We’re urgently building a more diverse staff

I outlined three priorities on my first day at The Arizona Republic: expand data-driven investigative journalism; attract new, digital audiences; match the diversity of Arizona.

In three years, our data reporting team has grown from two to five. We’ve more than doubled paid digital subscriptions. And the newsroom, overall, is more diverse than at any time in history.

This is crucial as we seek to have a deeper understanding of the struggles and hopes of our communities. It’s crucial as we seek to expand our audience of paid digital subscribers who see themselves reflected in our work. And it’s crucial to our investigative journalism and the subjects we choose to focus on.

“There is broad consensus among business leaders and public officials that the values of diversity and inclusion are moral imperatives,” Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of news at Gannett and publisher of USA TODAY, wrote in support of a companywide initiative to match the diversity of our communities by 2025.

“There’s a growing understanding that they are equally vital to better business results. This has always been true, especially in journalism. How can we hope to fully understand the issues and needs of our communities if our newsrooms don’t reflect the people we serve?”

The Republic has acted with urgency. More than three-quarters of new hires over the past year have been journalists of color, and eight of 13 are women — chasing the footsteps of Republic newsroom pioneers like Maggie Savoy, Venita Hawthorne James, Pam Johnson, Jennifer Dokes and Nicole Carroll.

Our goal is to match a community that is 44% people of color.

We’re not there yet, but we’re making progress, and doing so while hiring the most skilled and promising journalists on the job market.

In 2016, journalists of color made up 20% of The Republic’s staff.

This month, they’ll be 37% of the staff, up from 34% just nine months ago. Among managers, that number is 39%, up from 28% last August.

How have we done this?

We reached out to affinity groups within the industry, historically Black colleges and universities and Maricopa Community Colleges to add candidates for open jobs and for internships and fellowships, ensuring our efforts to diversify are wider while also reaching into the local community.

We organized two community-advisory groups and a series of discussions with Black and Latino audiences with a mission to build knowledge, trust and empathy.

This year, with the help of The Republic’s Diversity Committee, our goal is to add community-advisory groups for Asian, Native American and LGBTQ+ audiences.

Swift and strategic change is needed, so we created four Diversity, Equity and Inclusion working groups to make recommendations for immediate steps and sustainable reinvention.

These task forces spent six months developing an organization-wide plan to add DE&I focus to recruitment and pipelining, onboarding and retention, community outreach and engagement and to brainstorm new reporting and engagement projects.

The first new feature launches soon, with profiles of people dedicated to diverse or underserved communities, especially those shining lights among us who don’t have ready access to a wider audience, people like muralist Nyla Lee or community organizer Austin Davis. Republic Editor Kaila White is leading this initiative.

“Inclusivity and anti-racism are about the product of journalism as much as it is about the newsroom,” Kim Bui, The Republic’s director of audience innovation, wrote at the end of last year for Nieman Lab at Harvard University.

To support our efforts, we partnered with national experts from the Solutions Journalism Network, Committee to Protect Journalists and Maynard Institute for Journalism Education to create training modules for cultural awareness and community-based journalism that solves problems and builds trust. This was Bui’s prediction for 2021: “True inclusion and representation are long-needed and overdue, and power-sharing with audiences is something misfits have been pushing for years,” she wrote. “While we’ve been waiting to take on this mantle, some of us fear we may be set up for failure. To our credit, though, our lived experience and propensity for experimentation help us.”

It’s a priority for The Republic not only to hire journalists of color but to retain them.

The past has hurt. We acknowledge this, and we acknowledge our newsroom’s role in it.

I spent this past summer trying to understand the climate inside the newsroom as we moved too slowly toward equity. I interviewed dozens of former staffers and people who knew Richard Harris, the first Black journalist at The Republic. Harris joined the newsroom in 1964, a time when Jim Crow clung to every national institution, including the press.

Moving forward, we know we must be better.

We have lost talented journalists over the past year, but it has almost always been because those journalists were promoted within our company or advanced in their careers to other national newsrooms from Oregon to Washington, D.C.

We remain steadfast in our hiring and retention goals.

To meet the challenges of our time, we created six new reporting and editing positions to focus on equity, solutions and underrepresented communities:

● Daniel Gonzalez is reporting on immigrants and life for the next generations and communities of color inside our borders. News Director Kathy Tulumello praised two early successes from Daniel writing about lingering mistrust in the Black community over vaccines and a hotel worker who lost her job during the pandemic.

● Debra Utacia Krol, a former Pulliam environmental fellow on our staff, moved to a new beat examining how issues such as energy production, environmental pollution and ecotourism are affecting indigenous communities. Her coverage of Oak Flat has been revelatory. She has teamed up with Republic multimedia journalist Cheryl Evans and editor Shaun McKinnon. This project is funded by a grant from the Catena Foundation.

● Lita Nadebah Beck has taken the helm of a new reporting team focused on equity, education, solutions, housing and homelessness that includes new data reporter Ralph Chapoco and the outstanding reporting team of Jessica Boehm and Catherine Reagor. Their latest project compared data on rental aid and eviction filings and found landlords who received government funds to help offset non-payments by tenants had filed for hundreds of evictions anyway.

● Rachel Leingang is working a new beat she researched and pitched to her editors that will “provide an outlet for communities that historically are not reflected in our coverage, emphasizes community engagement as a reporting method … and deliberately analyzes solutions alongside problems.”

● Shanti Lerner is reporting on Arizona’s Latino and Native communities to tell stories centered on the people, places, history and things to do that make this state special.

● Joanna Jacobo Rivera is joining our staff this month to lead our outreach and coverage of bilingual and Spanishspeaking households and communities. She has taught courses on Spanish language media in Southern California, and has written and edited for La Opinión, Excélsior California and El Nuevo Sol.

To meet the minds of an evolving Arizona, The Republic added two full-time opinion and culture columnists and expanded our Editorial Board so that we now have members from the Black, Asian and Latino communities and a balance of members overall that truly reflects our community of readers — and potential readers. Along with myself, the board includes Abe Kwok, Joanna Allhands, Elvia Díaz, Greg Moore and Robert Robb, with Phil Boas leading the way.

My inbox is filled daily, and always has been, by those who question us, offer input and demand we do better. Our communities are filled with passion for progress.

I welcome your feedback.

In the newsroom recently, I picked up a new stack of letters to the editor. This ritual is timeless, these exchanges cathartic. The newsroom is still mostly vacated in the era of working from home. As a police scanner screeched to a sea of empty desks, I opened my email.

“As a 71 year old man of white privilege I want to thank whoever made the decision to add Mr. Moore’s talent to the editorial page as well as the sports pages,” a reader from Flagstaff wrote. “His thoughts are not only well written, they have opened my eyes to concepts and realities that I and many others have chosen to ignore. For way too long our country’s institutions, including the press, have been dominated by old white men. And to be perfectly honest, not very well.”

We are determined never to go back.