Politico reports that the Associated Press has named its first ever Race/Ethnicity/Demographics editor, Sonya Ross. Ross had been editor for the Washington-based regional reporters, and now she'll coordinate nationwide coverage that "captures the changing facets of race and ethnicity in the United States and its effects on the experiences of people of various races."
This is one of those moves that serves both as a step forward and a tacit acknowledgment of how bad coverage of the topic was before, like when The New York Times started a conservative beat a few years ago. For many conservatives, this proved that the Times reporters and editors had a naturally liberal bias and needed to create a special beat for the other end of the ideological spectrum -- not that the paper cared about covering conservatives.
Racial and ethnic diversity is different from political orientation, though. Newsrooms seem unable or unwilling to address the dearth of reporters of color, and incapable of understanding the communities and issues they're missing as a result. (The Washington Post's politics page was an example of that.) It's not, as Conor Friedersdorf erroneously believes, that black reporters would necessarily cover black neighborhoods better and be relegated to those neighborhoods because of their skin color. It's that so much of newsroom decision-making involves making judgment calls, and you want reporters and editors with a breadth of life experiences making them.
Otherwise, you get coverage like in the Times like this: In a city in which about a quarter of black men graduate from high school, the paper publishes 800 words on a white stroller abandoned in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It's important to know that the neighborhood, wealthy and stroller-laden, is loaded with Times employees, so maybe it's no wonder a disproportionate number of the paper's fluffier pieces spring from there. You would think that's the only neighborhood in the outer boroughs where people live -- you only hear about the other ones when there's crime involved.
-- Monica Potts
