Sports Departments Lacking Diversity (report)

I didn't see this posted.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-apse23jun23,1,1782018.story?coll=la-headlines-sports

Are newspapers getting lots of minority applicants and turning them down? Are there a lot of minorities coming through journalism school and smaller papers who are just getting passed over all the time for jobs?

 

From my chair, here are my responses to your questions ...

No. And no.

rb

 

So then what are papers supposed to do and how are they responsible?
This business is cutting jobs, shrinking the pool of openings even more and adding to the pool of qualified applicants. How is this going to change if there aren't many minorities coming through journalism school and there aren't many open jobs for those few candidates to apply for?

 

That, my friend, is the $64 million question.

 

People like Whitlock and even Steven A. Smith are helping, I think.

But it probably wouldn't hurt for newspaper organizations to create scholarships for minority journalism students that want to focus on sports.

 

     Two things about this story intrigued me, one serious, one smart ass.
     We've hashed over the predominately male demographic of sports journalism on several threads without much forward progress. As far as minority applicants go, there are vast swaths of this great land of ours where ethnic and racial diversity are limited. How many of those papers are part of the survey. Is it any kind of societal failure if the sports staff of the Idaho Statesman or Manchester, N.H. Union-Leader are almost exclusively white Anglos, or is it because so is almost everyone else in those burgs? Do they skew the stats? Wouldn't it be more helpful to compare the makeup of sports staffs only in papers that serve racially diverse communities?
     Now for the smart-ass, which the annual APSE meeting seems to bring out in me. There's something really weird about a convention of American sports editors going to a meeting to have social scientists tell them most sports editors are white males. Couldn't they have just looked around the room to draw the same conclusion?

 

Total bullshit.

First, there's not enough minority hires, unless you count Native American blood by which a good portion of America could research and find that they are minorities.


Take this to your typical college and let them chew on it would be the logical response to this. Instead, our brainy CEOs will issue another one of those edicts that most MEs can't conquer.

 

Maybe many of them were raised by black sharecroppers and never realized they were white. I bet if you tell them, the first thing they'll say is, "You mean I'm gonna stay this color?"

 

Anyone who pays attention to this report is an idiot.

Papers are doing more than enough to try and hire minorities and women. I'm so tired of all this grandstanding and hand-wringing. Can we get on with it, and try to just write quality stories?

 

Let me clarify my previous statement:

There's not enough minority hires out THERE to pick from in the first place.  They ought to be looking at the colleges that aren't producing minority journalism students.  That's like if the social scientists suddenly told the U.S. based textile industry: You aren't hiring ANYBODY.

Certainly they aren't. All the jobs are in India and China.

 

Well, the APSE comissioned it from a well-respected authority on diversity in sports. I'd say it's worth looking at.

 

Total horseshit. There are plenty of minority candidates. There are many sources to find them, if papers really want them.