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Diversity in the Newsroom Essay

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Ethics in Journalism: Diversity in newsrooms not a trend in the new millennium

My interest in the lack of diversity in newsrooms across the United States began while I was enrolled in an ethics course in the journalism department, this semester. I hadn’t realized until this semester that diversity was integral to good, accurate, and fair reporting, and that it is also widely lacking in newsrooms. While the subject of diversity was only discussed over a few class sessions, it became a noticeably important issue for me, especially as I am an aspiring journalist. As a top editor at the Massachusetts Daily
Collegian, a student-run newspaper at the University of Massachusetts that has almost no minority representation in the newsroom, …show more content…

A newsroom that does not have an equal percentage of diverse reporters in correlation with the percentage of minority readers is essentially not providing fair coverage of their minority population.
A study published June 1, 2005 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation researched newsroom diversity percentages for 1,410 U.S. newspapers. The study found statistics for both corporate-owned newspapers and private-owned newspapers. As of
June 1, 2005, almost a year and half ago, the study found that most newsrooms are below expected parity levels for diverse newsrooms, in correlation with their minority readership, and three-fourths of those newspapers are the largest in the U.S. A mere 18 percent of newsrooms are at their target goals for diversity in the newsroom, while 44 percent of newspapers nationwide have a declining percentage of diverse reporters. The statistics regarding newsroom diversity for the top six corporate-owned newspapers
(USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the
New York Daily News, and the Washington Post) have also declined.
Hèctor Tobar, a Latin American author and a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, says that the Times has “failed to represent the large Spanish-speaking community” and says that there is a “growing divide between news writers and news consumers.” In his article, featured in the Nieman Reports for fall 2006, he

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