High Anxiety   

The call for diversity in the newsroom has white men running scared.

At a staff meeting last spring, Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief Jack Nelson was asked by a female reporter why there weren't more women and minorities in the bureau.

"What he said – and I'm paraphrasing – is we don't want to bring any more white males into the bureau," says one staffer who attended the meeting.

A white male reporter challenged Nelson: "Do you mean it's a rule that no more white males will be in the bureau?"

"That's right," Nelson replied.

"Isn't that discrimination?" the reporter asked.

"No," Nelson said, "it's affirmative action."

Nelson, 64, who spent years covering the civil rights movement, says he's not satisfied with the ethnic and gender makeup of the bureau he has commanded for 19 years. Thirty-three of the 45 editors, reporters and photographers are white men.

"We don't have a good mix," says Nelson, who is white. "That's the crux of what I said at the meeting... We really didn't have, in my opinion, room to bring in more white males until we did more for minorities and women."

More recently, the staff of the San Jose Mercury News attended a similar session. In September, Managing Editor Jerry Ceppos, 47, stressed that integrating the newsroom is the paper's "most important goal for the next few years."

Ceppos, who also is white, accompanied his blunt talk with color slides of charts documenting the discrepancy between the percentage of minorities in the county the paper serves – 41 percent – and his newsroom – 17 percent. Ceppos' goal is 20 percent by the end of next year.

"Would we hire a minority journalist right now if an equally qualified non-minority journalist applied for the job? Would we even favor a promising minority candidate over a somewhat more experienced non-minority applicant?

"The answer is yes," said Ceppos. "I just don't know another way to change the figures you've been seeing."

Nelson's and Ceppos' frankness is unusual. While some news managers are candid about their desire to redress decades of inequity, many, fearful of lawsuits and recriminations, sidestep a topic that has become the hottest, touchiest, most whispered about issue at daily newspapers.

"I don't say [to applicants] we don't hire white men," says Nelson. "But I do say if you're a minority or a woman, it would help. Everybody knows it's true. I'm just being honest with people."

As managers scramble to reshape their newsrooms to better reflect their communities, there is obviously one group that is feeling anxious. For the first time, a large number of white male journalists believe they have to overcome the handicaps of race and gender that have traditionally worked against women and minorities. Although they acknowledge that past injustices need to be remedied, they feel threatened, frustrated and, in many cases, angry. But because it isn't politically correct to question the goals of diversity, most white men are reluctant to say so on the record. Minorities, conversely, deride white male angst and maintain that newspapers still are not doing enough.

The perception of reverse discrimination is fueled by rumors as well as the way newspapers are openly and aggressively seeking minority applicants. They're hiring consulting firms, holding sensitivity seminars, participating in minority job fairs, announcing special hiring policies and emphasizing minority figures. Still, many staffers complain that campaigns to reshape the newsroom have been handled poorly.

The move to diversify the workplace is not particular to the newspaper industry – it's happening at corporations across the country and is creating the same kind of fallout among white men. Experts say white male professionals are generally uncomfortable with the relatively new-found zeal with which managers – almost always older white men – are trying to promote diversity. The efforts are all the more threatening since they are taking place in the midst of a sluggish economy that's forcing newspapers and other corporations to slash budgets and trim staffs.

"What white men are actually experiencing is that feeling of: 'I'm not going to get what I want if I apply for this job,' " says media consultant Nancy Woodhull, "which is a feeling that women and people of color have had for a long time." Woodhull says news managers must consider the individual needs of all their staff members, white and non-white, in their concerted drive for diversity. In many cases, unfortunately, they have not.

R ecent surveys suggest that white men have little to worry about: They're still being hired and promoted. In 1992, a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) study based on a survey of 462 papers estimated that 55 percent of newspaper journalists are white males, while only 11 percent are minorities. Those figures include clerical and administrative staff. A 1993 American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) study based on a survey of 987 papers estimated that 10.25 percent of the 54,531 newsroom professionals at the country's 1,535 dailynewspapers are minorities. Fifteen years ago that number was only 4 percent.

That 10.25 percent figure is somewhat misleading, however. Most newsroom integration is taking place at newspapers with circulations of 100,000 or more. At those papers, managers are under fierce pressure to increase minority staff and are often rewarded with bonuses for every percentage point increase. The percentage of minorities at these papers is currently in the high teens or low 20s and editors are determined to push them higher.

These papers generally are in metropolitan areas with substantial minority communities. The most aggressive papers have nearly doubled their percentage of minority staff in the last five years. At the San Jose Mercury News, for example, the percentage of minorities working full time in the newsroom jumped from 9 percent in 1988 to 17 percent today. The Los Angeles Times' percentage of minorities increased from 10.5 percent to 18 percent during the same time period.

Employment opportunities for white males are brighter at small circulation papers. In fact, ASNE's recent survey indicates 45 percent of American papers have all-white newsrooms. These papers represent nearly one-third of the nation's daily circulation.

But most ambitious journalists, white and non-white, want to work at large metropolitan newspapers. And a white male's chance of getting a job at one of these papers – which are cutting staffs and trying to hire minorities – is diminishing. Nearly 60 percent of the 5,500 minorities at newspapers work in those newsrooms.

"Everybody has dramatically increased their numbers in a very short period of time," says a 42-year-old white male editor at a West Coast paper. "The only way to do that, especially in a recession, is to discriminate."

Top managers say publicly that all jobs are open to anyone who wants to apply. They tell their staffs that a diversity campaign is not reverse racism. They say it's not only an issue of fairness but also one of practicality. If a paper doesn't reach out to all members of the community, it will lose circulation and advertising revenue – and have to cut staff. It's a question of survival.

But privately some managers say that white males have a right to feel uneasy.

?The comfort level that white males used to have about the automatic getting of jobs is gone," says David Hawpe, 50, the white editor of the Courier-Journal in Louisville. "Yes, there are fewer jobs for white males. That is a fact. But where is it written that those jobs belong to white men by divine birthright?"

Some say what makes white men anxious is new competition. "A lot of white males when they started in the business long ago could automatically assume all their competition was only other white males," says Susan Denley, director of editorial hiring at the Los Angeles Times. "By focusing on diversity, we've created a lot of competitors that they didn't have before and it makes them nervous."

J. Frazier Smith, a black professor at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, scoffs at the idea that white men should be worried. "It used to be we couldn't find any qualified minority journalists," he says. "Now we've gotten to the point where white males are saying they can't get jobs or get ahead in the news business. It's so far from the truth, it's laughable."

When white women started entering the profession in the 1970s, adds Smith, who used to work for the Cincinnati Enquirer, "You didn't see stories about white males not being able to get ahead. It's okay to have women but when you have people of color, now we have a problem."

Today, women constitute 38 percent of the newsroom workforce; minorities make up a tenth. ASNE doesn't keep figures on what percentage of them are male or female. Blacks comprise 5.1 percent, Hispanics 2.9 percent, Asians 1.9 percent and Native Americans .3 percent. When managers talk about diversity they include white women, but there's a greater focus on hiring and promoting minorities.

David Lawrence Jr., 51, the white publisher of the Miami Herald and an outspoken proponent of newsroom diversity, says these numbers prove the white men can't jump theory is more perception than fact. "What you'll hear is: 'Boy, the future is gone for white guys,' " he says. "I say all you need to do is look around and see that's a ridiculous statement. We certainly continue to hire white men."

Recent statistics bear him out. For example, in 1992 the Seattle Times hired 12 white males out of 38 new editorial employees. That same year the Milwaukee Journal hired 14 journalists; six were white men. And between August 1992 and last August, six of the 20 full time hires at the San Jose Mercury News were white men.

"F inally, the people of color are getting an opportunity to succeed or fail," says Carl Morris, the executive director of the National Association of Minority Media Executives. "Now the battlefield is becoming a little more equal in the competition for jobs. Before people of color had no opportunities to even compete."

However, some white male journalists charge that the "battlefield," as Morris defines it, is hardly "equal." They say they are being passed over for promotions and new jobs in favor of less qualified minority candidates.

Of course, there are cases where white men don't get particular jobs because they don't deserve them.

"If I applied to the Miami Herald and I didn't get the job, I'd have to figure out why," says Lawrence. "Even if it's not so, I might say it's because they're into hiring minorities."

Whether race is used as a convenient excuse for not getting ahead is often overlooked. Instead, many white reporters interviewed believe race can be more important than talent in the newspaper industry's drive for diversity.

"Everybody has seen cases where people with obvious talent and qualifications are passed over for minorities," says Carl Cannon, 40, a white man who left Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau last March to become White House correspondent for Baltimore's Sun. To be sure, stories about inexperienced blacks who leapfrog over seasoned white colleagues, untested Asians who are wined and dined, or bidding wars over a Hispanic candidate right out of college have been passed around newsrooms.

Sometimes these stories are true; sometimes not. Take, for example, the white editor in his mid-forties with 10 years at a California paper. He spent a year as acting state editor, all the while lobbying to make the job permanent.

"He never had a chance," says another white male editor at the paper. "There was no way a white male was going to get that job."

Instead, a Hispanic woman from another newspaper was named state editor in mid-1992. Although a talented reporter, the woman, now 34, had no editing experience. The scuttlebutt in the newsroom, accurate or not, was that the white male editor was a victim of reverse discrimination.

In 1990, when the Dallas Morning News named three black men assistant managing editors at the same time, the newsroom's anxiety meter jumped off the charts. In one case, Kevin Merida, now 36 and working at the Washington Post, jumped over white staff members who had been editing his copy to become their boss as assistant managing editor for foreign and national news.

"While [Merida] was a great reporter, he'd never managed a soul," says a white male at the paper. "Talk about resentment about race. But then some people just recognized it as the way things are."

Merida says the promotions could have been implemented more gracefully. "I became my boss' equal, so that was certainly a delicate situation," he says. "Sure it caused tension, but we worked through it."

A few years ago, a large East Coast paper had an opening at its city hall bureau. A white male reporter, who was about 40 years old and whose work had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, applied for the job. He didn't get it. Instead managers gave it to a talented, though younger and less experienced, black reporter who was ambivalent about taking the position.

"Among some white males in the newsroom, there was a lot of grumbling because they felt this was yet another signal that their color was holding them back," says someone involved in the decision. "But the editors insisted on having at least one black reporter in the city hall bureau in a city that's approximately 40 percent black."

Managers' reasons for choosing one person over another are often kept private, and that generates gossip about hiring practices.

"It's just the whole climate out there now," says a 40-year-old white male Newsday reporter who was job-hunting last spring. "You're told by rumor, by friends in all these places I looked, that they [editors] have a push on to hire minorities and women."

Sometimes the message is more direct. When a white male in his mid-thirties applied for an editing position at a large Eastern newspaper's Sunday magazine in the mid-1980s, the magazine's white male editor said, "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you're the wrong color and the wrong sex." More recently, a prize-winning white reporter who applied to a large Southern paper says he was told the same thing. Meanwhile, he says, "blacks and Hispanics in my newsroom have been going on to better jobs over the past five years." Even as far back as 1980, a white reporter recalls applying for a job at Newsday. He says an editor told him, "If I didn't have to hire an Eskimo with a Hispanic mother and a black father who is handicapped, I would hire you."

More and more news managers – mostly white men whose jobs are not threatened – now go on the record with similar, if less blunt,policy statements:

"One of the first things I did was stop the hiring of non-blacks and set up an unofficial little quota system," Max Frankel, 63, who became executive editor of the New York Times in 1986, told the New Yorker in late June.

David Hamilton, 50, an assistant managing editor and recruiter at Newsday, says, "Given an equal choice, we'll tilt toward the minority to address ills that have built up over the course of a century." The percentage of minorities there jumped from 13 percent in 1988 to 18 percent in 1993.

Many big newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, have adopted the rule that for every employee search or promotion, management has to seriously consider a qualified minority candidate and a female candidate.

Still stinging from being caught unprepared when Los Angeles erupted in bloody riots in April 1992, the Times also is trying to place more inexperienced minorities in the main newsroom instead of starting them out in suburban bureaus, as was the previous policy.

"It's not a smart thing to approach the millennium with a lopsidedly white newsroom," says Denley of the Times, where minorities now comprise 18.5 percent of the staff in a city that's about 60 percent non-white. "We don't have a firm goal. No special numbers."

Yet Times Editor Shelby Coffey III has said that for the next two years he wants to make sure 50 percent of new hires are minorities and women. As of August, "we've almost hired 39 percent minority out of 50 hires," says Denley.

T he lingering recession – and the desire of newspaper publishers to maintain high profit margins – have limited opportunities for everyone in journalism. Many news executives are cutting staff at the same time they are seeking more minority employees.

"If the business wasn't downsizing, I don't think you'd find resentment," says Cannon of Baltimore's Sun. "I think these people [white men] would really welcome minority and women hires. You just wouldn't find some of the scorekeeping you have now."

Today, there are more people competing for fewer jobs. Three years ago, 57,000 supervisors, reporters, copy editors and photographers worked in newsrooms. By 1993, that number dropped to 54,000 as 59 dailies folded and others purged staff. Jim Davidson, 47, who worked for the now-defunct Pittsburgh Press, applied for one job at a West Coast paper and was told there were 400 to 500 applicants. He eventually found employment, but not with a newspaper.

"Now it's difficult, given the economy, the hiring freezes and lack of job turnover, for good people to move up the ladder, period," says Toni Laws, the NAA's vice president of diversity.

Journalists at all levels of experience are struggling. In 1988, 15 percent of an estimated 33,000 journalism school graduates got jobs at newspapers and news services. Three years later, that number had plummeted to 8 percent, according to the NAA.

Meanwhile, newspapers and trade organizations are actively wooing minorities. ASNE, for example, devoted $230,000 – 30 percent of its 1993 budget – to seminars, eight regional job fairs, internships and scholarships for minority journalists. In 1978, the group pledged to have all newspapers' professional staff mirror the general population by the year 2000. Minorities, who in 1990 made up 24.8 percent of the population, are projected to represent about 28 percent at the end of the century. The goal probably will not be met.

Then there are the multitude of conventions and job fairs for minority associations. "Virtually every job fair has signs up saying they want to hire minorities," says Smith of Ohio University. Only the Society for Professional Journalists still hosts a job fair that includes white job-seekers, according to ASNE.

But is it really more difficult for white male journalists to advance than their minority colleagues? Kevin Merida, who now covers Congress for the Washington Post, says it's the "greatest myth in journalism."

"The thing I want to knock down is this notion that blacks or people of color are getting special treatment," he says. "I just don't see it happening... Just look around. It's not like I'm bumping into black journalists wherever I go. I have been very fortunate, but I know so many other black journalists who have been stymied in their careers... A lot of that has to do with race, not skill."

Tony Atwater, a black professor who chairs the department of journalism and mass media at Rutgers University, says there are fewer opportunities for all journalists. "It's easy to target efforts to diversify the news industry as a culprit for taking away jobs from white Americans," he says. "But I don't necessarily buy the idea wholeheartedly. My strong feeling is it's tough to get a job for everyone."

Economists like Lawrence Mishel, research director for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., agree. "Recessions usually don't affect white collar workers that much," Mishel says. "But in this recession there was more job loss and unemployment among white collar professionals than was usually the case. Second, at least for white collar men, wages have been falling since 1987. Third, there's been a slow rate of job growth in the recovery and a very large proportion of new jobs have been temporary and part time.

"The overall reality is that there's a lot of economic restructuring going on that's hurting all workers."

Even so, a recent study by the 2,400-member National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) indicates that blacks and whites see things quite differently. It found that 97 of 100 mainly white print and broadcast managers surveyed said blacks were just as likely or more likely than non-blacks to be given career-advancing jobs. Only 24 percent of the 537 NABJ members surveyed believe that's true. Fifty-nine percent of the NABJ-member respondents said blacks have to meet a higher standard for promotion than whites.

A 1991 survey, conducted by Ted Pease and Smith at Ohio University's journalism school, found that two-thirds of white male journalists believe minorities receive preferential treatment. Approximately the same percentage of minority journalists say they don't. Seventy-six percent of white males said a glass ceiling for women and minorities didn't exist at their papers; 73 percent of black males, 62 percent of Hispanic males and 63 percent of females of all races said it did exist.

Smith and Pease predicted trouble ahead, calling their findings "an omen of a potential backlash among some whites in the newsroom against efforts to increase diversity."

There may well be a white male backlash, but it certainly isn't public. "It's too touchy a subject to speak on the record," says a white male in his late thirties at a Knight-Ridder newspaper who's been looking unsuccessfully for a new reporting job for a year.

Another white male in his thirties, who works at the Dallas Morning News, adds, "Race is such a sensitive issue that you don't see people [criticizing] anything that helps minorities."

If a white man did publicly charge discrimination, there'd be no chorus of sympathizers.

"Who knows how many times I got a job and some black guy didn't," says a Pulitzer Prize-winning white male editor for a national chain. "The playing field has been leveled and just listen to the white guy howl."

Many white reporters and editors note that blacks and other ethnic groups were systematically excluded from newsrooms in the past. They argue it's about time non-whites got a break – or at least a chance to compete equally.

"Even if it is hard now for white men because of competition from other groups, is it worse than what women or minorities have been struggling against?" asks Michael Ross, a 44-year-old white reporter in the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau with 23 years of experience. "The answer is no. It may be unfair in individual cases. But if you look at the situation overall, it's not unfair because you need to balance things out."

Where there is compassion for the white male predicament, it's often grudging.

"I have a degree of sympathy for the feeling white males might have that somehow everything has been turned upside down," says Evelyn Hsu, 40, an assistant editor at the Washington Post and president of the 850-member Asian American Journalists Association. "But if you are a white male, the reality is you do have competition now that you might not have had 10 or 15 years ago. Some of your assumptions are going to have to go by the wayside."

Betty Anderson, a 41-year-old black copy editor at the Seattle Times, says she empathizes. "It wasn't their fault that their grandfathers didn't hire people of color," she says. "But [younger white men] are having to reap what their grandfathers sowed."

Most high-level editors maintain that a multicolored newsroom is crucial for better journalism and reaching more readers. "I say the best person may very well be the best person because they are black or a woman or gay or handicapped," says the Courier-Journal's Hawpe. "Those people bring..a knowledge and sensitivity that others don't have. As a result, when you have a diverse staff, you do some stories you might not otherwise do. You use sources you might not otherwise use."

At the September staff meeting at the San Jose Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos mentioned a story that a Vietnamese reporter wrote about the increasing numbers of Vietnamese men who are returning to their native land to find brides. "If I'd been out on the street for a million years," says Ceppos, "I wouldn't have gotten the story."

Other editors say integrating the staff is also a matter of simple economics. Readership is dropping at many papers; minority populations are surging. To stay in business, newspapers must reach out to minority readership and they can't do it if white men and women are putting out a vanilla newspaper. "We can't in this country have white people sitting around writing stories about all other people," says Newsday's Hamilton.

"We are a business seeking to reach all readers," says Lawrence of the Miami Herald, which has a staff that is 30 percent minority. "Our readers are black and white and other colors, people of different faith, gender and sexual orientation. In order for us to reach those folks, we need a lot of different perspectives."

W hite male journalists aren't calling for all-white newsrooms and don't reject the idea that different perspectives can strengthen a newspaper. However, both whites and minorities are extremely uncomfortable about the way diversity policies are being implemented. Many blame newspaper managers, who generally are skittish about the subject, often too harried to be sensitive and motivated by bonuses for jacked-up minority numbers.

The situation is compounded by the fact that most top managers are white and male. ASNE reports that 85 percent of newsroom executives are male – and 96 percent are white.

The New York Times, whose editor is an outspoken leader in the diversity drive, closely fits that profile. Seventy-one percent of its news executives on the masthead are male and 91 percent are white. Only 2 percent of the daily papers across the country have minority senior executives, according to the National Association of Minority Media Executives.

Not only are managers mostly white and male, but they've been in the business a long time to reach those positions. Jeff Gottlieb, 40, a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, questions how effectively those managers can change the complexions of city rooms. "The people who screwed up by not hiring minorities for so long," he says, "are the same people who are now in charge of doing it."

Cannon, of Baltimore's Sun, challenges those in power to give up their jobs to a woman or a minority if they feel so strongly about diversity. "There's something about these white guys at the pinnacle of power who now have religion," says Cannon. "But now the [white] guys in their thirties can't be promoted because these guys made bad decisions back then."

Top editors and reporters contacted for this article agree that management has not handled the subject well. Most newspapers are fumbling around, don't have a coherent way of communicating hiring plans and don't do enough sensitivity training on the issue, critics say.

Management's lack of sensitivity – by being secretive or brusque – has served to heighten newsroom tension and cultivate distrust.

"Fear and envy results because management is mishandling diversity," says Mercedes de Uriarte, a diversity consultant for print and broadcast clients. "Management says such things as: 'We need to hire a minority for this job.' And they don't say why. Ver? few newsrooms invest the time and effort to effectively explain to white employees what the end objective is. That is to have a newspaper survive."

Others complain that managers don't bother to sell new minority hires by explaining what that person can bring to the newspaper. "One idea would be for management to route the résumé [of a recently hired minority candidate]," says Ohio University's Smith, "so everyone can see where people came from instead of plopping people down and saying: 'Here's your new sister city editor.' "

Consultant Nancy Woodhull says that managers should focus on individual career needs – for white and non-white – as well as changing the makeup of the staff. "Human nature doesn't change," she says. "People say, 'Yes, I agree with the concept of diversity. But what's it going to do to me? What am I going to lose?' "

Neil Foote, minority affairs director of ASNE, adds, "An editor who makes diversity an issue and does not acknowledge they'll be some resentment and fear is going to be making a big mistake."

Gottlieb of the Mercury News says that kind of misunderstanding can seriously hurt a newsroom. "I think management has to explain to people: 'This is difficult. We have to make changes and some of you will feel slighted,' " he says. "Management has got to understand that there are human dynamics involved. If they don't, they are going to end up with newsrooms fractured along ethnic lines."

News managers might also end up with lawsuits. The number of racial discrimination charges filed by white employees from all industries with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has jumped dramatically this year. From fiscal year 1989 through fiscal year 1992, there was an average of 10 formal complaints annually. But from September 1992 through this September, the EEOC received 22 complaints.

Anna Padia, human rights director of the Newspaper Guild, which represents employees at 220 newspapers, wire services and magazines, says complaints of discrimination from whites and minorities are mounting. "We have guild members who have complained who are white, black, Hispanic, Asian, male and female," she says. "They are deeply concerned about the way managers are implementing new diversity programs. In the last two months, there are at least a half-dozen cases we've been dealing with."

As top executives at the nation's newspapers strive to meet hidden or stated quotas, they must confront growing resentment by whites and non-whites alike. "That's the price of diversity," says Merida of the Washington Post. "News managers have to find some strategy for dealing with that. If you don't, a lot of tension is going to build up and it's not productive. In fact, you're wasting the talent and energy of people and you're not going to put out the best newspaper." l