This excellent, thoughtful and stat-filled piece on the problem: by Gabriel Arana is worth your click. A snippet: When youre in the business of telling stories, lacking diversity means youre limited in the sorts of stories you can tell—or even think of telling. A newsroom filled with white guys simply lacks the same imagination as one with people from an array of backgrounds. One editor I spoke with stressed that they choose staff for what they can bring to the magazine, first and foremost, but lacking diversity is actually a prime indicator that youre failing to attract the top talent. ...But the primary reason magazine staffs are so white is structural. We practice fairly specialized form of journalism and the pool of people who do it isn’t terribly large to begin with, and then you look at the group of people who are practicing at a higher level and it’s just not a diverse pool, Foer says. The road that ends with a spot on staff at places like The New Republic, The Atlantic, or the Prospect is paved with privilege. It starts with unpaid internships, which serve both as training grounds and feeders to staff positions. Most of our staff comes through our intern program, says Harpers editor Ellen Rosenbush. Do we get as many applicants of color as we’d like? Probably not, but we do get them and we have hired them. Theres a straightforward reason for the dearth of intern applications: Those who can afford to rely on mom and dad for a summer or a semester tend to be well-off and white. ...This highlights another key reason the countrys leading think publications lack diversity: the industrys reliance on social networks for hiring. The people we know—professionally and personally—tend to have similar backgrounds, and so when editors cast the net to build up the applicant pool for a position, they are largely recruiting people who look and think like themselves.
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 17:01:55 +0000
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