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Exploring the Perceptions of Diversity by Minority Journalists in the Wake of Shrinking Newsroom Staffs A

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Exploring the Perceptions of Diversity by Minority Journalists in the Wake of Shrinking Newsroom Staffs A A Seat at the Table: Exploring the Perceptions of Diversity by Minority Journalists In the Wake of Shrinking Newsroom Staffs A thesis submitted to the College of Communication and Information of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts By Mark A. Turner August, 2014 Thesis written by Mark Turner B.A., Louisiana Tech University, 1992 M.A., Kent State University, 2014 Approved by Danielle Sarver Coombs, Ph.D., Advisor Thor Wasbotten, M.S., Director, School of Journalism and Mass Communication AnnMarie LeBlanc, Dean, College of Communication and Information Table of Contents Page TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................ iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 II. LITERATURE REVIEW............................................................................................... 5 Theoretical framework............................................................................................ 9 Critical Race Theory................................................................................... 9 Framing Theory........................................................................................ 13 Cascading Activation Model........................................................ 16 III. METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................... 22 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 23 IV. FINDINGS.................................................................................................................. 25 Leading themes .................................................................................................... 26 Valuable and necessary............................................................................. 27 The Table: Being There, Getting There.................................................... 30 Credibility .................................................................................... 31 Making policy............................................................................... 33 Friends and Bedfellows............................................................................ 34 The Water Cooler: The Power of Peer Communication ......................... 36 Framing Diversity: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.............................. 37 Marketing ................................................................................................ 38 Summary ..............................................................................................................39 V. DISCUSSION ............................................................................................................ 42 Affecting Change .................................................................................................. 43 Future Research .................................................................................................... 44 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 46 APPENDICES............................................................................................................................ 47 A. Coded participant list ............................................................................................... 48 B. Interview guide......................................................................................................... 49 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 51 iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my mother, brother, colleagues and fellow graduate students for unwavering support through this journey. When I didn’t believe, they did. I want to offer the highest gratitude to the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication who allowed me to delve into diversity in each of my classes. I would especially like to thank my advisor Danielle Coombs, Ph.D., for her insights, support and wisdom and for fostering my love of qualitative research. I want also to thank the other members of committee–professors Jan Leach and Mark Goodman–for their expertise and support. I could not have accomplished this research without all of them. iv 1 Chapter I Introduction The era of digital disruption, advertising fragmentation, and doing less-with-more economics has halted decades of overall employment gains in newsrooms with a commensurate outcome for racial and ethnic minorities. The job losses have changed the face and reality of journalism inside news organizations and threaten to undermine the credibility of journalism as it seeks to tell accurately the stories of an increasingly diverse society. The full impact, however, of the job cuts in journalism’s new environment have yet to be studied fully for their lasting or even-short term effects on the value of diversity and the value of minorities in leadership roles. The influence and importance of news media in society as both mirror and participant is well documented. Realizing that changes in the news environment can adversely and disproportionally affect minority journalists and audience members, it is necessary to explore the messages about diversity, the policies toward diversity and its value inside news organizations. Having a deeper understanding of the attitudes held by minorities who gather news and newsroom leaders–those with seats at the table–who work through drastic change, can lead to a more productive navigation of diversity’s importance and utility in news organizations, the framing that takes place during coverage of the community, and in community perceptions. Newsrooms staffs are smaller. The findings from an annual American Society of News Editors (ASNE) census bear this out. From 2008 to 2009, the number of full-time minority journalists at newspapers dropped from 6,300 to 5,500, a decrease of 12.6%. Overall, newsrooms lost 5,200 journalists, or 11% of the workforce during the same period. Note that much of the overall job loss can be blamed on the closure of more than one hundred newspapers during the same period including large and medium ones in Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona (McChesney and Pickard, 2011, p. 104). In terms of percentages, however, 2 minority representation in newsrooms has seen a slight increase. In 1978, when ASNE first began adding up the number of minorities in newsrooms, there were 43,000 journalists, 3.95% of whom were minorities. In 2011, there were 41,500 journalists and 12.6% were minorities. This number is a slight recovery from the dip in 2007 but is at 1990s levels. For the purposes of this study, minorities will be defined as racial and ethnic groups that are differentiated from the most socially influential group as well as the numerical majority. Thus, this study, facts and figures from the U.S. Census and other national organizations in the United States, and references to those figures will define minorities as blacks or African- American, Hispanics or Latino, Asian or Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It is important to note that the ratio of minority newspaper staff to the minority population in the United States remains unbalanced. According to the 2010 U.S. Census report, minorities represent more than 29% of the population. That leaves a nearly 18% difference between newsrooms and the communities they cover. Here are some other census figures of which to take note: • The largest group of American residents reported being white (223.6 million), accounting for 72% of all people living in the United States. • The black or African-American population totaled 38.9 million and represented 13% of the total population. • Hispanics comprised 16% (50.5 million) of the total U.S. population of 308.7 million. • Approximately 14.7 million people (about five percent of all respondents) identified their race as Asian alone. • There were 2.9 million respondents who indicated American Indian and Alaska Native alone (0.9%). 3 Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population grew by 43% (15.2 million people), accounting for more than half of the total population increase of the United States. The non- Hispanic population–other minorities and whites–grew relatively slower over the decade, about 5%. (www.census.gov, 2010). Numbers show that newsroom diversity has not gained much ground in recent years, especially in comparison to the growing diversity seen in the demographics in the United States during the same period. Over the long term and across the aggregate of ethnic and minority groups there has been some improvement. Also, ASNE found that since 2001 the number of Asian-American journalists increased by 4.4%, while the number of black and Hispanic journalists fell by 31.5% and 7%, respectively. The number of Native Americans in newsrooms fell by 20.9%. The United States is not alone in its lack of minority representation in news media. In 2001, Greg Dyke, then-BBC director general and currently the England’s Football Association chairman, became the first media executive to apologize and declare publicly that the organization he ran was ‘hideously white.’ In a radio
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