Panel: News organizations need more diversity

INDIANAPOLIS — Sports coverage will accurately reflect athletes and issues only when news organizations hire more people of color and women — not only as reporters but as editors who embrace diversity, panelists at a sports media symposium said Monday.

The panel discussion at IU's National Sports Journalism Center followed a 2008 report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports showing that only 6 percent of the nation's top print and online sports editors are minorities. It also found that only 13 percent of sports reporters are people of color even though the athletes they cover in several sports are mostly minorities.

"We just can't have an understanding of the complexities of sports ... unless we begin to change these numbers in very dramatic ways," said Richard Lapchick, a panelist and director of the institute, based at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Stephen A. Smith, a longtime television analyst for ESPN and ESPN Radio and columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, noted that most reporters are white even though they cover basketball and other sports dominated by black players.

"What that says is 'We don't mind you playing the games, but we're going to control the message,'" said Smith, now a contributor to MSNBC. He said blacks find that "inherently offensive."

Panelists said it is up to management at newspapers to reverse what they said were sports newsrooms composed almost entirely of white men.

"I hope we learned our lesson ... that we have disconnected so much from our audience," said sports columnist William C. Rhoden of The New York Times.

The media haven't, the panelists agreed.

"It's getting worse," said Kristin Huckshorn, senior news editor for ESPN in New York and a founding member of the Association for Women in Sports Media. "There's no internal or external pressure on sports editors to hire women."

She said the journalism groups Associated Press Sports Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors should "pressure" news organizations to hire more women.

Garry D. Howard, sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and president of the APSE, said news organizations that have a diverse staff will have better coverage because they are "more inclusive."

"There's still a long, long, long way to go," he said.