THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503190035
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Editor's Notebook
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
On Wednesday, a dozen newsroom colleagues gathered around a long conference table to bring a new urgency to our initiatives to make our newsroom and our newspaper look more like Hampton Roads.
On Monday, I'll be in Chicago, working indirectly to make our newsroom and our newspaper look more like Hampton Roads.
If we are to reflect the readers we serve, we need more African Americans, more Asian Americans, more women working across the newsroom - and up the hierarchy.
And we need to ensure that our coverage doesn't disproportionately project women as victims, or minorities as perpetrators of misfortune. Instead, we should include them in the way we portray all aspects of life in our communities.
``We kid ourselves if we think to report a multiracial society through white eyes only,'' Frank Batten, the chairman of Landmark Communications, our parent company, has said. ``Or, for that matter, through the eyes of any elite - whether it be racial, cultural or ideological.
``To do our job well, we need reporting and editing staffs representing the broadest range of social and cultural backgrounds. The nation and our communities are growing more diverse, not less; newspapers must do the same.''
At The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, the good news is that our percentage of minority journalists - 10.15 percent - is close to the national average for newspapers, 10.49 percent.
The bad news is we're way off where we want to be by the year 2000.
At the turn of the century, we want to have a staff that reflects the percentage of minorities in South Hampton Roads, which was 32 percent in the 1990 Census.
That reflects the goal set by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978, on the 10th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on violence in America's cities.
One conclusion of that report was that newspapers and television news programs were hampered in reporting on - and possibly helping diffuse - urban tensions because their all-white staffs did not understand what was happening in minority communities in their cities.
This newspaper has long been committed to diversity. Our publisher, Frank Batten Jr., has declared:
``Our newspaper should reflect the interests, the concerns and the hopes of African, Asian and Hispanic Americans; I want people in each of these communities to see our newspaper as their newspaper. That will happen only when minority journalists make up a significant portion of our staff.''
We have worked hard to make this happen.
With our sister newspapers in Roanoke and Greensboro, N.C., we recruit minorities interested in journalism into a special internship program that lets them develop their skills and move into full-time jobs.
We also recruit minorities into our summer college internship program. And we sponsor a two-week minority summer program for high school students interested in exploring journalism as a career.
We also support the training and development programs of the National Association of Minority Media Executives. On Monday, I'll discuss executive leadership skills at the association's Albert E. Fitzpatrick Leadership Development Institute. (The institute is named for the association's founding chairman and retired executive editor of the Dayton Daily News in Ohio.)
But with less than five years left before the year 2000, we need to accelerate our efforts.
So Joyce Ingram, our deputy managing editor for administration and community news, has assembled a team to help her and Marvin Lake, Commentary editor and director of recruiting, pump things up.
This team will bring a strategic focus to our hiring, retention, development and promotion efforts. And it also will help us develop audits of our content, to measure how we portray women and minorities.
If we better serve these populations, we will better serve everyone.
KEYWORDS: THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT AND THE LEDGER-STAR by CNB