The Sun’s annual look at our newsroom makeup
David Nelson
I often field questions about how the Sun is doing, and there’s so many ways to answer.
I’ve shared in columns about our physical changes, in terms of printing a paper or our location at 545 Fifth Street; shifts in frequency and makeup of the print edition and the digital readership patterns driving those decisions; and occasionally about our people. At the end of the day, and whenever we look back and tell the story of the Sun’s digital era, it’s those people who are going to be the most important. This is a reporting staff that I truly feel lucky to work with every day.
We’re succeeding with this group in a tough environment for journalism, and for the Sun to continue that progress, we need to build an inclusive and diverse workplace where employees are valued and feel empowered. That means working to hire and sustain a workforce that is reflective of our area's diversity.
See also:Gannett newsrooms making steady progress in overall diversity
A commitment the Sun recently made, along with my colleagues at more than 250 newspapers in the USA TODAY Network, is to annually report back to you about the progress we’re making for our staff to better reflect the diversity in our community.
This week, as we did the past two years, we publish the makeup of our newsroom staff. Others around the company are doing the same, as a way to track whether, over time, we make progress toward this goal.
Our staff makeup has not changed over the past year, which means the statistics we’re sharing will look familiar. Part of that is good news, as stability and institutional knowledge is important in local news.
As of July 2022, about 10% of our newsroom staff, including reporters, a photographer and editor, come from diverse racial backgrounds.
It’s not yet truly reflective of the community we serve, but we acknowledge that goal takes time.
I believe that transparency and accountability are part of the long-term work it will take to make this vision complete, and the annual publication of this data puts some pressure on us to continue moving in that direction.