News-Record.com

Like too many newspapers, the news staff here is predominantly white and predominantly male. It's been that way for years, and efforts to diversify have come and gone with little success. Journalists here teach at A&T and UNCG. Until this summer, we shared a journalist -- Val Nieman -- with A&T; she taught there and ran the student newspaper and she was an editor here. We run a week-long summer journalism workshop for minority high school students. We have a couple scholarships for minority college students who get jobs here when they graduate.

But we get little traction.

Yesterday, a bunch of editors here spent 90 minutes talking deeply about how to diversify our staff. Most of the discussion centered on race, but our overall effort is broader. We want more young people, more women and more free-thinkers. Among other things, we're looking at intensifying our mentoring program, increasing the number of scholarships we sponsor, aggressively tracking and attracting potential candidates, and appointing a full-time editor to recruit and mentor candidates. We haven't figured out how were going to do it, but we're going to do it.

The reason's are obvious: As society changes, so must we. We can't be a good newspaper if we're out of touch with pockets of the community. That includes issues of importance to the young and the elderly, black and Latino and Asian people, poor people, uneducated people...I could keep on going, but you get the idea. It's expensive and time-consuming. And vital.

I'm not suggesting that only Latinos can cover Latinos or that 20-somethings can only write about young people. I'm also not suggesting that members of specific demographic groups all think alike. Both suggestions are simplistic and distracting. The paper benefits by having more people with different experiences, whether based on race, age, upbringing, politics, gender, sexual orientation or any number of factors. Journalists with different experiences will bring smarter, broader-based perspectives in coverage.

I can hear the critics now: we're prostituting ourselves on the altar of political correctness; we're discriminating against able white males; and our liberal slip is showing.

Hardly. We're trying to be more relevant to the entire world of readers. The civic conversation will be enhanced, and the paper will be more relevant.