The PD is racist?

Well, isn't proving one of those right or wrong fairly simple?

 

So maybe the sports department "earned" the right to hire Terry Pluto by skewing previous hires for race and gender. Maybe the other parts of the newsroom are "lagging" by not hiring by skin color or sex first and foremost.
Take that, buttinski VP from ESPN!

 

Well Joe

The black community doesnt buy the paper there because THEY know the hiring practices at the paper is not good. I get that from many Clevelanders I know.

So in the end the PD just hurt themselves even more than helping itself out with the hire.

 

Money talks.
Does the black community in Cleveland have enough money to make their voices heard?
Simply put, if the black community there had the swing and really wanted a black columnist hired, then the Plain Dealer would be welcoming Stephen A. Smith to town.
Not that Screamin' would ever actually step foot in Cleveland.
And given the PD's circulation and metro population, at least part of the black community is buying the paper. They'd have to, unless they have every white person in town subscribing.

 

While it is a newspaper's responsibility to reflect its community, is the P-D obligated to hire a black columnist just because?

I know plenty of papers that are good reads, stellar reads, and reflective of their communities, and they don't have black columnists.

 

I'm not calling b.s. on your comment, because the closest I've been to Cleveland is either Wheeling or Dayton. But on general principle, I'd be shocked if any community, outside the newspapering community, would be familiar with the hiring practices of any newspaper. Most people want the obits, the lotto numbers, the weather and the news. Usually in that order. How it gets there rarely crosses their minds, at least in my admittedly unscientific experience.

 

Well Mystery Meat

Community leaders knows from the coverage. Also in my experiences of newspapers, when there is low representation in newspapers, those minority staffers do leak info to community leaders about the practices of the paper. I have seen it at every stop I have gone through in my career. Do not under estimate the power of quietly spreading the word.

I am sure the community leaders in Cleveland received that same letter that NABJ sent to Cleveland.

 

The paper is not obligated to hire a black columnist, but you would want to give different experiences and points of view in the paper.

Also there are several black sport journalists from around the country who are from the Cleveland area and they didnt get a call.

That is the problem in the industry, black journalist don't get a chance to even get interviews for gigs such as this. That is the frustration of many black sports journalists.

 

So are you saying they should've Rooney Ruled it and interviewed a minority candidate, and wasted everyone's time?

To me, that's more insulting than not considering a minority candidate, period. It was clear they were making a hire to kill off their competition.

 

I think we can all agree that the PD screwed themselves and set the tone in previous hires, so that now when they make a great hire, they're still taken to the woodshed for it.

 

Let's face it, more than ever we're at a point when the job of the editorial portion of a newspaper is to attract an audience for advertisers, and more editors and publishers are coming down on the side of giving people what they want rather than what they need to know or what they should want. The ideal of a diverse, all-purpose newspaper might be like covering the re-zoning meetings -- that might be important in some grand scheme, but if customers don't want that, then you're going to fail.

The PD feels Pluto has an automatic audience, and they have targeted that. It's more quantifiable to them than a possible audience that might or might not embrace the paper with a new minority columnist.

As for your second point, it seems as if a lot of black sports writers have been getting some pretty good, high-level jobs recently at ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe.

 

Can we get a little subject-verb agreement on this thread?