Senior Sports Reporter, Orlando Sentinel

Baron, many minority journalists aren't part of the old boy network. As a result, they don't hired. Diversity in 2010 is out of the window. Papers don't seem to care if their staffs are lilly white. They care only about profit margin.

 

You're right in that whole profit margin thing. Nowadays, it ain't a race thing, or a gender thing, it's a you're costing us too much money and no one cares what you produce thing.

But as someone who actually saw upper management hand resumes to his SE and tell him to interview them, on more than one occasion, and have each of the applicants be either a woman or minority, it was just another thing to PO the rest of the staff. Like I said, some of the hires were excellent. Some weren't. But it was always in the back of everyone's mind that they were brought on board because of their color or gender.

 

The Smiley face meant I only meant to be snarky in a nice way.

 

Excellent point The bottom line is that the old boy network has to be destroyed. Many times minority athletes ask where are other minority reporters. Hard to believe that this is still at hot topic in 2010.

 

i'd like to know where the minority candidates are? my last two openings that I was allowed to fill attracted a grand total of six minority candidates. the last one attracted one after i solicited some help from a high-ranking apse member.
and it's not like we're a weekly or a shopper -- although some readers say we are -- we're a 30k daily with good high school and good college sports in our coverage area.

anyway, tim -- hire this jeff shain guy if you don't want to hire me.

 

Not to get too off-topic, but how do you know your openings only attracted just six minority candidates? Did you have more to go on than just names?

I guess I just wondered how you can tell race, gender, sexuality, disability and everything else that can classify candidates as "minority" candidates if you only have names. (I'm not being snarky - I'm considered a "minority" but my name doesn't flag me as such, so I wondered how you can tell. Is it on the application?)

 

There are plenty of ways to tell not just going by name. I'm excluding sexuality and disability here -- mostly race and gender.
if an applicant is Jane doe. obviously it's kind of easy.
column mugs. college attended, professional organizations, are clues.
when we were with a different chain, there were minority applicants that forwarded their resumes through that channel. I might have missed one or two
Point is, we were making a concerted effort to find minority applicants, and they just weren't there. I probably should have said that there were six minority candidates that I could identify. I might have missed one or two, but six out of approximately 175 applicants isn't a very high percentage.
We did offer one minority and they turned us down for an offer at a bigger paper.
We also offered a position before that to a person with a disability and also were turned down because that person ultimately was reluctant to relocate away from their home.
It's just a tough issue all the way around.

 

2, your problem attracting minorities isn't uncommon. However, did you go to any of the ethnic organizations such Unity or NABJ or NAJA or AAAJ or NAHJ? Did you ask other minority journalists did they know of any candidates? Did you ask others on your staff if they knew of any candidates? Did you check with your area colleges for talent? What about smaller papers in your area?
Not throwing a dart at you but many don't go the extra mile or make the extra phone call in trying to locate minority talent.

 

Drip -- After 26 years, i know the drill.

 

Damn, you're old.