Diversity at Work

By Thomas Huang

Fundamental business challenges and rapid technological change have made it hard for newsrooms to keep diversity as a top priority. I can't fault newsroom leaders: Just keeping our shrinking news operations from utter collapse is an overwhelming task.
  
And yet nothing has changed about why diversity -- on our staffs and in our coverage -- is crucial. We uphold our journalistic value of accuracy by covering our entire community. And, by having a diverse staff, we can better understand and connect with our audience.
  
To spark this conversation, Poynter has invited about 40 journalists from across the country to participate in a "Diversity in the Digital Age" conference. Thanks to a Ford Foundation grant, the conference will take place at The Chicago Tribune July 22-23, on the eve of the UNITY '08 Convention, the largest gathering of journalists of color.
   
We have invited a formidable group with expertise in ethics, diversity and online journalism. We hope to get their best thinking on the following questions:

• Content: How well is diversity reflected online, in multimedia and in blogs? Can we identify some best practices?

• Craft: How can we use online tools to find and promote diverse community voices?

• Staffing and recruiting: How can we best maintain the value of diversity in reorganized and downsized newsrooms?

Please help us jump-start the discussion by responding to these questions in the comments section of the blog. Stay tuned to the Diversity at Work blog. In the next few weeks, we'll publish Q&As with some of the conference participants. We'll be live-blogging from the conference, and we also hope to produce a conference report, which will be made available on this blog.

Click here to read the seminar participants' bios and related links to their work/work they find interesting.