Minority sports reporters

CW1975,

"Lilywhite" is pretty much a racist term. You know this, yes?

 

TSN has a black anchor and an East Indian anchor. Must mean that some minority individuals are willing to do the job. Maybe someone should try to find out why some people - OK, sectors of society - just aren't interested in our profession.

 

This is absolutely true.

A decade or so ago, I was the ME of a 5-day daily with a newsroom staff of 8, in a small, semi-rural Midwest city, still within 2 hours of two huge metro areas. (It so also happened that the paper's home city was about 20% African-American, and about 10% Hispanic. Our staff, as with many small papers, was lily-white. As far as I could tell, the paper had never had a 'minority' staff member. I felt, to provide some kind of balanced perspective on the community, we needed one (or more).

So a few months go by, and amazingly enough, we have our first staff opening. I put an ad in E&P, being careful to include that we were an EOE.

OK, a week or so goes by, and I get a dozen or so resumes. I look over the resumes and clips, and I call up four people for interviews. As it turned out, two of them were black. I didn't especially select them because I thought they were black, although I suspected they were from a number of indicators (campus organizations, column mugshots, etc.)

Well, as a rinky-dinky daily, I can tell you, we weren't offering much. So I knew, whenever I interviewed ANYBODY, I couldn't dazzle them with a gaudy salary or the promise of leisurely work weeks.

Of the four candidates, there was one clearly superior candidate, two about equal, and the fourth was clearly not up to the level of the other three.

I called them all in for interviews. The best-qualified person had a much, much, much better offer. I had a good time talking to them at lunch, and said I'd get back to him.

Then, I interviewed Candidates #2 and #2A. Candidate #2 was black, and he had a much, much, MUCH better offer -- a 90-day internship at a Major Metro Daily, with a full-time job offer to follow assuming he didn't get himself fired during the probationary period. He would make more than twice from the internship that we could pay him as a full-time staffer.

I interview Candidate #4, also black. His qualifications were clearly inferior to the others -- clips simply not up to really professional standards. He was going to be a 'project,' but I was OK with that. I would have been willing to give him a shot if he seemed receptive to an offer. But no -- once again, he had a major-metro internship already in his pocket, and a couple of staff-writer offers at mid-size dailies as well.

Frankly, it came down to a matter of "signability." I really couldn't offer any of these people a very competitive offer, but the black candidates in particular had dramatically superior offers already in hand. I called Candidate #2, and I said, "Hey, I'd like to make you an offer, but to tell you the truth, I don't think you'd even consider it." He said, "try me."

When he stopped laughing, I said, "Well, I just wanted you to know we weren't blowing you off, but given the budget I'm working with, I don't think I can compete with your alternatives." He said, "It's cool. At least you didn't try to bullshit me."

We ended up hiring Candidate #5, if I remember. Or maybe #6. : :

 

the fairly small (30k) newspaper in my home state's capital has a black man on staff. he goes out and covers preps and the population there is about 75 percent white ... by your logic, this must be wrong, too.

 

Interesingly, in my department the older staffers generally edit many more stories than the younger ones. They're faster and don't screw around as much on the computer.

 

Tommy,

I'm just saying that a company should routinely at least look beyond the pile of candidates for the best possible hire -- whether that is a minority or not.

 

Tomas,

May be true, but you might be surprised at the number of youngish white males without degrees who apply (sometimes successfully) for writing or editing jobs at large papers.

 

Tomas,

May be true, but you might be surprised at the number of youngish white males without degrees who apply (sometimes successfully) for writing or editing jobs at large papers.
This is a valid point. And I'm not even sure what it means...
But, I will have more "white" men w/o degrees apply for desk positions than well-qualified women or minorities.
For a beat gigs, it's a different story. I see a lot more diversity.

 

Look, we can all tell stories about who was able to get what jobs with little or no experience. Back in college, I was up for an internship at a major metro. I had worked for the college paper, and had a couple internships. My clips were fairly solid. I was finalist, but ultimately my spot went to a white woman with no previous experience. But, she was from an Ivy League school.

I've encountered that situation a few times, passed over for the white guy/woman who had more connections. But, you know what? I consider those exceptions, not rules. I think the majority of those in charge of hiring want the best people for the job, regardless of color or gender. Of course, I've seen newspapers take chances on someone of color who wasn't as experienced, but in my experience, that doesn't happen much at the higher levels. At the internship level, I expect to see more of that because a lot of newspapers believe in grooming and investing in minorities. I can't entirely blame them for that.

But I suppose all this diverted greatly from the original post. If the question is if minority athletes feel a kinship with minority reporters, I think that is true -- to a point. Obviously, most minorities are comfortable around one another. If that's the case, it makes an interview situation easier. This may be a bad example, but it's no different than how a white male reporter might feel if he were covering golf at an exclusive country club. A minority in that situation is likely to feel slightly uneasy, especially if most of the service workers are black. I know I would.

A newspaper should have a newsroom that reflects the COMMUNITY, not the numbers in journalism schools. If Houston is 70 percent black, shouldn't the newsroom reflect that? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the newsroom should be 70 percent black. What I'm saying is, diversity is a readership issue. More people of color would read the newspaper if they felt as if their communities were covered adequately.

If you read most newspapers, particularly in major markets, it is written for suburban white people with kids. And it's written that way because most of the editors in charge of coverage are...suburban white people with kids.

 

No, they're writing for the suburban white people's kids, and that is indeed a problem, probably of a different sort.

 

No, papers are convinced suburban white people spend more on advertising. Or advertisers spend more on suburban white people.

 

No, I think it's that white advertisers spend more on Suburbans ;D