Chasing newsroom diversity
Subtitle: from Jim Crow to affirmative action
By: Gwyneth Mellinger
Series: The history of communication
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780252037382; 9780252078941
Subjects: African Americans in the newspaper industry; American newspapers; Minority journalists; Minorities; Minorities in journalism; Diversity in the workplace; Employment; History
Description: "Social change triggered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s sent the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) on a fifty-year mission to dismantle an exclusionary professional standard that envisioned the ideal journalist as white, straight, and male. In this book, Gwyneth Mellinger explores the complex history of the decades-long ASNE diversity initiative, which culminated in the failed Goal 2000 effort to match newsroom demographics with those of the U.S. population. ... Explaining why a project so promising failed so profoundly, Chasing Newsroom Diversity expands our understanding of the intransigence of institutional racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia within democracy."--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the black and white of newspapers; title: Manning the barricade: maintaining the white prerogative in the face of change, 1954-1967; title: Seeking justice in a climate of irony: the hiring initiative's uneasy prelude, 1968-1976; title: "A sensitive and difficult task": establishing a framework for newsroom integration, 1977-1989; title: The gay Nineties: reimagining and renegotiating a multicultural newsroom; title: Diversity in crisis: ASNE's time of reckoning, 1998-2002; title: Afterword: closing a chapter of newspaper history.