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Diversity in newsrooms and other media organizations has increased steadily over the last few decades, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. The number of persons of color who work in journalism has been an amount that many companies are making an effort to emphasize and enhance, as an aspect of journalism that has become more important with the rise of the internet is for those working in news to reflect the audience being written for.
According to Nieman Reports, increased diversity in newsrooms has not meant there is more equal coverage in the news itself, as only 25 percent of African-Americans believe the news media represents their community honestly, and only 33 percent of Hispanics feel the same way. So, the problem is not simply solved by hiring more people of color, but it must translate into the stories being told and how those in minority communities are being portrayed to the public.
However, there is a still a larger issue in the matter of representation in public relations and advertising agencies. Even today, people of color trying to be hired in such businesses are faced with many more obstacles in landing a job than those who are white, despite having the same degree of education and experience. And a lot of this issue, according to Ad Age, can be traced to those who run the companies who "shy away from serious conversations about systemic racism" in the industry.
But despite being at different stages of fixing diversity in these different sides of communication businesses, each still needs to a better job of improving their representation of their audiences, on the job and in the media.
Representation on the Job
Minorities in media organizations offer many benefits to their companies, aside from just helping them meet diversity quotas. People from different backgrounds will inevitably have different points of view on issues affecting their readers, viewers and clients. Therefore, it is important to have reporters handle stories on social issues that they may have some experience with. If a story needs to explain a complex issue thoroughly, wouldn't it be beneficial for the reporter to be someone who understands it from their own life experiences?
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| Courtesy of Google Trends |
And yet, despite the need for these other perspectives in stories, newsrooms can still do better. Just under 40 percent of news content, of more than 24,000 pieces analyzed by the Women's Media Center in 2017, "was credited to female journalists," according to NPR. In addition to this, only 15 percent of daily newspapers had a person of color in a top newsroom position in 2013.
I can even see the need for better diversity in my local newspaper, The Plain Dealer. According to Google Trends, the paper has not made much improvement from 2001 to 2017 in representing the diversity of its audience based on either gender or race.
Representation in the Media
The other aspect of diverse representation involves how minorities are portrayed to the public. It is important for news media to avoid stereotypes that unfairly group people of similar backgrounds together as being exactly the same as one another. People should be represented as they are in reality, not as they are in past representations or how others assume they are.
It is the responsibility of journalists to see past these stereotypes and to see minority communities as the individuals within them, both how they are similar to and different from each other. If the media want the public to trust them with how they are represented, they need to make an effort to fight against any underlying biases they may not even realize they have. These stereotypes must be recognized and moved past in order to properly represent an audience and ensure their trust.
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