Race and media: Part I

We reached out to Shaunice Hawkins, the director of diversity for the Magazine Publishers of America, to discuss the lack of diversity in our industry. She gave us an outline of what the MPA is doing, and what we at TONY can do, to promote a more diverse workforce.

In putting together our Race issue, we talked to people in the publishing industry, which is struggling to diversify its ranks. One editor we spoke to said that because publishing doesn't pay as well as some other industries, ambitious people of color bypass it in favor of more lucrative careers. Do you think that's true?
I can’t comment on why people of color have bypassed publishing for “more lucrative careers” in other industries. I prefer to concentrate my efforts on those who want to build their careers in magazines.

Okay. So how is the MPA doing that?
Well, for example, this past March, we held a one-day Magazine Career Insight Conference in New York. Over 340 students and professionals from across the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean participated—half were people of color. We’ve also built strong relationships with historically black colleges and universities, institutions with considerable Hispanic-Latino student populations, the National Association of Minority Media Executives, UNITY: Journalists of Color and so on, to create employment feeder pools for the magazine industry.

That’s great, but should diversity be as simple as a numbers game? Should magazines look at their reader demographics and just say, “Okay, our readers are 26 percent African-American, 10 percent Asian–American, etc. Let's create a staff with the same ratios”?
Diversity should never be a “numbers game”! Diversity is about valuing the unique talents and contributions of the industry’s workforce—regardless of difference and/or similarity—and harnessing this talent in way that makes an invaluable difference.

[Ed note: In addition to our interview, I asked Shaunice how a magazine could best go about attracting more diverse candidates and she sent a set of basic guidelines. Click to page 2 to see her advice.]