What I've tried to do is attract people to the magazine who will really have an impact. Part of that impact lies in creating new networks for blacks equivalent to those that have been so beneficial to whites. The black journalist John Dotson, Jr., now publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal , brought Whitaker into a Newsweek internship in 1977. To do otherwise requires an effort, and not many people are willing to make that effort. Not many people are willing to expand their Rolodexes when they have an opening.
Black editors help expand the Rolodexes.
Newsrooms are not hermetically sealed against the prejudices that play perniciously just beneath the surface of American life. There was the idea that you had to find extraordinary black people who would meet those standards, while you could find a lot of ordinary white people who would meet the standards. We bring our own racial attitudes in the society into the newsroom, but we don't acknowledge it. We couldn't be racists. We're the good guys.