Free Hard News by Seth Mnookin Page B

managing editor, spent a career as a “first black.” *20 On the day he was promoted, he told a
Times
reporter, “I hope tomorrow, when some kid of color picks up The New York Times and reads about the new managing editor, that kid will smile a little and maybe dream just a little bigger dream. That’s all I’ll say about firsts.”
     
    R ACE IN THE N EWSROOM
    For the media world, the industry’s sorry record on diversity has been cause for embarrassment going back for decades, ever since the Lyndon Johnson administration’s 1968 Kerner Report described how “the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes.” *21 Ten years later, in 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) would propose an ambitious goal: By 2000, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms, it announced, should mirror the diversity of the general population. At the time, minorities made up only 4 percent of newsroom staffs around the country. By 2003, that number had risen to 12.9 percent—still far short of the 31 percent of the American population that is nonwhite. (ASNE recast its goals and is now aiming for parity in American newsrooms by 2025.)
    There are many theories as to why minorities are underrepresented in American newsrooms, most common among them the pervasiveness of an old-boy network. *22 For decades, the
Times
has fought to diversify its reporting ranks, with mixed results. Too often, the paper’s efforts to hire minority staffers have come across as tokenism to those being wooed and as clumsy quota-filling to the rest of the newsroom. “The culture is such that a lot of people feel in their guts that when they see a minority colleague, they feel a little jolt of unfamiliarity, and some may even feel that the person doesn’t really belong,” says Roger Wilkins, who worked for the
Times
in the 1970s and early 1980s as an editorial writer and columnist. *23 “I know that greeted me when I joined the editorial board in 1974. We’re geniuses at reading white people’s faces.”
    A semiformalized effort in the early 1990s to increase minority representation in the newsroom didn’t help matters. That year, Max Frankel instituted a one-to-one quota for newsroom hiring: For every white reporter who was hired, a non-white reporter had to be hired as well. It was a crude and inelegant solution and fostered complaints from both whites and African Americans. Whites, of course, felt they were suffering from reverse discrimination, and African Americans who were hired complained that they were looked at askance. What’s worse, some of the hires that resulted were journalists whose talents were not up to the
Times
’s standards.
    Frankel would later speak of the problems that resulted from his campaign. He wrote in his memoir of a “senior black editor” who was promoted above his abilities and ended up suing the
Times
for discrimination. And in 1994, just after stepping down as executive editor, he spoke to Charlie Rose about the troubles he had encountered when he tried to diversify the staff: “There was a real problem, and the word was getting out that this was not a place that was entirely hospitable to blacks because they weren’t [being promoted] fast enough.” Attempts to counter that perception, Frankel said, “created some mistakes”: “In the years when we were all practicing affirmative action on the first round and looking very hard to diversify, we grabbed at some people so fast that they were not always the right people. . . . At a certain point, you cannot compromise just for the sake of appearances with the quality of the people you bring in. So those failures, those disappointments, created a certain disillusionment, and they were confused with racism or inhospitality.”
    Sulzberger hadn’t been publisher when Frankel instituted his one-for-one hiring quota, but he was a vocal champion of the need to alter quickly the makeup of