A NEW STUDY SAYS SOME OF THE BIGGEST NEWSROOMS in the country are still failing to fulfill a nearly 50-year-old pledge to increase the employment of people of color in top masthead positions, despite repeated reviews and greater coverage of the issue.
The report, titled “Missed deadline: The delayed promise of newsroom diversity” and conducted by student reporters in the Asian American Journalists’ Association’s Voices program, analyzed the mastheads of several news organizations to examine how closely they reflected the nation’s demographics.
In 1978, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) made a pledge to achieve parity with the percentage of people of color in the general population by the year 2000. After that deadline was blown and a new one was set for 2025, data in the Voices report shows many American newsrooms are still nowhere close to achieving this goal.
The report focused on the mastheads of five national newspapers—The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal—as well as NPR, Fox News, and CNN.