NY Times: Diversity..Our Way Or Hit The Highway

Mark Thompson

News industry leaders are forever proclaiming that diversity is an organizational priority. Such pronouncements usually come paired with apologies for having failed on this front in the past, along with vague plans to do better.

Erik Wemple at The Washington Post writes, New York Times Chief Executive Mark Thompson defied this tradition last week in a presentation before a gathering of managers on the business and news sides of the newspaper.

He identified three areas toward which diversity efforts must be channeled: recruitment, hiring and promotion.

Supervisors who fail to meet upper management’s requirements in recruiting and hiring minority candidates or who fail to seek out minority candidates for promotions face some stern consequences: They’ll be either encouraged to leave or be fired.

The American Society of News Editors tabulates newspaper’s minority newsroom representation, and the New York Times clocked in at 19 percent in the 2015 survey. Minority representation in the daily newspaper workforce is just shy of 13 percent. For the sake of comparison, The Washington Post has 31 percent; the Boston Globe 20 percent; the Star Tribune Media Co. 15 percent; the Philadelphia Inquirer 13 percent; the Miami Herald 42 percent; and the Idaho Statesman 0.0 percent.