong leader on diversity?
- How do you get past fear?
- Why haven't we gotten there yet?
Read the report. Look at the two that preceded it. Talk to co-workers about how they'd describe a good leader. How would diversity success look to them? Compare your company to the McCormick Scale and discuss where you are and why. Set about constructing your own list of measurements. Let "Leading The Way" get the conversation going.
We might start finding some answers if we can find the right questions.
There are two kinds of diversity. There are many uncivilized...
