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Reporting on Black America: Who Tells the Stories?

“Diversity fatigue has been alive and well in America's news industry for many years,” writes Milton Coleman, a senior editor at The Washington Post and an organizer of Leadership in Diversity: New Models for Growing Audience, Talent and Revenues, a two-part conference taking place this year. Racial practices in newsrooms disquiet blacks, but discussions about them surface mostly among minority journalists. As black journalists leave mainstream news organizations for websites, issues of financial viability, resources for reporting, and their site’s impact follow them.

Reporting on Black America: Who Tells the Stories?
Carl Sandburg’s Reporting Foretold the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 (1 comment)
‘No other mainstream white journalist in America’s second largest city was writing anything close to Sandburg’s depth about its festering racial problems.’
By Cameron McWhirter
Roi Ottley: An African-American Journalist Covers World War II (1 comment)
By Cameron McWhirter
Diversity in Newsrooms: Fresh Strategies, New Goals
Meeting 21st-century challenges means pushing the newsroom diversity argument away from staff numbers and toward content and revenue.
By Milton Coleman
What Often Goes Unsaid (1 comment)
The racial dynamic of what happens inside a newsroom is ‘an elusive if contentious subject that seldom rises to become a topic of media forums or workshops—except when minority journalists come together to talk.’
By Amy Alexander
Familiar Patterns of Minority Exclusion Follow Mainstream Media Online (3 comments)
‘The parallels between the legacies and online media are as stark as they are disheartening.’
By Jean Marie Brown
Black Journalism Takes Root in Contemporary Times
By Jack E. White