Media columnist Michael Wolff, who regularly excoriates the media’s reporting on itself, has turned his acerbic attention to TV. The death of television, he argues in his new book, has been greatly exaggerated. It’s very much alive and kicking, he … Read more
It’s tough to turn on a TV news report, pick up a newspaper or surf across a news website these days without seeing a story at least partially affected by race. A report from the U.S. Department of Justice … Read more
When “Tell Me More,” NPR’s talk show about diversity, was canceled in 2014, NPR’s then-ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos observed that Latinos (16 percent of the U.S. population) hold only 5 percent of newsroom jobs at NPR … Read more
Journalists make careers out of covering the symptoms and causes of bad urban public schools, writing tragedies about students falling through the cracks, scoring scoops from school board investigations, and chasing scandals alongside concerned parents, angry teachers unions, and … Read more
The high-profile deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray have allowed us to train the spotlight on law enforcement and examine how police officers can be more effective in beleaguered black communities. But, in order … Read more
we don’t have a lot of Native American journalists at mainstream newspapers, and that’s a problem, especially because we may not be that large in number but the jurisdictional and economic power of tribes is so significant. In states … Read more
One thing we do at BuzzFeed that works is hiring Hispanic writers. They don’t have to have a sort of Hispanic beat. David Noriega is a national reporter for us who broadly covers immigrants, but … Read more
At the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, we launched a series of investigative reports about two and a half years ago looking at disparities in areas such as housing, education, criminal justice, and jobs. At first, … Read more
Years ago, I was recruited from the University of Kansas for the copy desk by legendary Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and life-long diversity champion Acel Moore. In me, he landed the ultimate diversity hire—African-American, Japanese, and female. And he let … Read more
journalists might resist the designation, but we are tribal. As wedded as we are to our tribalism, our long days and bellyaching and gallows humor, this very tribalism is what limits the racial and gender diversity of our nation’s … Read more
