NY Times says it needs culture change, better inclusion
FILE - This June 22, 2019, file photo shows the exterior of the New York Times building in New York. In a report to its employees in February 2021, The New York Times says it needs a culture change to become a better place to work, particularly for people of color. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)NEW YORK – The New York Times says it needs a culture change to become a better place to work, particularly for people of color. A survey of employees didn't just uncover bad news; 95% of Times employees said they felt pride in working at the paper, and most have had positive experiences. “We also believe it will make The Times a better place to work, for all of us.”
Search is on for new leaders in journalism's upper echelons
Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post and one of the nation's top journalists, says he will retire at the end of February. The Los Angeles Times is further along in its search for a successor to Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine. The Washington Post named Krissah Thompson the newspaper's first managing editor for diversity and inclusion. Kevin Merida, a senior vice president at ESPN and former Washington Post editor, is a name on many lists as a potential hire. The news industry's financial troubles over the past two decades has thinned the usual pipeline of leaders, Geisler said.
New York Times: ‘Caliphate’ podcast didn’t meet standards
FILE - This June 22, 2019 file photo shows the exterior of the New York Times building in New York. The New York Times says it was wrong to trust the story of a Canadian man whose claims of witnessing and participating in atrocities as a member of the Islamic State was a central part of its award-winning 2018 podcast Caliphate. The Times said its journalists should have done a better job vetting him, and not included his story as part of the podcast. He told the Times that as an Islamic State soldier, he had shot one man in the head and stabbed another in the heart. Investigators concluded they couldn't be sure he'd ever been in Syria and almost certainly didn't commit the atrocities he'd claimed.
Headline-making missteps put focus on newsroom diversity
In electronic media, 12 percent of broadcast journalists are black, similar to the national population figure of 13 percent. It's not only insulting to me, but to black journalists around the country.A failure to include journalists of many different backgrounds means missing stories. Hardy, who just left a job in Greenville, S.C., said that without black journalists there, stories about gentrified neighborhoods would have gone untold. The sweep of national protests following the death of George Floyd has news leaders talking to their staffs about how the story affects them. An internal outcry over the essay wasn't apparent until a number of black journalists tweeted that Cotton's argument in favor of using federal troops to quell violence made them feel unsafe, and others throughout the newsroom supported them.