The price of parity

By Shauna Scott Rhone.

According to the American Society of Newsroom Editors' annual report, American daily newspapers pink-slipped 5,900 newsroom employees in 2008. Of those shown the door, 854 were minorities. At least, that's the total among the newspapers that responded to the survey.

Who knew a lack of color could mean darkness? But the decrease of journalists of color in American newsrooms and bureaus around the world not only makes the paper's voice paler. It also dims the light of sunshine shone by those word scribes and image sculptors who rose from the neighborhoods of their darker brothers. In fact, that sunshine burned my desire to become a journalist deep into my heart years ago.

This is not a screed about the more than 800 dreams lost. This is a rally cry for the survivors, the ones still holding it down and keeping their heads when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on the Internet.

Remember ASNE's pledge for parity? The basic premise was to have the percentage of minorities in the nation's newsrooms match the national population percentage. With the current state of economics, I think it's another dream deferred. I also think parity could have saved the newspaper.

The country is "browning" as the census forecast says, with more people of color increasing annually to eventually surpass the number of caucasians. Not only that, with continued shrinkage of the middle class, the lifestyle of a good number of the "new minority" to come will rival that of the working poor.

This reshuffling of the economic deck needs to be chronicled and gatekeepers for the poor are being snatched off their posts at an alarming rate. As a result, accomplished reporters of color (some of them award-winners) find themselves without an outlet for their training despite their climb through the middle class of professionals. Like auto assembly workers, these crafters face the prospect of having a skill they may never use again through no fault of their own.

It makes an interesting dichotomy: dysfunctional leaders get golden parachutes and foot soldiers get the shaft.

I have always held the opinion that it's not the Internet that's killing the media. Like a negligent lover, media took the public for granted while giving out news that not only couldn't be used but became so trivial, it distorted the minds of our children by stripping them of empathy and morality. The late writer Finley Peter Dunne's plea to newspapers of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" has somehow been reversed.

With newsroom parity, Dunne's words can live again. Journalists of color have the cache to enter worlds most others fear to visit. Those worlds hold the stories of the past, present and future of American society to be told and held as written maps to national prosperity and unity.

For example, the current national unemployment rate approaches double digits. In some black and hispanic communities, that number is old news to them. The current chant increases for outsourced jobs to return to this country, while factories, schools and hospitals shuttered in black communities decades before in a homeland version which exported jobs to the suburbs. And in an odd turn, most newspapers stayed downtown but consistently leapfrogged over their immediate neighbors unless there was police escort to cover crime or the exceptional citizen.

Journalists of color, if hired again in a quest for ASNE's parity project, could lead newspapers back to profit by covering the bellwether communities' role in bringing the country back to world leadership in commerce. Of course, that assumes the current stimulus package will benefit those citizens. Lack of coverage would guarantee the current economic comeback won't last.

Will better media coverage guarantee the stimulus will work and laid-off journalists get to resume their careers? As the president would say, solving that problem is above my pay grade. I do know an informed populace is one in control of its own destiny and it's up to the media to fight for its role in increasing the information stream to the world.