What do you expect from a minority hire?

Boots

Whether you realize it or not, you're kinda getting your answer with some of these responses.

A lot of people have no idea how to deal with this issue or answer this question because they don't have a working paradigm on the issue of race, gender and sexual orientation beyond "I know I'm not racist, sexist or homophobic." That, and discrimination laws train anyone in a hiring position not to think in the terms you've just laid out. It's illegal to ask that kind of question out loud in a meeting, lest someone gets offended…why even think about it?

I think what you really mean is: How are minority reporters used in your newsroom? Rephrase your thread that way, because that's what you're really getting at.

 

I guess my question is, why did you notice? Do you pick up papers and see how many bylines are out there with "Asian" sounding names? You're living life ... just a very bitter and uninteresting one.

 

I like how you refer to yourself in third person now, Moddy.

 

Hmm, it was nothing inflammatory. Perhaps I didn't click post before moving on to something else. Meh.

 

I was at college in the 1970s and they brought in Gil Noble to talk. He was working at a black radio station in Harlem in the 1960s and (coincidentally?) a major station hired him and quickly sent him to Newark to cover the riots. He knew exactly why he was getting this (prestigious?) assignment and knew he was no safer in this environment than a white reporter would have been because, for the most part, it was black people who were being shot and killed. It made his career, but of course this would have done him no good had he wound up dead.

I don't think it's necessary to match someone to an assignment along racial or ethnic lines, but I think having a diverse newsroom is important so there is more than one perspective during news meetings when coverage and story play are being decided. Now some non-journalists disagreed with me about this recently, saying that if you have a newsroom with black people who were raised middle class in the suburbs, how are they more equipped to relate to poor, urban blacks than a white person? Can't say, but I do not think money alone insulates someone from experiencing racism. I shared an apartment for a year with two black people who grew up with more money than I did and were better educated than me and (like me) did not live in a city until they moved there for college, but they were decidedly black, they saw life from a black perspective, they had experienced certain things I never would, and even armed with a Harvard MBA and an Audi they offered insights on racial matters that no white person I've met could have come by firsthand. Neither were journalists, but they would have been provocative additions to any discussion of the front page -- that is, if you have the kind of newsroom that encourages people to speak their minds. There are newsrooms that are equal-opportunity stiflers of dissent, where managers don't want hear a peep out of black people, white people, Asian people, you name it, unless they echo the editor. Diversity doesn't do a whole lot of good if people can't share their perspective.

 

If we can find out the day he learned how, we should make that a red-letter date in SportsJournalists.com history.

 

Frank thank you for a great reply. That's the sort of stuff we were looking for.

 

March 23, 2007, a date which will live in hilarity.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/39094/

 

This was a poor, ill-conceived question because as phrased it presumes that there is a difference in expectations.

A recruiter once came on campus and asked people "what's your favorite color?" Well, this automatically triggers disparate treatment because those in the majority get a free ride to say black, white, purple, magenta, whatever. The minorities? Well they have to consider how the answer is going to play given their ethnicity.

Boots, if you wanted an intelligent answer, you needed to rephrase.

The ideal short answer is as stated above, "same as from any other hire."

 

In some news organizations, unfortunately, there are those who believe and expect something more from minority hires. A black guy on the NBA or NFL beat should be able to get stories from other athletes because they have something in common. Check out baseball where many papers are hiring Latino reporters.
Again, the Va. Tech massacre coverage illustrated what I'm talking about to a certain extent.