A look at DEI efforts in New Jersey newsrooms
Here’s what’s changed at Gannett and NJ Advance Media
In 2020, seemingly every newsroom made commitments to improve diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests and a racial reckoning around the world.
New Jersey’s largest news organizations were no exception. Gannett pledged to build more representative newsrooms and publicly publish diversity staffing reports. NJ Advance Media has implemented changes recommended by its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, which launched in 2018.
New Jersey newsroom leaders and employees both say that it’s important to build newsrooms that look more like the communities they serve and create diverse coverage that consistently reflects the voices and concerns of different ethnic, racial and religious groups in their city or region.
But there are various ways to go about achieving these goals, and different timelines and understandings of progress. In addition, several newsrooms across the state unionized in 2021 and have started to bargain with their employers around DEI and other issues.
In short, the state of DEI in NJ newsrooms is changing, and all parties acknowledge that there is a lot of work to be done. Here’s an overview of what has happened in the last two years and how newsroom leaders and employees are thinking and feeling about DEI.
Gannett pledges to improve DEI
The Record and NorthJersey.com, Gannet’s largest Jersey media properties, issued a DEI pledge for their newsroom in August 2020, around the same time Gannett did across the country.
Daniel Sforza, the executive editor, wrote the pledge and acknowledged that “Over the years, The Record has largely failed to be consistent in how it has told the story of diversity in North Jersey.”
In September 2021, Sforza recounted the organization’s progress, noting that The Record dedicated new coverage areas and beats to the Arab and Muslim communities, the Asian community, people with disabilities, women’s sports, housing discrimination and more.
Sforza also pointed to other methods of community outreach, such as resuming a diversity-in-journalism workshop for college students and continuing to meet with more civic groups like the Hispanic Alliance for Garfield to discuss issues of importance.
But at the same time, Sforza released an annual diversity census that showed The Record hadn’t improved in hiring staff to better reflect community demographics. The percentage of white, Asian and male employees all increased, while the percentage of Black, Hispanic/Latino, and female employees decreased.
The Record’s newsroom is still drastically different from the community, especially for newsroom managers, which it defines as someone who supervises one or more employees. About 94% of newsroom managers are white and about 67% are male.
Sforza told me that these numbers were just a snapshot in time, but also noted difficulties in hiring, citing a labor shortage and “The Great Resignation” as factors. He preached patience and reiterated The Record’s long-term commitment to DEI.
“I think it’s important for everyone to realize that this isn’t something where there’s a finish line. You constantly need to innovate, work to reflect your audience, and improve diversification of your topics and staff,” Sforza said. “It’s not something where you accomplish it and then you’re done — that’s not the approach. It’s a constant evolution where you keep pushing forward and asking what more you can do.”
Hollis Towns, Gannett’s Atlantic region editor and vice president for local initiatives, also highlighted the importance of building a strong pipeline in hiring more diverse staff.
Towns works alongside Sforza and Mizell Stewart III, Gannett’s vice president for news performance, talent and partnerships, to make sure The Record attends journalism conferences — like those hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) — and builds strong relationships with HBCUs and other colleges.
Both Towns and Sforza referenced their “north star goal” at Gannett: they want their newspapers to reflect the communities that they serve. And even if the numbers aren’t there yet at The Record, Towns says it’s also about making sure that they are engaged in the community and taking part in the conversation to shape policy.
“It’s not just about counting the numbers and ensuring the numbers are reflective,” Towns said. “Rather, it’s more about making sure there are voices at the table that are a part of those conversations, and that we’re inclusive in all of what we do, not just in the reporting, but in the decision making and in the growth and progress of the company overall.”
Unions form in Gannett newsrooms
The Record has also been part of a unionization wave sweeping the journalism industry, especially for Gannett’s properties in the Atlantic region. In February 2021, three of Gannett’s NJ properties — The Record, Daily Record and NJ Herald — formed The Record Guild.
More unions followed. In August 2021, three more Gannett properties — Asbury Park Press, Home News Tribune and Courier News — formed the APP-MCJ Guild. And the same month a group of digital producers for 37 Gannett news sites across the Atlantic region formed the Atlantic DOT Guild.
All of these groups unionized with the New York News Guild, and in December 2021, they joined forces to start bargaining for new contracts as the Gannett Regional Union (that union also encompasses three more Gannett units in New York).
“Every newsroom is different, but the underlying problems persist, and we’re going to be more powerful working together than going against Gannett individually,” said Susanne Cervenka, an investigative reporter at Asbury Park Press.
Cervenka serves on a joint DEI committee, which includes members from many of the different outlets within the Gannett Regional Union. In her own newsroom, Cervenka has been discouraged by the lack of changes in staffing and noticed troubling trends — for example, she said that six of her female colleagues left in recent years, and they were replaced by five men.
Specifically, the Gannett Regional Union would like to see new hiring standards and contractual language that requires management to seek candidates from underrepresented groups. For example, the New York Magazine Union (also represented by the News Guild) recently secured language mandating that a minimum of 35% of applicants that get to the first step in the interview process have to be from traditionally underrepresented groups.
“We want to ensure that Gannett keeps its promises by working with them and creating actionable plans with deadlines,” said Melanie Anzidei, unit secretary for The Record Guild and a sports reporter at The Record. “There is strength in numbers, and we all want the same thing: to work with Gannett to change our culture and find ways to produce impactful journalism by having stronger, safer, and more inclusive newsrooms that also reflect the communities we serve.”
To start, the Gannett Regional Union will conduct a pay equity study modeled off an April 2021 study of 14 other Gannett newsrooms. That study revealed pay disparities across race and gender at Gannett newsrooms like the Arizona Republic.
According to Cervenka, it’s been helpful to learn from the experience of other unions at Gannett newsrooms across the country. The Guild has even facilitated conversations with other Gannett unions, like at the Austin American-Statesmen, where employees have helped the Gannett Regional Union formulate some of their DEI asks.
“We can see from Austin and Arizona what is possible,” Cervenka said. “We can see that we don’t have to just take what Gannett says at face value, just by (Austin and Arizona) having a union and working on a contract, they were able to close their pay equity gap. They gave us a road map and showed what’s possible — we can put diversity promises in our contract.”
DEI committee makes changes at NJ Advance
NJ Advance Media (NJAM), which operates NJ.com and major newspapers like The Star-Ledger, has also ramped up its efforts to improve DEI in the past few years — mainly through an internal DEI committee, which has gone through several iterations since it launched in 2018.
Robin Wilson-Glover, director of digital opinion, and Enrique Lavin, publisher and editor of NJ Cannabis Insider, are the current co-chairs. The committee is rounded out by three reporters, one columnist, one editor, and the director for newsroom operations.
According to Lavin and Wilson-Glover, the committee’s mission statement is “to help ensure diversity in race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, physical disabilities, and socioeconomic backgrounds is represented in the hiring and retention, coverage, and decision-making of NJAM operations.”
They pointed to several accomplishments in the last few years, such as facilitating an implicit bias training program that was adopted by Advance Local newsrooms across the country. At NJAM, the committee helped to create a new Diversity of Voices editor position and a full-time columnist to cover NJ’s communities of color.
Improving newsroom standards has also been a major focus. The committee led the charge to update style guidance for reporting on disenfranchised and underserved communities, changed mugshot policy, and developed the Diverse Source Database in partnership with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
Moving forward, the committee is working to issue guidelines that can re-imagine public safety and crime coverage, further strengthen talent pipelines through fellowships and events, and partner with NJAM’s sales and marketing department to develop an incubator program for New Jersey businesses owned and operated by people of color.
Employee frustrations at NJ Advance come out
Even though DEI efforts may seem strong at NJ Advance, there have been public calls for change from employees. Tennyson Donyea Coleman, who was a member of the DEI committee, had been an entertainment/trending reporter at NJAM before establishing his new role as culture, identity, and diversity reporter in June 2020.
A year later, Donyea tweeted a thread about his experience at NJAM (he left shortly after and now works as a statehouse reporter at the public radio station WHYY). It is a powerful essay and video about the experience of a Black journalist at a corporate news organization.
Donyea detailed racist microaggressions, pushback, and dismissiveness he received from NJAM management and how it took a serious toll on his mental health. He wrote that his time on the DEI committee was traumatizing and called for more independent, outside involvement as well as more grassroots community engagement.
In the thread, Donyea noted many of the changes that the committee helped implement, but explained that racism in leadership persisted and that his experience of being a Black journalist in the newsroom felt exhausting and helpless.
Donyea’s open skepticism and public critique is a brave and poignant example of how many journalists have felt about the DEI changes in their newsrooms.
While it’s easy for newsroom leaders to point to new hires and training initiatives as signs of progress, it’s much more difficult to meaningfully change how it feels to be one of just a few underrepresented journalists in a newsroom, or begin to build external relationships with communities who have felt neglected for decades.
As journalist Janelle Salanga wrote in Nieman Lab, “By focusing primarily on demographic changes as a measure of anti-racism, legacy newsrooms are implicitly giving weight to the idea that existing in a white supremacist system is enough to change it.”
The state of DEI efforts in NJ newsrooms
In the past few years, NJ’s largest publications have increased their focus on DEI, and newsroom leaders from Gannett and NJAM have started to make important changes in hiring, building new coverage areas, and strengthening community relationships.
But many employees in these newsrooms are still frustrated with the pace and scope of change, as well as the embedded racism and power imbalances within their organizations. The same is true nationally; a recent Medill Media Industry Survey showed that fewer than half of respondents who worked for newspapers said their organization’s DEI efforts were comprehensive, and even fewer said they were satisfied with those efforts.
Good intentions from newsroom leaders will not be enough to truly create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive journalism organizations. It will take serious listening to the concerns and experiences of employees and community members — and an active willingness to share power and decision-making with all of these groups.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
