A report from the Public Media Journalists Association points to a lack of diversity in leadership and employee retention as problems in stations’ efforts to build diverse and inclusive newsrooms.
“Most people feel like there is an effort happening,” PMJA Executive Director Christine Paige Diers told Current in an interview. “But there are still lots of people who are at least somewhat disenfranchised and still feeling like they maybe don’t fit as well as they would like to in their workplaces.”
The report, “A Look at Diversity in Public Media Journalism,” presents results from a 2023 online survey fielded by the association. The 215 responses from public media journalists included 197 who were employed at stations and 18 who worked independently. The survey reached journalists at more than 80 stations.
The number of responses to each question in the survey varied. For example, one question received 143 responses and another 63.
The research was analyzed by Stan Jastrzebski, a doctoral candidate in mass communication at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Jastrzebski is also a former public radio news director.
Diers described the report as a “first step.” PMJA intends to focus next on curriculum development, she said. Some of the training will focus on leadership, an area the report found in need of improvement.
Thirty-two people described the workforce of their organization as mostly white. Some attributed this to their station’s location or small staff, according to the report. One constant was that leadership did not match the diversity the newsroom was trying to achieve.
“I think one key is, how can we better develop a pipeline of diverse leaders?” Diers said. “How can we take earlier career folks and prepare them to be leaders?”
Respondents reported that most stations offer some kind of diversity initiative. But the scope of these efforts and perceptions of their effectiveness varied among survey respondents.
Answers to a question about how public media news organizations can improve their diversity pointed to leadership changes and improvements in staff recruitment and retention.
On another survey question, 33 of 63 respondents said they thought turnover was affected by identity.
“… By far the most common response was that unequal or improper treatment of people based on their identity causes those people to leave jobs in public media,” the report said. “Among the portions of a person’s identity that were specifically cited are: age, LGBTQIA+ status and race, but notably only two people mentioned gender as a factor.”
The PMJA report compared its findings to the once-a-decade American Journalist survey.
The 2022 American Journalist survey found the number of full-time minority journalists grew to 18% in 2022, up from 10.8% in 2013, the highest jump in a single decade since 1971.
But the 2022 survey also said 26.5% of respondents thought more journalists of color needed to be hired, 21.8% said more political diversity was needed, and 12.5% said more diversity of sexual orientation was needed.
PMJA’s report includes recommendations that drew upon other sources such as networking meetups and feedback from conference attendees, Diers said.
Those recommendations include:
- Going beyond race and ethnicity so that the newsroom has a “variety of abilities, ideologies, and experiences”
- Taking concrete steps to build diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility into everyday operations and planning
- Considering new reporting strategies and partnerships
- Regularly updating staff on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives and being transparent about finances and audience development
- Investing in onboarding and professional development
The report also pointed to questions for future research, such as examining turnover at stations or if and why LGBTQIA+ journalists are better represented in public media newsrooms than at commercial outlets.
PMJA doesn’t have specific plans for more research, but would like to see more done, Diers said. One lesson from this project came from starting it without a professional researcher.
“We have learned if we’re going to do research, we need to start with someone who [has] done extensive research and understands the research field,” Diers said.