For the past decade, Bobbi Bowman has been at the center of the American Society of Newspaper Editors‘ efforts to make newsrooms more accurately reflect their communities.
Bowman, who is the society’s diversity and membership director, started her career as a suburban reporter at The Washington Post, where she eventually became an assistant city editor. She then moved on to the Detroit Free Press as deputy city editor and later to USA Today covering state and local politics. In 1990, Bowman became a recruiter for Gannett and later was managing editor at the Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
She writes a monthly column for the Maynard Institute’s Web site about “Covering the New America,” and contributes occasionally to Poynter’s Diversity at Work blog. She recently responded by e-mail to some questions I asked her. This is an edited version of our exchange.
Gregory Favre: How do you define diversity?
Bowman: I don’t define diversity, and I try not to talk about diversity. For me, diversity is a barrier word. It’s a word with too much baggage.
I like to talk about the changing demographics of the U.S. I love talking about the best story of 21st Century America — covering how this country will make the incredibly historic change from a majority-white nation to a majority-minority nation in the next 30 years.
No other nation has ever undergone the kind of demographic change the U.S. will experience in our lifetime.
How do you view this change in the digital age?
Bowman: As a new audience with lots of new places to get news — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Also, anyone can now publish his or her own “news site” and build an audience for it; it’s called a blog or a Facebook page.
We have come a long way from that day when ASNE set a goal of parity for newsrooms, but we are still a long way from where we hoped to be and need to be to truly reflect our communities. And it’s time for another diversity census of newsrooms. What do you expect?
Bowman: It will certainly be a year when we see another decline in the number of full-time journalists working in newsrooms. Beyond that, I never make predictions about our findings because I’m always surprised. We’re like the U.S. Census Bureau; we simply do the counting and report the findings.
ASNE’s diversity committee and its audience development committee plan to work closely together. What do the two committees hope to achieve with this partnership?
Bowman: We hope to help editors better understand that their future audience is a very diverse audience. Editors are now embroiled in shrinking budgets, loss of staff, loss of readers, making the Web work and keeping it updated.
We’ll get through that. It will be tough, but we’ll get through it. Then we are going to face an audience that doesn’t look like our newsrooms. That’s going to be the next battle, and it’s going to be more brutal. We want to help editors start to grasp the enormity of the next battle.
As you look back on your years with ASNE, what do you believe have been the most important developments in the area of diversity?
Bowman: Two developments come to mind:
The realization on the part of a growing number of news organizations that their communities are changing. Immigration is changing the face of communities in Nebraska, Iowa, North Carolina and southwest Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri.
Many newspapers in small communities are trying to cover the impact of these immigrants on their communities. They are using census data. They are sending reporters to Mexico. They are trying to hire reporters who speak Spanish, Arabic and other languages.
ASNE sponsored a yearly seminar for seven years called “Covering the New America.” It was specifically geared toward helping small and medium-size newspapers better cover this amazing topic. The commitment of some editors like John Lampinen of the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., to covering this topic was inspiring.
Secondly, ASNE now has a program that actually teaches editors how to manage a diverse newsroom and thereby improve the journalism they produce. And editors love it. Some have left saying we changed their lives. We just need money to keep it going because it truly makes a difference.
Do you think diversity is being left out of the conversation as the volume is turned up each day about the economic woes of the news industry?
Bowman: I don’t know. What I do know is the demographics are changing, and they are changing much more quickly than the demographics in our newsrooms. Nearly half the children who are 5 years and younger in the U.S. are minorities, and that’s an undercount. They are our future readers, advertisers and workers.
Given the push for immediacy in the media today, how do you think we should deal with ethical and harmful issues, such as hateful speech?
Bowman: We believe in the First Amendment. I defend folks’ right to say what they want, so I will keep my right to do the same thing. However, you can’t yell fire in a theater. I am delighted to see that more newspaper sites are requiring folks with comments to register, and I would require real names. If something is your opinion, you should be willing to own up to it.
Many diverse groups are creating their own products in print and on the Internet. Do you think they have given up on mainstream media, and what are the implications of this trend?
Bowman: I think this is where we lose the war.
You might have noticed that daily newspaper circulation has plummeted from a high of 63 million paid subscribers in 1984 to a little more than 51 million in 2007. It is no accident that the circulation for daily U.S. newspapers started declining in the 1980s — about the same time the current increase in minorities in the U.S. population became noticeable. Demographic changes are a significant factor in daily newspapers’ decline.
If young minority journalists don’t like how their local newspapers, TV or radio stations cover their communities, they can report and write their own news and be “mobile journalists” in a sense. Working independently, they will be the pioneering publishers and editors of the future.
