WHITE WASHED. That's one way to describe college newsrooms, and most of the professional newsrooms I've worked in as well. Over at CampusProgress.org, Justin Elliott, who last year completed a term as executive editor of the excellent Brown Daily Herald, delves into the vicious cycle that contributes to homogeneity in journalism: Low-income and immigrant students can't afford to volunteer time at the paper when they could be working for pay, and their parents don't see journalism as an acceptable career path. The kids who do invest time at the paper are thus more likely to be upper-income and white, and they do a bad job of covering communities of color on campus because they aren't embedded in them socially. Students of color learn to mistrust the school paper, and then even those students of color who would otherwise be interested in journalism decide not to get involved. The effects trickle right up the journalism career ladder, especially in the magazine world, which provides fewer paid internships for college students and lower-paid entry level jobs. The result is heavily white applicant pools for programs like TAP's writing fellowship and The New Republic's reporter-researcher gig. I wish Justin had interviewed a few student activists of color who manage relationships with their campus papers -- he sticks to culling opinion from the journalism side of the equation. But he does present some good ideas on how to increase diversity in campus journalism. He profiles the excellent summer program founded at Princeton University by TNR Deputy Editor Richard Just, which puts a select group of low-income high school students through a journalism boot camp and then provides help with college applications and internship placements. Justin also talks to a reporter at Duke who found that even though he was assigned to the "diversity" beat, he continued to misunderstand "the black Duke." Indeed, it is almost impossible for any publication to adequately cover a segment of the population from which no one on its staff hails. So speaking of philanthropy, progressive donors should start paying more attention to breaking down some of the socioeconomic barriers to journalism careers, and especially to journalism careers in the public interest. --Dana Goldstein
