Media leadership is more diverse – but does this mean diverse newsrooms?
Newsrooms have been talking about diversity for decades – but most of that talk hadn’t translated to action. Now things seem to change, with more female media executives being appointed to lead some of the world’s top news organisations. But is this enough and does it mean that newsrooms have – or will – become truly diverse?
Last month, the Associate Press appointed Daisy Veerasingham, its executive vice president and chief operating officer, as the news cooperative’s president and CEO, setting her up to replace the retiring Gary Pruitt at the beginning of next year. Veerasingham will become the first woman, first person of color and first person from outside of the United States to lead the AP in its 175-year history.
The news agency also appointed its Assistant Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief, Julie Pace, to be its senior vice president and executive editor.
Their promotion means that two of the world’s major news agencies – AP and Reuters – will both have strong women in top management.
In April 2021, Reuters had named one of its top editors, Italian journalist Alessandra Galloni, as its next editor-in-chief, the first woman to lead the globe-spanning news agency in its 170-year history.
Earlier this year, Mary Margaret became Entertainment Weekly’s first female editor in chief, while HuffPost named Danielle Belton as its next top editor.
These appointments confirm the change happening and the trend of women taking lead roles in news organisations, as part of a broader effort to diversify newsrooms and amplify female voices. Nieman Lab recently analysed the leadership of the 20 largest American newspapers and found only seven are led by a white man while 12 are led by a woman, a person of color or both.
These new leaders do bring change to the media industry. But are they enough?
It will take more to truly diversify newsrooms
Newsrooms are more than the persons that lead them. And diversifying them as a whole will take more than just appointing a woman or a person of colour at the helm. It requires bold changes at all levels and roles.
HuffPost’s Danielle Belton, who is Black, told CNN Business in an interview that it’s going to take more than hiring a person of colour for the top job to bring diversity into a newsroom.
“Diversity doesn’t stop with, like, Obama becomes president and somehow everyone is like, ‘Racism is over.’ That’s not how things work,” Belton said. “If you don’t fill in the reporter roles, the social editors, people who work in sales and audience, and all these other different roles within the news organization, if you don’t have diverse representation in those places, you don’t actually have a diverse newsroom.”
In the U.S., news organisations continue to lack the diversity of the country as a whole, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. Whereas 65% of the overall workforce in the U.S. is non-Hispanic white, for example, this number rises to 77% in newsrooms.
However, a positive example is USA Today where the editor-in-chief, Nicole Carroll, recently announced that women now make up the majority of the newsroom. A survey on staff diversity shows women are 51.7% of all journalists.
Even though newsrooms are changing and adapting to social and cultural developments, the effort to increase diversity should not stop in top positions. Instead, it should be applied to every level in order to have truly diverse voices and perspectives within a newsroom.
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