Newspapers faulted for sports hirings

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- U.S. newspapers got a failing grade for gender diversity in their sports departments and a C for racial diversity, according to a study released Thursday.
Seventy-eight percent of the staffs at Associated Press Sports Editors newspapers and Web sites are white men, the study found. Just 5 percent of sports staffs are black men and just under 3 percent are Latino men. Only 11.5 percent are women.
The report was done by Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
Among sports editors, 88 percent are white men, with just under 2 percent black men, slightly more than 2 percent Latino men and nearly 6 percent white women. There was just one black female sports editor among the 341 newspapers surveyed.

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These stories annoy me because there is never a context of how deep, or shallow, the pool of candidates is.
I would love to have had a more diverse staff when I was hiring, but if every applicant you get is a white male, you don't have much choice than to hire a white male.
Perhaps, like in MLB, the goal should be to develop a bigger pool of sports journalists who are not white men.

 

I'm going to get flamed for this but I'll ask anyway.

What's an acceptable percentage of minority staff members?

 

I have to agree with you. There's a huge gray area those numbers aren't touching. It's not as if theres a huge pool of minority and female sports writers out there being turned away at the door. Maybe the industry needs to do a better job of cultivating possible talent from the ground up rather than being blamed for the lack of diversity in the industry.

Lord knows we need to have alternative POV in the industry.

 

New definition of minority staff members: Those who are still employed.

 

A few years back when a similar study came out we looked up what percentage of journalism students were minorities. The number was about 15 percent.

It doesn't seem so far off now.

 

Who is the only black, female SE?

Did Garry Howard have a sex change?

 

In my six years at my current shop, I have gone through the process of hiring someone four times.

I have never received a resume from a female. I believe I have received only one resume from a minority (I say, "I believe," because only one has made it clear in their resume what their ethnic background was and I never asked anyone).

As someone else noted, the only way to increase diversity in the newsroom (particularly the sports dept.) is to encourage females and minorities to enter the field when they are still in high school, or even earlier.

Of course, at this point, it might be doing a disservice to females and minorities to point them in our direction. :-\

 

You never read these types of studies of feature and lifestyle departments. It's always the sports department that gets the gas.

 

Perhaps it may be because they have more women and minorities?

 

It's funny how the birth of intergration spelled the death of the black sportswriter and newspapers in general.

 

There were fewer minorities in college back 40 years ago yet many more minority sportswriters than there are now.

So I don't see how your point applies here.