Through our coverage and content, The Daily Northwestern constantly strives to be a more diverse and representative news source for campus and Evanston communities. Central to that effort is gaining a better understanding of who works for us.
Since 2018, The Daily has compiled and released an annual diversity report detailing the staff’s composition based on several demographic categories, including race, gender and financial status. This year’s report reflects data collected from newsroom staff at the end of the 2023-2024 school year.
At a time when nationwide organizations are increasingly doing away with diversity and inclusion programs, this information will help shape our recruitment and retention processes for our newsroom.
And while our staff is not representative of our entire campus community, The Daily is committed to promoting inclusivity in our newsroom and full transparency with our readers.
Editor’s Note: The following data comes from a voluntary survey, so it does not represent our entire newsroom’s demographics.
The Daily’s racial and ethnic breakdown statistics exceed 100% to account for multiracial students. The Northwestern Class of 2027 statistics don’t disaggregate for Asian demographics, whereas The Daily does.
This year, The Daily’s staff and editorial board’s racial demographics reflected a number of old discrepancies.
Though the majority of Northwestern’s Class of 2027 identified as BIPOC, The Daily continued to overrepresent white and Asian staffers, with a skew toward East Asian, compared to our student population.
The number of Latine and Black staffers also fell to less than 10% of the newsroom each, down from a greater than 20% total last year, even though past years seemingly indicated a buck to this trend. There were no Indigenous staffers during the school year either.
Last year’s report introduced the Middle Eastern and Northern African identifier, with almost 2% of staffers falling under that category this year.
For The Daily to improve and diversify its coverage, finding ways to integrate more staffers of marginalized identities will be a priority as we head into our recruitment this fall and determine our year-long retention efforts.
Female representation in The Daily dropped slightly but still made up the majority of the staff, reflecting past years’ demographics.
The number of non-binary staffers has fallen to zero.
Most of the staff also identify as heterosexual. The breakdown of LGBTQ+ staffers remains consistently in the 30-40% range.
The Daily also underrepresents students who receive financial aid. More than 60% of NU’s undergraduates receive financial aid, while only 33.3% of our newsroom staff do.
The number of first-generation staffers in our newsroom fell below last year’s newsroom statistics, dropping to 5% from 9.9%. The same applies to the number of students who identify as low-income in The Daily — only about 8.3%.
The Daily can be fairly time-consuming for students, who may also need to juggle their commitments with schoolwork and jobs. In 2019, The Daily implemented a quarterly stipend program to help alleviate some of those financial stresses.
We will continue to work and identify new sources of fundings to support FGLI staffers in our newsroom.
Takeaways
Staff retention rates continue to be a point of concern.
This school year, our newsroom will again scale back our print paper to once a week as we transfer to more digital mediums. The Daily’s production time spans from Sunday to Thursday, from 6 p.m. to later into the evening.
With the new change, production will likely shorten and allow staffers to have more time to balance their other personal responsibilities.
It is also important that our newsroom continues to make strides toward a more diverse staff. While the percentage of staffers of color this year fell slightly compared to previous years, we will continue to gear our recruitment and accessibility spaces. Our goal is to make the newsroom a more inclusive and equitable workspace.
However, with recent efforts to devalue such ideals, we encourage other newsrooms to reevaluate their approaches. Publishing this report each year helps us better understand how to serve our own community.
We are still far from fully achieving our missions of diversity and inclusion, but will remain committed to building on these efforts in the future.
Related Stories:
— The Daily’s 2022-2023 diversity report
— The Daily Northwestern’s 2021-22 diversity report
— The Daily Northwestern’s Spring Quarter 2021 Diversity Report
