Amid CEO Craig Dubow's campaign for more diversity, I expected a lot more minority hiring when I asked Gannett Blog readers this week about their department's newest employees. Fully half of the 86 who responded to my survey said their last hires were white. (I was expecting closer to 25%.)Now, this wasn't a random sample. But the results are still interesting, if only as a collection of anecdotes. So here, then, is how those 86 readers responded when I asked them to complete this statement: The most recent person hired in my Gannett department was
- Asian-American: 13%
- Black: 22%
- Hispanic: 3%
- Native American: 2%
- White: 50%
- Other/don't know: 1%
- I'm not a Gannett employee: 6%
Related: Sinner? Saint? Sweetheart? Survey shocker!
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[Image: the 12 members of the rather lily-white Gannett management committee]
In my experience, the responsibility for meeting EEO goals has always been disproportionately with the entry level jobs - classified, mailroom, telemarketing, and formerly customer service. My department is acceptably diverse, but every manager above them, all the way up to Dubow, is white.
ReplyDeleteWhile the most recent hire at our paper is white, we also have a completely incompetent African American employee who has been spared the axe simply to keep our minority rates up. It doesn't do much for morale, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting is that the 4 newsroom employees laid off at the Home News Tribune and Courier-News in East Brunswick were all non-whites. 2 Indians, 1 Pakistani and a Latina.
ReplyDeleteAnd one was even the nephew of Pervez Musharraf. No lie.
Anon@7:38 a.m. That's technically incorrect - it was 2 Latinos, 1 Pakistani and 1 South Asian Indian. But they are definitely all minorities. Management's reasoning is that we don't need those news staffers becuase they axed our two minority publications - Nuestra Comunidad and Desi Weekly - effective immediately.
ReplyDeleteThat's the stated reason. Two publications were axed. They happened to be primarily foreign language based.
ReplyDeleteAt the Courier News, 1 african-american in classified was cut, 1 african-american from single copy was cut and 1 white from circulation was cut.
ReplyDeleteJim, our last hire in the newsroom was a white guy for our multimedia editor, but lets face it, no one is really hiring hardly at all anyways. Our new hire was the first ADDITION to our newsroom in quite a while. We've had plenty of SUBTRACTIONS to the newsroom, including a good amount of diversity, not only racially, but by gender. It's not just white people being hired, but while males.
ReplyDelete