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

Not really new. First job out of college I made $14.5 k per year (granted, long time ago, but still.....). And a lot of my classmates who went into newspapers made even less.

The accepted rule of thumb was that rookies made less, that you paid your dues (literally) and worked your way up. I suspect other professions are similar in that regard.

 

Sports Journalism Institute is still chugging along if I recall correctly. That's a nice way for talented minority and female journalists to get placed.

 

One issue with hiring is the idea of "best resume and clips" is subjective.

One editor might thing a Harvard degree and clips from the WaPo are best.

Another editor might think screw the Ivy League, a degree from a specific J-school (Northwestern, Mizzou, etc.) is best.

And yet another editor may not have gone to college, so anyone with a degree from State U. is just a stuck-up snob who should have been slinging agate for those four years.

An editor who is a former football writer may think someone's football clips are "best" while ignoring another candidate's NHRA clips, even though they're stellar.

The point is, "best" is subjective. And it's been proven again and again that when it comes to hiring, people tend to hire "someone like me." They just naturally gravitate toward those candidates. And the cycle continues.

The way to break the cycle is to make a conscious effort not to dismiss candidates who are not "like you" .... whether the diversity is black/white, male/female, gay/straight, poor/wealthy, urban/rural, educated/experienced, football/equestrian, whatever. Make sure that what they can offer is equitably compared to what other candidates bring to the table.

 

And let's be honest: No one's looking to hire unless the candidate is reasonably nearby.

 

Turtle, you raise a great point.

In hiring moreso than anything else, meritocracy is a myth. And frankly, in this market, if you have 200 applicants, you might have 50 or more who have the ability and qualifications to do the job. It's not a matter of determining who is the "best" because any of the 50 could do a fine job and determining the "best" in that group isn't always easy -- or even possible. So I think it's always helpful to think outside one's comfort zone.

(Although frankly all candidates, black and white, myself included, have benefited from "knowing someone" in the hiring process. In fact, that attitude informs much of the networking opportunities offered by minority journalism groups.)

My real problem is when we alter the criteria in order to reverse-engineer the outcome that we want. Asians do too well on test scores and blacks do poorly? Test scores don't matter then!

When the Ivy League schools started getting too Jewish, they did the same thing to make sure WASPs weren't left out. Deemphasize grades, emphasize "well-rounded" athletes, etc.

 

Good points. But again, some of this comes down to whether or not papers are actively recruiting minority candidates. It's one thing to say you want diversity but if you're not doing anything about it, the way Xandu did, you're just talking rhetoric, in my opinion.

 

Just a general observation, not in response to anyone in particular.

I cannot understand how any supposed enlightened person can fail to understand the value of having a diverse staff. I couldn't care less whether it makes a penny's worth of difference to the industry's bottom line. The simple fact is that coverage of a diverse world by an overwhelmingly white media is a massive fail.

 

That isn't a fact. That is an opinion.

Still haven't seen much explanation of where this helps other than among people of similar opinions and their convention-going cohorts.

 

Sorry, that's fact. I've lived it.

You couldn't be convinced otherwise because you think that the way you and those who look like you view the world is the norm.

 

Well now there is a compelling case. If you've lived it, it must be fact. I do want to move to this utopian world you live in where the business implications don't matter, though.

 

I'd like to know where your world is where you would be comfortable with your media being overwhelmingly minority staffed. By the way, diversity, at worst, is bottom-line neutral.

 

I have no idea what this means.

For general-interest media (a newspaper, for instance), I have just not seen it to matter. I read mostly news and sports stuff where the event happened, it's a big event and somebody writes about it. Matters very little what the ethnicity of the writer is. For columnists, there would be a difference, and I do appreciate those perspectives. (I suppose music, theater and such really aren't my thing.)

But it has not been demonstrated in any way that those added perspectives make any difference at all on the business side, which is the way the diversity goal was pushed for a good 20 years.