5 Facts about ethnic and gender diversity in U.S. newsrooms

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The renewed attention to the composition of newsrooms comes in the wake of the American Society of News Editors’ (ASNE) annual survey of workforce diversity, which showed that minorities and women are less represented in newspaper newsrooms than in society at large.

In recent years, progress on the diversity front has largely stalled. ASNE has counted professional full-time newspaper journalists since it first released the census in1978. This year, 978 out of 1,382 daily print newspapers responded, representing 71% of all U.S. dailies. In addition to the continued reduction in the size of the daily newspaper workforce in 2012, some of the key findings in the ASNE report relate to diversity in the newsroom.

  1. Overall, minority journalists accounted for 12% of the total newspaper newsroom workforce in 2012.
  2. Smaller newspapers are less likely to employ minority journalists.
  3. Women are often underrepresented in newspaper newsrooms.
  4. About one-third of newsroom managers are women.
  5. In the past two decades, there has been little overall change in the percentage of minorities in the newsroom.

5 Facts about ethnic and gender diversity in U.S. newsrooms