Center for Cooperative Media launches statewide diversity survey of New Jersey journalists and newsrooms
Survey aims to give a full picture of the gender, racial and ethnic makeup of the state’s press corps
The diversity of the press in the United States has been a major issue in the industry for years, as white-led, white-focused news organizations have dominated the landscape for decades. Pressure to reflect the diversity of the country has rightfully grown, especially recently.
New Jersey is an incredibly diverse state, one rich with multiculturalism — and we want to make sure the media here is representative of that diversity.
That’s why one of the core strategic objectives for the last several years at the Center for Cooperative Media for Montclair State University has been to “Enhance the Center’s efforts in equity, diversity, and inclusion and make this work an urgent and visible focus in New Jersey.”
We’ve been working on this through efforts to better support ethnic media, offer fellowships and training for early-career journalists of color, expand translation of news, and much more.
But we’ve never had a good baseline of the diversity of the industry in New Jersey against which to measure.
When groups like the Center or the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and funders such as the NJ Civic Information Consortium or the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation do work to diversify media, is it really making a difference? How can we know?
There are a lot of ways to measure this to get at a true, representative answer. We decided to start by doing a census of sorts — a research study looking at the makeup of journalists in our state.
The Center has hired researchers David Coppini and Kareem El Damanhoury, both of Denver University, to lead the work. They based New Jersey’s diversity audit on one conducted by researchers at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina.
After months of planning, we’re excited to finally get our diversity audit into the field!
The audit will have three core components:
- A survey for individual journalists, which focuses on the experiences of the individual journalists/editors and their identities.
- A survey for companies, which is meant to get a picture of the levels of diversity and inclusion within the organization as a whole.
- A series of individual interviews.
The final report, however, will share anonymized results. Identities of individuals and organizations completing the survey will not be shared.
The Center will begin sending links to the surveys out to journalists who work in New Jersey media this week based off its internal lists — if you don’t receive one, let us know at info@centerforcooperativemedia.org and we’ll get you one. This includes freelancers who work for New Jersey-serving organizations.
The surveys are not long; each should take less than 15 minutes. There $10 gift card incentive for everyone who fills out the individual survey.
I’m really hopeful we get a good response on the surveys. The CISLM team at UNC had a poor response rate to the organizational survey in particular.
I get it — it’s uncomfortable for news organizations that have not prioritized diversity to report that fact in such a survey. Our goal, however, is to help such organizations build diversity and inclusivity into their organizations. Having this kind of data can help us do that.
We hope to publish our results this spring. Our soon-to-be-announced Racial Equity Advisory Board will use this data to help guide its recommendations for our work in 2024 and 2025. And we hope it will help inform interventions by other players in the news ecosystem as well.
A grant from the NJ Civic Information Consortium is helping to underwrite the cost of the diversity audit.
Stefanie Murray is the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Contact her at murrayst@montclair.edu.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
