The News Leaders Association recently expressed disappointment in how few news organizations were willing to report diversity of their staffs in an employment practices survey. As a result, this headline made its way around the country last week: “Efforts to track diversity in journalism are lagging” (AP).
But INN staff realized the same is not true of our members, so we revisited our findings from June 2021 and published them on Medium.
Some highlights: when the Institute for Nonprofit News invited 284 member nonprofit news organizations to take its diversity survey in January 2021, some 94% responded. We found that:
- We see signs of progress in racial equity and inclusion within the nonprofit news field. In 2020, over a third of outlets (37%) had a staff where people of color made up 40% or more of total personnel, roughly representative of the U.S. population.
- In the past few years there has been a rise in organizations led by people of color, with recent startups leading the field’s advances in diversity. Nearly half of all INN member news outlets led by people of color launched from 2017 through 2020. Among the 770 workers across startups, including leadership and staff, 38% are people of color, vs. 31% for the whole field.
- There is a continued need for work at the executive level. A little less than a quarter of nonprofit news executives are people of color. Representation is highly variable and many outlets have low or no racial diversity at the top leadership level: One third of outlets have at least one person of color among their top executives, but nearly two-thirds have all white leadership.
