The rift between New York Times management and staff is far from healed, according to the results of the paper’s own internal investigation.
A recent New York Times study has found that many newsroom staffers, particularly people of color, feel unseen, unheard, and unrepresented. In fact, the internal report says, certain elements of the New York Times’s workplace culture, including its celebration of individual achievement, act as “cultural inhibitors” for minority employees. The paper has responded to the results of the investigation with a pledge to address the organization’s alleged inclusivity and diversity blind spots.
“The Times is too often a difficult place to work for people of all backgrounds — particularly colleagues of color, and especially Black and Latino colleagues. It calls for us to transform our culture,” publisher A. G. Sulzberger, chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien, and executive editor Dean Baquet said this week in a staff memo.
Staffers received the memo this week as an introduction to the release of the diversity and inclusion report, which took about eight months to prepare and draws from the testimony provided by some 400 New York Times employees.
“After several months of interviews and analysis,” the memo reads, “we have arrived at a stark conclusion: The Times is a difficult environment for many of our colleagues, from a wide range of backgrounds.”
“Our current culture and systems are not enabling our work force to thrive and do its best work,” it continues. “This is true across many types of difference: race, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic background, ideological viewpoints and more. But it is particularly true for people of color, many of whom described unsettling and sometimes painful day-to-day workplace experiences.”
The memo concludes with a promise to build “a more diverse, equitable and inclusive” newspaper.
As for the commissioned investigation itself, it finds that the paper’s minority staffers feel underappreciated and that many have had “painful” experiences while working for the vaunted news organization.
The report claims people of color who work at the New York Times have experienced “unsettling and sometimes painful day-to-day workplace experiences,” adding further that blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in leadership roles.
“Black colleagues who are not in leadership positions leave the company at a higher rate than white colleagues,” the report claims. “Black employees, and Black women in particular, rated the company lower across nearly all categories of our 2020 employee survey, with the lowest scores around fairness and inclusion.”
Female Asian American employees, meanwhile, say they feel “invisible and unseen — to the point of being regularly called by the name of a different colleague of the same race, something other people of color described as well.”
The New York Times is preparing a series of initiatives aimed at correcting the wrongs laid out in the report, including the creation of a “new diversity, equity and inclusion” office. The paper also pledges to place more blacks and Latinos in leadership roles while also increasing the number of blacks and Latino employees who represent the company’s entire workforce from 9% to at least 13.5% by 2025.
“Diversity is not in tension with our journalistic mission: Instead, it helps us find the truth and more fully understand the world,” the report concludes.
It adds, “Diversity is also not in tension with our commitment to independence: We will continue to cover the world without fear or favor and portray the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Making the Times experience better for colleagues of color will make The Times better for everyone.”
I wrote earlier this year that the New York Times sounds like one of the most miserable places to work in America. As it turns out, many of its own staffers agree!
