#JournalismSoWhite: Oscars' dilemma shared by the news media

THE LACK of diversity among Oscar's acting nominations has provided a lot of tsk-tsking and wagging fingers and plenty of grist for journalists and media watchers, but it has also prompted other professions to take a cold, hard look in the mirror.

Journalism has been wrestling with the lack of diversity among its own ranks for decades with little improvement to show for all its lofty intentions. The discussion about hiring more minorities in the media has been an on going  conversation limited to the industry but #JournalismSoWhite, launched by Asian/American journalist and immigration advocate Jose Antonio Vargas, has pushed the profession's ugly little secret to spill out of the newsroom and into the public realm.

I have often been the lone journalist of color in thousands of editorial meetings throughout my 28-year journalism career, which involved an ethnic community newspaper and four (or was it five?) different mainstream newsrooms under a similar number of ownership groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The only exception was my time spent at the Oakland Tribune under the late Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Robert Maynard, one of the country's strongest advocates for diversity in American newsrooms. He was the first African/American owner of a newspaper in a major city and he practiced what he preached. The Trib had one of the most diverse news staff in the profession. Editorial board meetings always had a wide range of perspectives where sometimes, there would be only one straight, white male in a room of 10 editors.

In the other newsrooms, most of the editors I worked with were Euro/Americans. It was hard not to notice my minority status in those meetings. Knowing that my experiences in my circuitous route to a journalism career was unlike the other writers and editors in the room, I always made it a point to offer news angles or assign stories that other editors might not have thought of. 

In news meetings, as we evaluated stories and their placement in the print newspapers, I always offered value judgements of stories that they might have passed over but which I thought might be of interest or importance to minority communities. In the diverse Bay Area, this perspective was invaluable from a business standpoint because our readership is as diverse as they come in the United States. 

It was a balancing act because I didn't want to be the "representative" of all minorities in those meetings. At the same time, I could not stand by and stay silent. "Uh, excuse me but with all due respect, ..." Kowtowing? I don't know, I thought I was being polite.

I'm not sure how the work environment is in television or radio, but in print, my minority status was hard to ignore. Being Asian in a leadership position was rare back then. Funny thing, the more management talked about increasing minority representation, compared to my time at the Maynard Tribune, the number of minorities in journalism seems to have declined as time passed. 

I hope it is different in the big city newspapers but newspapers in the suburbs, which until relatively recent have been the domain - or, should I say, refuge - of Euro/Americans remain largely white even as the suburban demographics are shifting with minorities seeking the American dream of home ownership. Today, the Beaver Cleaver neighborhoods - at least in the San Francisco Bay Area - are harder and harder to find and increasing the number of journalists of color becomes even more critical.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, probably the best-known undocumented immigrant in the country, opened up a can of worms recently when he tweeted the following.

Vargas, who started the organization Define American in his quest for citizenship, is a Filipino/American who came to this country at age 13. It wasn't until he was in his late teens that he discovered he was undocumented. 

He won a Pulitzer while working with the Washington Post. He revealed his immigration status in a Huffington Post confessional. Since then, he has been in the forefront advocating for immigration reform, including a documentary about his situation and a TV doc "Dear White America." 

RELATED: Jose Vargas, an undocumented American

Continuing the #JournalistsSoWhite conversation, he tweeted these queries:

When candidates for the U.S. presidency are spewing anti-immigrant hate and hurling racist  statements against Asians, Latinos, African/Americans, Syrians, Muslims, etc. It becomes critical that our voices are heard amidst all the mischaracterizations and stereotypes but sometimes - like me - one can get tired of holding up the banner for diversity.

Maybe it becomes a case of burnout when journalists of color get tired of trying to explain themselves and the communities they came from to editors and management who -- despite their best intentions to diversify their staff -- still preferred to hang out with people who look like them, go golfing with them, joke with them, and share the same values and perspective that they hold. In other words, it was never a meeting in the middle. One always had to move into their enclave, talk like them, dress like them and let the everyday slights slide off one's shoulders. 

According to the American Society of News Editors' census released last summer, the percentage of racial minorities at newspapers was at 12.76 percent in 2014. With minorities making up 37.02 percent of the U.S. population, our newsrooms are not representative of the society we live in.

For every 100 employees in the media industry, 2.8 are of Asian descent according to the ASNE survey. 

RELATED: Find out how diverse the American newspaper industry is with our interactive.

Sadly, my anecdotal observation is also true, minority percentage of newsroom employment is on a downward track, falling to 12.76 percent in 2014. A year earlier it was 13.34 percent. ASNE president Chris Peck in a press release, hailed this as good news saying the stats shows employment of minorities as holding steady. I don't know about that; to me it looks like its is getting worse.

It may be too late for the newspaper industry. Minority journalists are finding a place for themselves in the new media platforms which have younger and more daring owners who are more open to the diverse ideas those journalists bring with them. There is a fear that newspapers are the dinosaurs of media. Their inability to change and adapt to the changing demographics and technology may be its undoing.

The tech industry has been under heavy fire for its lack of diversity and opportunities for minorities and women but compared to the print media, they are light years ahead. Google, for example, said this year that 60 percent of its overall staff is Euro/American. At Facebook, only 55 percent of the overall staff is white. Euro/Americans at Microsoft make up 59.5 percent of its overall staff. (Of course those numbers are misleading because the inequities come in the board room with minorities clustered in the lower paying jobs and women in supporting roles.) 

RELATED: Asians hit a bamboo ceiling in Silicon Valley

BuzzFeed founder and chief executive Jonah Peretti says that diversity is a priority for the company. “We care about diversity for moral reasons,” explains Peretti in not to employees “but we also know a diverse staff is a competitive advantage that allows us to recruit from the broadest possible pool of talent and have team members with a wide range of experiences and perspectives.”

The cynic in me says "I've heard this song before," but maybe the online news sites may be the proving ground for minority journalists in the future. The news outlets on the Internet have the advantage of not having the historic template that perpetuates the old boys' networks. 

I like to think that there will always be a place for good journalists. Computer skills don't automatically translate to good story telling. Digging for information, getting the facts straight and writing compelling stories are skills that will always be in demand, no matter the medium.

The Poynter Institute's Kristen Hale, whose article inspired this discussion, wrote: 

"Journalists love holding people and institutions accountable — we speak truth to power. That is our job. But given our own power, are we holding ourselves accountable? #JournalismSoWhite is meant to spark conversations, uncomfortable as they may be. I would like to think, and I hope, that the conversation that was started online can move to offline conversations in newsrooms across the country (and also in journalism schools, where the new generation of journalists are being trained). One of my favorite quotes about journalism came from the playwright Arthur Miller: 'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.' Since #JournalismSoWhite, we are nowhere close to hearing everyone."

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