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

You made it a point to hire journalists who figured out one way or another to inform you they were black.

 

I met the photog happenstance. The rest fell into place.

I would have hired the girl regardless of phone call or the fact she went to an HBCU. First thing I looked at in the email was her packet of clips. She could build a page. If she was up for the 40-minute drive every day, the hours were hers. If it was between her and a white woman who lived 5 minutes away, she was getting the hours.

There's actually a second part to it. I'll write it in the morning. Sleepy.

 

Then you didn't make it a point to hire black candidates. You hired candidates who happened to be black.

 

Are you saying the best candidate in a pool of applicants would just happen to be black instead of being a black person I sought out? Because it doesn't always work out like that?

 

I am saying it generally is an either-or situation. Either you want a minority candidate and tailor your search to finding one, or you want the best candidate and are fine with that candidate being any race.

Now, there certainly are cases in which there's more of a gray area. Perhaps you start a job search hoping to hire a minority but not willing to make it a mandate, then you do due diligence on the candidates and are pleased to find the best is a minority. But even in that scenario, you either do or don't at some point narrow your pool of applicants based on race.

I support affirmative action-style hiring procedures, but I don't want to hear about how after you made sure every minority journalist group in the country knew you were hiring and you looked through applications hoping to find someone with ties to one of those, you truly are certain you hired the best candidate. You may have, but once you compromise the objectivity of the job search, you lose the right to say you can be objectively certain you hired the best candidate.

You hired the right candidate, which sometimes doesn't have to be the best.

 

I wanted the best of both worlds. I wanted the best candidate but I wanted the best candidate to be black. I found it twice within a month but it's not always so cut and dry. I had to fight for the black chick and I'll go into detail tomorrow how I had to push the new Editor into a compromise to make it happen.

 

Xan I applaud your effort. And in a city like Trenton that is 52 percent black, the need for a black journalist is obvious.
Contrary to popular belief, there are not many papers going to conventions such as NABJ for recruiting. Many reasons have been cited for the cutback in their appearance at such events.

 

It's probably closer to 65-70% black, although the Latino population is exploding by the day. Trenton in 2020 will be a whole new town. The town is headed toward a nasty showdown, bet on it.

Anyway. To close up last night's chat, I really wanted to give this 23-year-old black chick with talent a chance. The new Editor wanted to give the 25 to 30 hours to a white woman with 25 years experience who he knew from their days at the rag across town 20 years earlier. I pushed hard for the girl till he agreed to give her a shot. She did, and the two ladies alternated 4-day/3-day weeks.

I'm not saying I'm some kind of hero or savior or any of that self-serving bullshit, but had I not been there to fight for her cause, she still might not have gotten her first real chance. So these are still some of the hiring issues regarding blacks and newspapers. (And yet I'm the racist.)

Sadly, I just found out, the paper isn't using the photographer -- even for sports, which sucks, because he came through in a pinch many times last spring when the SE needed coverage during the playoffs. The dude rearranged his schedule -- he has a day job and a 3-year-old daughter -- because he didn't want to let this opportunity pass him by. They don't call him anymore.

And now through a partnership (free photos for free pub), they've gone back to vacuous white chicks for Page 6.

 

How does a page designer add diversity to the journalism work at the paper? In that case I can see a case for favoring younger page/graphic designers for their new ideas, but not favor one or the other based on race.

 

Perhaps one day that young black page designer becomes an Editor who makes daily decisions about the quality of "journalism work" that you seek. Till then, she's just a kid with a chance. See where she is in 5 years.

 

A page designer is part of the newsroom conversation. When I was a page designer, I routinely had major impact on story placement while also submitting story ideas that often were executed, some by me as a writer on the side.

 

I think it would be interesting to know if a higher proportion of blacks/women are leaving the industry, since we all know people are fleeing.