Coming soon,The Ralph Wiley Rule for sports journalism hiring?

If you don't know... They're not...

 

If a shop is headhunting, then they absolutely know where to look. But that only applies to a select few organizations (around here at least).

The rest of us throw up an ad on JJobs, the APSE site and here and await the flood of applicants.

 

But "they didn't apply" is not a bogus reason. Unlike the NFL -- where it is accurately presumed that 99 percent of the men coaching who are not head coaches want to be one -- I suspect there may be many newspapers at which minorities simply have no interest in working. (And they may have no interest for good reason. Like it's not a very good job.)

I'd love to see more minorities and women sportswriters at mid-sized dailies. I'm guessing it's not much different than it used to be, which is not terribly good.

 

He didn't. Not even close to that.

 

As of a decade or so ago, the percentage of minority journalists was relatively close to the percentage that were in journalism schools. It was something like eight percent vs. 11 percent... I have no idea what the numbers are now, but I don't think there's any reason to think they've significantly changed.

If you're at a big paper or one of the main websites you really have no excuse not to look at minority candidates, because there are plenty of great writers out there to choose from. But if you're at a mid-sized daily in certain parts of the country, you might very well get 200 applicants without a single one being from a minority.

 

If PEteacher didn't leave the business, there would be more minorities working as sports writers.

 

At my first job, we sent someone from our sports staff to the NABJ convention every year to recruit and I guarantee you, of the openings we had when I was there, every writer opening had a minority interview and of the hires made, I'd guess half were minorities.

We had a desk opening and instructions to hire a minority and there were no applicants. This was at a 350,000+ (at the time) circ paper. One of the managers in sports was instructed to find a suitable minority candidate and he couldn't do it.

 

No, I don't think that's correct. Not sure where you got that.

Ads are posted in the usual places. Minorities know these places. They are not secret. If they don't apply, should it be assumed that they DID want to apply and would-be employers should try to hunt them down, even though hundreds of qualified candidates applied? I'm missing something in the reasoning there.

And while applications have the EEOC thing (which is often optional and I never fill out myself unless forced), these are not requested in any ad I've seen -- just a resume, cover letter and clips.

 

Mizzou, NABJ isn't the only source for minority candidates. It's unfortunate that many feel that's the first step. Perhaps it's because its the only source that they know of. Moddy's point about the industry needing to do a better job can't be emphasized enough. Hiring is not an exact since but the results have been pretty bad when it comes to bringing in minorities.

 

Some of doing better as an industry could be paradoxical: Bigger papers need to stop overslotting diversity candidates for internships for which they're not prepared.

 

And by the same token, interns are just that, interns. They are learning the craft. I've seen my share of bad white interns along with bad minority interns.