Scott Brinton

What America needs: diverse newsrooms

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I hadn’t truly understood or appreciated the mindset of an 18-year-old black woman until I read Amon Brown’s excellent article, “Black Lives Matter rallies in East Meadow,” published recently in the Heralds.

Brown, who is 18 and African-American, wrote it for the Hofstra University High School Summer Journalism Institute, which I co-direct with fellow Hofstra Professor Peter Goodman, a former Newsday classical music critic.

The two-week program in July, funded by a New York Press Association grant, aims to get students from underprivileged neighborhoods interested in possibly pursuing careers in journalism — particularly community-based journalism that examines issues of concern to people of color. This year’s 10 participants came primarily from Hempstead and Elmont high schools.

Brown, who graduated from Hempstead High in June and is headed to the University of Albany to study journalism, covered a July 9 Black Lives Matter rally in Eisenhower Park. In her story, she quoted Rachina Phillips, 18, of Hempstead, who spoke about how she feels when she is stopped occasionally by police.

“The automatic feeling that I get is afraid because it’s happening so often now,” Phillips said. “You would expect to feel protected by a police officer, but since all the events that have happened, instead you feel cautious.”

The events that she was referring to were the recent shootings of black men, a number of whom were unarmed, by police. That single quote gave me a glimpse of what life is like for a teenager living in Hempstead, or any other similar community.

Gang violence plagues this hardscrabble neighborhood. It can be a scary place for a good kid who just wants to make it back and forth to school without being accosted –– and make no mistake, there are lots of really good kids in Hempstead.

They depend on police. They need police. They should consider police their friends –– and the vast majority of police most definitely are.

Seemingly in rapid-fire succession, however, a small number of officers have been shown on TV gunning down black men, some of whom were running away from authorities. The images of their deaths continue to be telegraphed again and again by national media outlets. Suddenly, kids on the street start to wonder.

Note that Phillips didn’t say she hated police. She didn’t disparage them. She is now “afraid” and “cautious.”

Phillips shows us how so many young black people feel. Like most everyone, they are horrified and angered by both the shootings of black men and the assassinations of authorities. At the same time, they’re frightened –– really frightened.

At the end of the day, they just want their voices to be heard. That’s why they rally. That’s why Black Lives Matter formed.

But who’s listening? Average young black people rarely appear in the media. To judge by many news reports, they don’t exist. That’s probably because so few in the media understand and appreciate their viewpoints.

The right to a free press is among America’s defining values. The question is, do people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds enjoy equal knowledge of and access to the press? The answer is, indisputably, no.

In a two-part report for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2015, Alex Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, examined a critical question: Why aren’t there more minority journalists?

According to Williams’s research, many, if not most, daily newspapers with circulations of less than 50,000 (which comprise 84 percent of all dailies) employ no reporters or editors of color.

The reasons for the dearth of minority journalists are numerous. At the core of it, it all boils down to education.

The trouble starts in middle and high school. Many economically disadvantaged school districts, often in minority communities, have eliminated newspaper clubs and journalism classes because of budget cuts. That was the case in Hempstead, one of Long Island’s poorest school systems, until Hofstra helped restart the newspaper club last year through a community journalism class that I teach.

Without exposure to the media, students in such communities have little to no knowledge of journalism, and young people of color are considerably less likely to enter the media field.

After reading Williams’s stories, I paid greater attention to the number of journalists of color whom I met. When I attended the New York Press Association convention in Saratoga Springs in April, I scanned the expansive conference hall at lunch one day and spotted just a handful of African-American and Hispanic journalists — and no Asians. It suddenly dawned on me: Most everyone was white.

Editors and reporters of color are needed in newsrooms to give voice to people and communities that the press has too often ignored. If we are to build understanding among all Americans and foster a more peaceful nation, then we must promote more diverse newsrooms. That begins by introducing young people of color –– high school and college students — to journalism, allowing them to explore whether careers in the media are right for them.

As Jocelyn Elders, the first African-American appointed surgeon general of the U.S., has said, “You can’t be what you don’t see.”

Scott Brinton is the Herald Community Newspapers’ senior editor for enterprise reporting and staff development and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication. Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com.