ASNE Study: American Newsrooms Almost 90 Percent White

From [HERE] At a day and age when America is almost 50 percent people of color according to the U.S. Census, American newsrooms, those places housing that dying breed of media-maker the print journalist, are almost 90 percent white according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors ASNE survey released on Thursday.

And the study reported that the 12 percent of the total population of newsroom staffers that was "of color" dropped .47 percent from the last survey of the year before. No, not 47 percent, but basically one-half of one percent. Which means just 13 percent of the population was of color.

What this means, if one stops and thinks about how a newsroom is staffed, is that for every white and more often than not male (36 percent of the newsroom staffers are female), person, that means someone of color was, at some point, turned away from employment.

It also means that many black journalists in particular were the first to be fired in the wake of the economic and technical changes that have caused newsrooms to shrink in size.

Another ASNE study from 2009 revealed that 400 black journalists lost their jobs in 2008 alone, and at what was described as an "alarming" rate. The National Association of Black Journalists reported that the habit of cutting blacks from newsrooms continued through 2010.

The "why" you may ask has one simple answer: racism.   Who to hire and fire is a judgment call made by management of, in this case, a newspaper.  Many people of color in newsrooms have been given assignments that are either sports-related or concern matters involving people of color - like expressing views via a column.  In other words, they're pigeon-holed, not promoted, then shown the door when its time to pair the ranks.

The bright side of this story is, with a near 50-percent minority population, the market is there for the enterprising journalist of color to start their own media brand and capture some of it.  It's not so hard to generate a good website or blog, and it's worth doing because even those who stay at newsrooms may not get the recognition they deserve.

As an example, this blogger also contributes to SFGate.com's City Bright's Section.  In 2009, Hearst Corporation's San Francisco Chronicle website was mentioned in a small report in Editor and Publisher, in November, if memory serves, of how the traffic for that October was due, in part, to "mommy-bloggers" and other blogs, while failing to mention the work of this blogger, who generated about 1 million unique visitors for that October of 2009 alone.

So, I set out an objective to prove a point: that if one knows how to "work" online technology they can't be ignored regardless of color, and in spite of the news organization's and the public's best efforts to do so.  Using a then-new blogging approach I created, this blogger generated over 10 million unique visitors over the next year, which was 2010.

If fact, of the 46 million unique visitors SFGate.com attracted in 2010, one-fifth of them were generated by me.  Or, look at it this way: a black guy, me, technically owned just over one-fifth and close to one-quarter of SFGate.com in 2010, which was valued in some quarters, at $60 million for that year.  In fact, I generated 285,000 unique visitors in one day and in just seven hours - that was March 18th 2010.

Anyone of color can master this stuff.  It just takes study and work, both driven by a healthy dose of anger at the active racism of the overall society, intelligently applied.