Newsroom diversity will require union flexibility

Richard J. Tofel

It’s a tough season for those of us who believe in the importance of racial diversity in newsrooms. The Supreme Court opinion in the Harvard and UNC cases last month basically renounced as unconstitutional the view that selective colleges should look like America racially, and it will be just a hop, skip and jump for this activist Court to soon extend this vision to workplaces.

At the same time, widespread layoffs are eroding a good bit of the progress that had been made in diversifying some newsrooms, particularly that portion of the progress achieved in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed. At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, more than 40% of union members recently laid off were people of color, with both Latinos and Asians making up greater proportions of those let go than the overall representation of those groups in the bargaining unit. That sort of damage will mount as most of the nation’s newsrooms continue to shrink.

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