Newsroom Diversity Will Require Union Flexibility

The Court's move against affirmative action requires new initiatives

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

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.

The harm from LIFO

This shouldn’t be a surprise, as unionization becomes more pervasive and almost all union contracts require that a rule of “last in, first out” be applied to layoffs in any given classification and location. If we are going to preserve the progress we made on diversity during the 45 years when the Court permitted affirmative action, and make the continuing (and overdue) progress that both justice and the increasing diversity of the population requires, I think the time has come for labor unions to do their part.

This issue has arisen in the past, and unions have sometimes disclaimed any responsibility for helping to solve it. But as a resurgent labor movement seeks wider input in how newsrooms are managed, it’s hard to see why diversity, too, doesn’t become a shared responsibility, and not only in hiring but also in retention.

That means that new union contracts need to provide exceptions to the seniority rule for layoffs when the effect of that rule would be to make newsrooms less diverse. That will be complicated, and will almost necessarily give newsroom managements more discretion on where the burden of layoffs will fall, which is antithetical to a basic union tenet. But it seems to me warranted, indeed required, if we are to collectively maintain our wider commitments. It is more than fair for unions to complain about problems from layoffs, but they also need to be part of solutions.

I don’t mean by this proposal to suggest that managers have done enough to date on the diversity issue in newsrooms. Many have not. I always took this imperative seriously as a newsroom manager and leader, but certainly wouldn’t hold myself out as some sort of paradigm. More could always have been done in the past; much more needs to be done in the future.

And I don’t mean to suggest that the burden of preserving and extending diversity should fall on unions alone.

What else needs to be done

One other necessary step, in my view, is that newsrooms need to pivot to economic affirmative action, overtly, openly and systematically favorable treatment in the hiring process for applicants who come from families of lower income or wealth. That remains permissible, at least as I read the recent Court opinions and constitutional law generally. It might, over time, return journalism closer to its working class roots, from which many newsrooms moved away, particularly in the years after the glory of Watergate.

Because wealth and income in our society are generally higher for white people, such an approach would also tend to have the indirect effect of bolstering racial diversity, even as it had the salutary direct effect of ensuring a broader range of voices on the full range of questions with which newsrooms today must grapple.

These are not easy questions to address. They are, however, critical to the ability of journalists and journalism generally to gain or retain— or regain— the trust of readers and potential readers. Even as the crises of attacks on democracy and a more dangerous climate demand our urgent attention, it’s important not to forget that race remains the central problem of American history, the challenge around which so many others pivot.

If we are to continue our progress, it will be necessary for everyone in our industry to do what they can. That will include organized labor.

Second Rough Draft will likely be off the next two weeks. See you soon.