Diversity at Work

An editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch once told George Curry he couldn't write. He had already worked for two years as a reporter for Sports Illustrated and had written about 25 front-page stories for the Post-Dispatch during his first year at the paper in 1972. But despite his experience, his editor assigned him to the police beat, a job generally reserved for cub reporters.

Curry knew he could write, so in his free time he began a book. Several years later, the book, "Jake Gaither: America's Most Famous Black Coach, it was published -- but only after being turned down by 25 publishers.

Now Curry is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has worked at the Chicago Tribune and is the past president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. He served as editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service in Washington, D.C., from 2001 to April 2007.

Photo by Mallary Jean Tenore/Poynter George Curry

Curry shared the Post-Dispatch anecdote during a Nov. 15 keynote speech at a gathering of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists at Poynter. The struggles he faced as a young black journalist, he said, have worsened in today's newsrooms.

He also argued that newsroom recruiters are focusing on too limited a pool of candidates of color -- often limiting themselves to journalists seen as non-threatening and not inclined to challenge traditional coverage.

"I really think that increasingly it requires a certain tenacity to stay in this business," Curry said. "And for you, as a person of color, there are limitations on where people are going to let you go. A disproportionate number of people are leaving the profession because their skills aren't being taken advantage of."

He pointed to several examples: Ken Cooper, former national editor of The Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize winner who took a buyout and is now freelancing; Nat Sheppard, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who left his job to work at an Internet firm, Linda Wallace, who left The Philadelphia Inquirer to start her own public relations firm and Vivian King, who left a TV station in Milwaukee to go into public relations.

"These are all personal friends who did not see their careers advancing at their respective news organizations and decided to do something differently," Curry said.

The need to write about those who are marginalized in society has become increasingly important, Curry said, noting that it is today's young black people who can help address the need.

Writing about those who are marginalized doesn't mean succumbing to stereotypes, Curry noted. He recalled a time when an editor asked him to cover a story on the impact of Reagan budget cuts. To his editor's surprise, Curry found a white woman to challenge the stereotype that all people on welfare are black.

He said confronting these stereotypes -- and carving a better future for today's young black journalists -- will mean paying attention to lessons the Civil Rights Movement and strengthening efforts for equality. "We have to fight for everything we fought for before," Curry said. "Our voices can't be muffled."

Journalists have an obligation to teach today's youth about the Civil Rights Movement and to find new ways of reaching them, he added. "I watch TV ... And I look at all these glamorous homes, MP3s, and I don't see any books. So our challenge is through the Internet," he said. "You've got to go find them."

In much the same way, he said, news recruiters have to find diversity within diversity.

"I think that one of the most troubling trends in journalism is that people who are doing the hiring oftentimes are trying to hire a certain, non-threatening type of African American as a reporter," Curry said. "They want someone who grew up in the suburbs, who cut off their mustache, and they want homogenized African Americans there and not people who will go out and fight for the voiceless."

Curry also recalled the late Gerald Boyd, the former managing editor of The New York Times who resigned after the Jayson Blair scandal -- a move that some ascribed to racial profiling. In a recent New York Magazine article, Curry, who worked with Boyd at the Post-Dispatch, criticized his obituary in the Times, saying it besmirched Boyd by referring to Blair in its lead.

Newsrooms need good leaders like Boyd who can help diversify a news organization�s coverage, Curry noted, saying that hard news stories are overlooked and voices are muffled in homogenized newsrooms.

Reporting on difficult subject matters means being aggressive enough to find stories rather than waiting for them to come along: "You don�t have to deny your color, your gender or your sexual orientation, or anything else," Curry said. "You should be looking at newspapers and saying, 'Something isn't being covered.' What are you doing beyond waiting for a press release in a story to go out and find stories that nobody else is going to write about?"

Newsrooms today are so concerned with making a profit, Curry said, that they are reporting on non-controversial stories that will make people smile but will do far less to change society.

Specifically, Curry said he believes the media are doing a poor job of reporting on AIDS, particularly in the African-American community, as well as on race relations, homelessness, poverty, and lack of affordable housing. One way to generate such coverage is to continue inspiring young journalists to set the tone for the future of journalism. 

Addressing the younger journalists in the audience, Curry said he sees them as emblems of hope for the future. "You've got to make a choice of whether you want to be a thermometer or a thermostat," he said. "A thermometer measures the temperature; a thermostat sets it. Which one are you going to be?"