Dennis Romero on the 2011 ASNE diversity survey — and what fifteen years of newsroom-diversity tracking shows

By Sasha Park · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive →

In early April 2011, LA Weekly Informer blogger Dennis Romero — known publicly as The Informer — broke down the American Society of News Editors’ third annual newsroom-diversity survey. The headline finding: minority numbers were plunging for the third year in a row.

Then

The ASNE survey had documented that U.S. newsroom minority representation had been declining as a percentage of overall workforce — a pattern that became structurally clear in the 2008-2011 contraction window when newsrooms were shedding staff and the staff being shed disproportionately included minority journalists. Romero, a Latino blogger writing for one of LA’s main alt-weeklies, was particularly attentive to the specific demographic breakdowns.

Now

The newsroom-diversity decline ASNE was tracking continued through the rest of the decade. ASNE itself dissolved its annual census in 2018. The newsroom-diversity question has continued to be tracked by Pew Research and various academic studies. Dennis Romero left LA Weekly in 2014 and has continued in journalism across NBC Latino and the major U.S. national outlets. The LA Weekly Informer blog is no longer in its 2011 form after the 2017 Semanal Media sale.

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