For all the oppressed white males out there....

and that's just the thing arm. these people who want radical change are no different than the folks they despise. they make blanket statements and want to oppress a certain class of people in a nutshell. for many of them, i'm afraid, there is no middle or fair ground.

 

Anyone ever think that sports staffs are 90 percent white males because applicant pools are 90 percent white males? Or does that just make too much sense?

 

"It's just so presumptuous to act like "I would have gotten that job if not for the minority!"


Not so presumptous when you've seen emails from corporate head-hunters interested in you, after they've gotten glowing views from a former boss, and then suddenly their interest goes cold after finding out you don't qualify in any of their "diversity" categories.

 

It's glossed over for the sake of convenience, just like when the "women earn xx% of men" reports come out every year, or the "only .05% of fortune 500 companies are woman" reports.

 

We beg and plead for minority and female candidates, freeze jobs waiting for them, make financial commitments in the interview process we don't normally make, hire folks with glaring deficiencies and get outbid by bigger papers for their services. My place would love to pack the staff with minorities because we would reflect the community a whole lot better. We just can't get anybody to apply, and when we do they either get hired by a bigger paper and fail miserably somewhere in the interview process. If we do manage to make a minority hire, they're gone to a major metro in 2-3 years or less. This puts us in a situation of not only trying to expand the number of minorities our staff, but of struggling to even maintain the current level.

That article was missing two crucial statistics: 1) the total percentage of minorities among college seniors declaring an intention to seek a job in journalism. 2) the percentage of minorities who have been unsuccessful seeking journalism jobs. If you are a minority applicant who can't get hired, take a long hard look at yourself and your skills and keep applying.

And Ezal ... I would bet you are low with that '90 percent or applicant pools white'. I would bet it is more like 95-plus percent, particularly in sports.

 

JME,
Yes, I was that same person. But I've since realized that 20K a year in many places is much different than 20K here in the Bay Area. I've been going at this for almost two years as a professional, many more if you count J-school and undergrad. I've always been passionate about the things I care about, whether it's journalism, or tax theories, or abortion, or flag-burning and free speech, etc., but let's not get into that. I've always rooted for the underdog too, which may be why I'm so passionate about minority sports writers. Either that, or I see so many people here who realize it's a major problem and still don't care, using the same, lame "hire the best candidate" or "there's not enough minority candidates" drivel.

My bosses say that passion is my biggest strength. And in this argument, my passion seems to be fueled by all the ignorant posters who don't see the lack of minorities in our field as a problem.

 

Once again, that's very much true. No one's disputing that. But you are so narrow-minded that you don't see that as a problem?

 

You're right, arm. I apologize to you. My generalizations was a response to others on this board (not you) who repeatedly make the same blanket statements about other class of folks relevant to this thread -- minority sports reporters.

 

When any decent opening in this field gets hundreds of applications and shitty openings get dozens how many sports editors are going to take the time to seek out anybody unless it's the person a few miles up the road they happen to know does a good job and is easy to work with? It's not like a typical sports editor doesn't have enough on his to without that. It takes hour upon hours just going through the packets they do receive.

Maybe universities need to be recruiting a more diverse student body into their journalism programs. Perhaps newspapers should be trying to encourage young females and minorities to apply for internships and work as stringers or desk help. Maybe if that happened in a few years we'd have more minorities applying for the full time jobs and there wouldn't have to be a search.

 

I agree that it is a problem, some of your statements are contradictory.

How can you agree that the applicant pools are 90 percent white males, but at the same time you refuse to believe there "aren't enough minority candidates?"

Perhaps in your passion you have failed to realize that these two statements are at odds with one another. I understand and agree that we need more minorities and women in these pools, but they have to want to be there. They have to apply for these jobs, find the openings and pursue them like everybody else.

You want to argue that they aren't given proper consideration once they apply at some newspapers? I'm with you there. I've seen the lack of respect, particularly toward women in the business.

But you have to understand that many newspapers have problems diversifying their staffs because they simply can't get women or minorities to apply.

When you say the people doing the hiring aren't trying to fix the problem, you aren't 100 percent wrong, but you are oversimplifying matters. It is more than one factor that leads to the lack of women and minorities in our business.

And women and minorities are getting breaks, too. As an example, I know of at least four reporters who are women or minorities who got jobs in sports writing they weren't qualified for. I understand that is subjective, but so is a lot of this debate.

In all four cases, the editors doing the hiring were not allowed to hire a white male no matter what. The results of those hires ranged from complete disaster to a period of failure followed by continued subpar work to a couple of nice success stories.

But the bottom line in all four cases is these people applied for the jobs. They did the work to get in the hiring pool and they got their shot. Not all took proper advantage of it, but they got their opportunity.

Are there plenty of white guys getting jobs they don't deserve, too? Sure. But it's happening in both directions.

The real work needs to be improving the diversity of the pool of candidates, not shutting out quality applicants because they happen to be white and male.

 

Again -- Nobody's "shutting out" white males. The numbers prove that. The market is wide open for white men-- now more than ever.

It's like you guys won't be satisfied until it's 100 percent.

 

shouldn't we sometimes gamble a little bit on the hire? Sometimes the most qualified guy who causes the least amount of headaches might not be as good of a hire as the energetic guy looking to break into the business or looking to move up from that small daily who might need more direction but has more upside.
I think a lot of it depends on your situation -- staff size, potential hire's workload, etc.
I've had good luck both ways -- hiring the person with experience hiring straight out of J-school.