The White Pages
Steven White flags Justin Elliott’s article at Campus Progress on diversity in college newspapers. He describes a vicious cycle whereby few lower income minority students have the time or financial resources to be on a newspaper staff, which then leads to poor coverage of minority issues at campus, which means that those minority students who otherwise would otherwise be interested in being on a newspaper staff don’t want to because they’d feel alienated from it. Though the problem isn’t just financial, surely addressing that aspect would be a good place to start for more diverse newspaper staffs.
Elliott mentions the Princeton and Harvard newspapers as ones struggling with diversity. Harvard and Princeton are very rich universities — they have a staggering amount of money to throw around. If they think that having a high quality, diverse newspaper is important, why don’t they just pay the staff members for the insane amount of hours they put in? This way, low income students who might want to write but have to hold down paying jobs wouldn’t have to make that choice. Being on the newspaper would be a financially rewarding position and thus would open the door to more people. Current college journalists, former college journalists, what do you think?
Also check out and Dana Goldstein’s take.
