The percentage of minority staffing in daily newsrooms fell slightly last year for only the second time since the American Society of Newspaper Editors began tracking minority employment in its annual Newsroom Census.
The 2007 census is expected to show that the percentage of minority journalists slipped 0.25 percentage point over the past year. The first drop in minority employment in the survey’s 29-year history was by 0.21 percentage point in 2001. Since then, diversity ratios had been rising minimally, with a 0.45-point increase cited in last year’s report.
In that report, minorities constituted 13.87 percent of America’s newsrooms while the nation’s minority population is nearly 33 percent.