Priming the Pump   

A training program launced at Denver's Rocky Mountain News aims to get more Hispanic presence in newsrooms.

To do its part in changing the face of American journalism, E.W. Scripps Co., recently launched its Academy for Hispanic Journalists at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

The venture, geared toward early career journalists, has been enthusiastically endorsed by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Scripps' partner in an attempt to increase Hispanic representation at news outlets in major Latino population centers.

Scripps Editorial Development Director Mike Phillips says the academy will provide a different way to recruit minority journalists. "A lot of diversity recruiting is simply stealing candidates from other newspapers," he says, adding this way Scripps could create its own source of trained and skilled Hispanic journalists, each having the skills of "a 10-year veteran." The training is a two-year program.

More important, however, Phillips says that the academy will help with the industrywide problem of retaining Hispanic journalists. "We've been good at recruiting bright young journalists [but] retention has been a bigger problem," he says. He explains that's partly because the new recruits didn't have much support--newspapers "dropped them in the middle of the newsroom and said, 'OK. You're here. Sink or swim.' "

The company's creation of the academy, projected to cost $350,000 a year, is in large part a response to the NAHJ's complaints about news organizations with inadequate minority staffing.

The academy "establishes an institutional approach that will create a new and ongoing pipeline of young Hispanic journalists for the entire Scripps chain," says NAHJ President Juan Gonzalez.

Phillips says that many Scripps' reporters need help in understanding and learning how to reach the expanding Latino markets in their areas. He says that NAHJ's diversity training seminars, meetings between members of the Latino community and newspapers, and other initiatives already launched at the News, Ventura County Star and the Naples Daily News, have been productive. "This is a new thing for us," he says. "It is very much an experiment, and one that is working."