The Importance of Diversity

Poynter Institute’s Gregory Favre interviews Washington Post Senior Editor Milton Coleman about why diversity is essential to newsrooms. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:

Gregory Favre: Given your background as a long-time champion for diversity in the news business, do you think it will be possible to maintain diverse newsrooms in these days of cost-cutting and enormous changes, especially at newspapers? If so, what needs to be done?

Milton Coleman: It is possible and it is imperative that newsrooms retain as much as they can of the diversity we have built over the years. We are losing many journalists of color because of downsizing brought on by the new financial realities in our industry and the economic realities in our country.

We also continue to lose journalists of color for the same reasons that fueled a thinning of their ranks earlier, namely the feeling that there are glass ceilings in our newsrooms and that our organizations are less committed to the kind of journalism that brought many minority journalists into this business.
Some newsrooms have seen the current situation as an opportunity to expand diversity rather than merely a chore to preserve it.

Read full interview.