Journalism Doesn't Judge

Madison Foulkes
mf578016@ohio.edu

Diversity within media has been a topic of interest for many years now. As our country becomes more open with race, gender and ethnicity, it seems the only jobs that aren't moving with this change are the ones in media.

A Pew Research study found that newsrooms are mostly made up of white males. With that being said, younger newsrooms are found to be more diverse in race, gender and ethnicity. The difference between older media and their younger counterparts is large as far as diversity in the newsroom goes.

News organizations know being successful means you need to have a captive and engaged audience. Without its audience, a news organization is nothing. The American Society of News Editor's annual newsroom diversity shows that in 2016, only 17 percent of editorial staff consisted of latino and non-white journalists. That number has only increased five percent since 2000.

A chart comparing the amount of space on one page of the newspaper and the percentage of a population that correlates with that space. Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Ultimately, an organization is losing its audience if it doesn't have diversity. It only makes sense that latinos and non-whites feel misrepresented considering 38 percent of the current population in the United States make up this group. If newsrooms have more journalists of color with the exposure and access to certain issues, they are more likely to capture the latinos and non-whites that make up a large portion of our population.

Increasing diversity in newsrooms can have more of an impact than originally thought. Not only are we correctly representing populations, but we are also having a wider reach while increasing engagement and trust with the audience. Highlighting diversity helps to maintain the current audience as well as reaching potential audience members. It seems like a very small thing, but it can have a huge impact on the overall success of the organization and journalism as a whole.

I think one of the issues with the lack of diversity in newsrooms is changing the overall image of an organization. A lot of these primarily white-run news organizations fear that their dependability and trustworthiness will change with the different types of journalists that work for them. This is not the case.

News organizations would increase dependability and trustworthiness by integrating stories written by various races, genders and ethnicities. Minorities make up almost half of the population in the United States. If news organizations don't account for this large part of the population, they are missing that potential audience.

Not only is it important to gain these potential audience members, but it is also important to have them engage with your journalism. If the audience is not engaging with your work, they are not creating that connection they might have with another journalist who writes about their hometown or a similar situation they went through while growing up.

Connecting and bringing people together is one of the main reasons why I became so invested in journalism. You can use journalism for a lot of different things. Personally, I believe that writing something that connects others is the most impactful. If there are only certain types of stories written, those stories are only reaching a set audience. By having a variety of stories written by various journalists, journalism can reach all types of people. Everyone deserves to read something that can change their lives. It all starts with diversity in media.