ST. LOUIS — In recent years, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has played the role of watchdog as the region struggled with issues around race and diversity.

 

In 2012, reporter Jesse Bogan covered the paucity of blacks on the roster of the town’s beloved St. Louis Cardinals. At the time, there were none.

 

In 2014, in the months following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, reporters Nancy Cambria, Doug Moore, and Walker Moskop took an accounting of the racial makeup of police departments in St. Louis County. In 30 of the 31 communities they tracked, the percentage of black residents was higher than the proportion of black officers. In Ferguson, where Michael Brown was killed and two-thirds of the residents were black, only 7 percent of the city’s police officers were black.

 

And in February, the Post-Dispatch’s editorial page called out the University of Missouri Board of Curators, for being comprised of “six people of a certain age. All are white.”

 

There’s no question that the reporting was both interesting and relevant, particularly as the St. Louis area grapples with racial equity. But the Post-Dispatch has its own problems with diversity, problems that mirror those at media companies throughout the nation. But the issue is perhaps more acute here given the racial tension since the shooting in Ferguson.

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Some media companies resist or respond defensively when outsiders examine their practices. But to its credit, not the Post-Dispatch. Top managers, including executive editor Gilbert Bailon, provided data that documents the racial composition of its staff and spoke openly about how they are trying to maintain and increase diversity. In most cases, reporters who offered criticism did so on the record.

 

The Post-Dispatch drew my attention to their diversity issues last year when it filled three prominent jobs with white men. Within the space of several months, the P-D had hired a new metro columnist, a lead sports columnist and an editorial page editor. Journalism is a team effort, but the people who fill these three positions have long been among the most widely recognized and influential journalists in town.

 

In an era of austerity for many newspapers, hires are precious. At 118 employees, the newsroom is roughly one-third the size it was when Lee Enterprises purchased the Post-Dispatch and other media properties from Pulitzer, Inc. in 2005. Arguably, Bailon filled those spots with superstars. He moved Tony Messenger, the editorial page editor, into the metro columnist job. Messenger had recently been named a Pulitzer finalist for his Ferguson-related editorials. Shortly after long-time sports columnist Bernie Miklasz departed, Bailon brought aboard Ben Hochman, a native St. Louisan who had been a decorated columnist and a frequent sports radio presence in Denver. By age 35, Hochman had already won six national awards.

 

Then, earlier this year, Tod Robberson replaced Messenger as editorial page editor. Robberson won a Pulitzer Prize with two other writers for work they did in highlighting socio-economic disparities in Dallas where he worked for the Dallas Morning News.

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From left: Tony Messenger, Tod Robberson and Ben Hochman

 

All these men were superbly qualified for these jobs. But I wondered if anyone was unsettled by the decision to select three white males for marquee positions as the community was dealing with the Ferguson aftershocks.

 

The answer turned out to be yes and no. But it's not nearly as simple as that. The reactions to these hires should make every journalist and newsroom manager — not just in St. Louis but across the country — reflect on his or her role in a complicated picture involving coverage of minority communities.

 

How the Post-Dispatch fits in nationally and locally

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As of February, overall the Post-Dispatch newsroom staff was 17 percent non-white and management was 19 percent non-white, according to figures provided by the company. That puts the Post-Dispatch roughly on par with other newspapers in the United States. Overall, minority journalists make up 18.5 percent of the professional workforce at newspapers in the Post-Dispatch’s circulation category (100,000-250,000), according to the latest annual survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. (Late update as of 7/14/16, Post-Dispatch says new figures compiled for ASNE shows improvement and the newsroom overall has now reached the national average --18.5 percent minority journalists.)

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Many U.S. news organizations, including The Poynter Institute, have trouble reflecting the diversity of America writ large. Figures cited by ASNE show that minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, with the number expected to grow to about 42 percent over the next decade. Few newsrooms come close to matching those numbers.

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The St. Louis region is not as diverse as the nation. According to 2014 census estimates, the population in the city of St. Louis and the region’s five most populous counties was 26 percent non-white. So the newsroom/community gap appears to be 7.5 percentage points.

 

But the gap widens considerably when it comes to blacks. Blacks make up nearly 21 percent of the population in the city and those five other counties. The percentage of blacks on the Post-Dispatch staff is just eight percent. That is 10 people among the 118 in the newsroom.

 

Though the number of non-whites has remained consistent at the P-D during the last 10 years, the number of blacks began to decline. In 2006, blacks made up 12.3 percent of the staff, according to figures the Post-Dispatch provided to ASNE. The Post-Dispatch has made gains in hiring minority staff since then by hiring Asian-Americans and Hispanics — about four percent in each category. That roughly reflects their percentage in the region, according to census figures.

 

The Post-Dispatch’s first Hispanic editor

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Having Gilbert Bailon, who is of Hispanic heritage, in the role of executive editor, is a symbol of the newspaper’s commitment to diversity. The Post-Dispatch also has had a woman as an editor in recent years (Ellen Soeteber), and before that an Asian-American (William F. Woo).

 

His own story as a minority journalist is compelling, though he isn’t one to harp on it. Bailon, 57, is of Mexican descent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He is the grandson of copper miners on both sides of his family who found a home in Globe, Ariz., a mining community about 90 miles east of Phoenix. Bailon’s father was a Navy veteran who went on to become a pharmacist and later a court bailiff and translator. His mother was an educator and earned a PhD. Bailon attended public schools in Tempe and was drawn to journalism, as early as middle school where he edited the paper and was the student correspondent for the Tempe Daily News. He majored in journalism at the University of Arizona and edited the campus newspaper.

 

After college, Bailon landed a job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as a police reporter. He remembers benefiting from the Capital Cities Communications minority journalism program, which he said gave him a sense of possibility. Bailon moved on to Dallas Morning News, where he quickly climbed the rungs and served as executive editor. He later became publisher of Al Dia, a startup Spanish-language paper in north Texas. Along the way, Bailon served as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and has served on the diversity committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He also served as ASNE president in 2007, the second Hispanic in that role.

 

Bailon was hired as editorial page editor at the Post-Dispatch in 2007. He took on the top newsroom job five years later.

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So Bailon is well-versed in diversity issues, and he’s lived it. While he did not run into outright bigotry, he can remember encountering assumptions about where he came from; what he was interested in and how he would perform. “You can get pigeonholed,” he said, as many assume you want to cover your own community. And minority readers have their own assumptions as well, he said, “that you should be championing” their efforts.

 

When it came down to making those choices for the three top jobs at the Post-Dispatch, Bailon said he considered people of color, and women. “In all three cases, we had strong minority finalists,” he said. “And we reached out to minority journalists to make sure we had a diverse pool.”

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After those hires were made, the Post-Dispatch hired a black journalist, Junius Randolph, for its website and an Asian-American, Kristen Taketa, as a general assignment reporter, and Jose de Jesus Ortiz, who is a Hispanic, as a sports columnist. In the last few weeks, it has added Ashley Lisenby, an African-American as a metro reporter, and Nassim Benchaabane, a native of Algeria, as a police reporter.

 

Diversity by department

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The sports hire was particularly notable. With the death of Bryan Burwell, a popular and widely respected sports columnist, in 2015, the Post-Dispatch sports staff became all-white, (except for Stu Durando), and all male, (except for online content editor Sara Holmes).

 

For several weeks in fall and winter of 2015, the newspaper ran a house ad (an example at right) featuring a picture of the not-very-diverse team (Holmes was not pictured, though Durando was), which touted their credentials as stellar sports scribes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moore (above), the newspaper’s diversity reporter, was appalled. Moore said he had been trying to get the marketing department to pay more attention to the newspaper’s 100 Neediest Cases campaign. “Then, in the middle of the campaign, I open the paper and I see an ad for sports, and these white guys smiling at me, and I think, ‘Are you f-ing kidding me? Why are we promoting that we have no diversity in our sports department?’”

 

Earlier this year, the marketing department launched a campaign featuring a dozen columnists. Included in the campaign are four women and three non-whites. Most of them come from the features department, which is comparatively diverse in relation to every other department.

 

Until recently, it was led by an Asian-American, Jody Mitori (she took a job outside journalism in April), and includes a family columnist Aisha Sultan, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, pop music critic Kevin Johnson, fashion and home writer Debra Bass and feature writer, Calvin Wilson, each of whom is black, and three women, Gail Pennington, Judith Newmark, and Sarah Bryan Miller, as television, theater and classical music critic respectively. Overall the staff is made up of seven women and five men, six people of color; six whites.

 

The photo staff is also diverse, with five non-whites among a staff of 11. But the eight-member business unit (which officially is considered part of Metro) is all white, except for one editor, who is Hispanic.

 

And then there’s the metro desk, which did most of the reporting on Ferguson. Although some people of color were involved in that coverage, a great deal of the reporting was handled by white reporters. Was the newspaper disadvantaged by a lack of diversity?

 

Bailon acknowledged that he would like to have more diversity among his metro reporters, but notes that among those involved in the Ferguson coverage were a news editor Ron Wade and video editor Gary Hairlson, both black, and Carlos Ayulo, assistant managing editor for presentation, who is Hispanic.

 

But on the streets, some saw problems. Moore points out that the Post-Dispatch did not land an interview with Brown’s parents in the aftermath of the shooting. The Washington Post sent in Wesley Lowery, a person of color, and many thought he beat the Post-Dispatch on some important stories. Other people of color outside the mainstream media became important social media figures: DeRay Mckesson, St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, and Mariah Stewart, who contributed reports to the Huffington Post as part of a special fellowship program.

 

But it would be unfair to all of these individuals to say their journalistic credibility was based on their race. To be sure, their work might be informed by their experiences as minorities. And some Ferguson residents and protesters might have warmed to them more quickly. But the more important traits were insight, constancy and diligence. There were plenty of people of all races who wilted in the Ferguson media hothouse and others who shone, including many white reporters at the Post-Dispatch.

 

Messenger, then editor of the editorial page, and his staff were particularly notable in addressing all things Ferguson. The newspaper’s editorials were by turns passionate and sober; progressive and at the same time realistic about how much could be accomplished and how quickly. Those editorials were written by Messenger, Kevin Horrigan and Deborah Peterson, all whites.

 

As the coverage continued, education writer Elisa Crouch and child and family policy reporter Nancy Cambria, both white, contributed in-depth, enterprise reporting shining a light on racial disparities and their impact on the community.

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Notably, the Post-Dispatch did have Koran Addo (above), a recently-hired black journalist, covering the racial tension at the University of Missouri last fall when the football team threatened to boycott a game in sympathy with protesters. Addo is now covering city hall.

 

Is the Post-Dispatch “irrelevant to the black community?”

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In many cases, it is whites on the Post-Dispatch who feel that the newspaper’s racial makeup is cringe-worthy. Bogan, a white metro reporter, raised his hand at a staff meeting last year to address the issue. In his six years at the newspaper, Bogan has written extensively about minorities, including the piece on the racial makeup of the Cardinals. At the staff meeting, Bogan brought up the fact that the Post-Dispatch lacked a black metro columnist and that it was an obvious omission in the newsroom's coverage post-Ferguson. What was keeping the Post-Dispatch from making such a hire, he wanted to know.

 

The newspaper once had a black columnist, Greg Freeman, who died at age 46 in 2002. Bob Joiner, who is black, once wrote editorials and had a weekly column on the op-ed page. He left the newspaper in 2005.

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In the summer of 2003 came Sylvester Brown (above), who left the newspaper in 2009. Brown, who I supervised until 2005, was dismissed by the Post-Dispatch after the newspaper accused him of an ethics violation. 

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Brown maintains that the ethics charge was used as a pretense to fire him for talking about diversity issues at the newspaper and for writing critically about white politicians, such as St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. The Post-Dispatch has insisted that the ethics violation was the only deciding factor in his dismissal.

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Years later, Brown is still critical of the Post-Dispatch's record on diversity.

 

“They don’t really respect black readers,” Brown said. “And in many ways they are irrelevant to the black community.”

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Relevance is a theme that others with less animosity toward the Post-Dispatch also discuss. Gloria Ross (above) is a black freelance journalist who is active on social media. She lives in the city’s racially diverse Central West End and does a lot of walking through her neighborhood. As a courtesy to her neighbors, she picks up the newspaper and throws it closer to their stoops. “There aren’t any papers out there anymore,” she said.

 

Maybe that’s not surprising, given that readers can now access the newspaper’s website without subscribing to the print edition. Lee Enterprises says the P-D website stltoday.com gets 83 million pageviews a month. No one knows how many of those eyeballs belong to blacks, but Ross surmises not many. She says few of her friends are reading the Post-Dispatch online. When she sends a link to a Post-Dispatch article to her friends on Facebook, it’s news to them.

 

Felicia Pulliam, a member of a civic organization called Focus St. Louis, doesn’t subscribe to the newspaper. She sat on the Ferguson Commission, the group appointed by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon to set an agenda for the community to address racial disparities.

 

“I don’t read the Post-Dispatch as much as I used to,” Pulliam said. “Last year, I read it daily. The coverage last year was probably the best it had been in a long time.” But Pulliam said the newspaper fails in covering the black community in its entirety, concentrating perhaps too much on dysfunction and not as much on everyday lives.

 

“I have always wondered why the PD was not much more diverse. I am getting frustrated with it,” Pulliam said. “That’s kind of why I stopped reading it.”

 

Pulliam’s mother, Jeanette Pulliam, is a retired educator and a subscriber. She reads it avidly everyday. As a teacher and former member of the Normandy school board in northeast St. Louis County. she knows some of the people behind the bylines.

 

She respects them, especially education writer Elisa Crouch. “You could bet that what you said (to Crouch) would be in the paper correctly,” Jeanette Pulliam said. But Jeanette Pulliam says she can’t think of one of her friends who subscribe to the newspaper.

 

An understated, but important reason that readers follow a newspaper are the obituaries (a typical page is at right). Jeanette Pulliam increasingly sees notices of friends and acquaintances passing, but not in the Post-Dispatch.

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Rarely will readers see a black face in the newspaper’s paid obituaries. The newspaper isn’t discriminating. The obituaries are open to anyone who wants to pay for them. But why pay for an obituary in the region’s most widely circulated newspaper if few of your friends and acquaintances are reading it?

 

Many blacks do pick up and read the free weekly St. Louis American, the region’s black paper. Interestingly, its current editor, Chris King, is white and so are many staff members. But its publisher, Dr. Donald Suggs, is black and has deep ties in his community. That’s where you will find the news about blacks that covers a lot of achievements as well as dysfunction. It is also where you can find the obituaries that never surface in the Post-Dispatch.

 

Post-Dispatch managers recognize that more outreach needs to be done in the black community.

 

Adam Goodman, who oversees the Post-Dispatch’s metro coverage as an assistant managing editor, said:

 

“I would hope that despite our shortcomings on any given day, (black readers) would recognize how dedicated we are to all of St. Louis and how committed we are to seeking out the truth and keeping all parts of our community informed. That means being devoted to telling the stories that need to be to told and to holding folks accountable. One lesson from the intense spotlight of Ferguson is to try to better understand differing and passionate viewpoints.

 

“On a personal level, I and others here communicate with members of the community each and every day. They tell us about what they see happening around them, offer up ideas or voice concerns about our coverage.”

 

Recently, the newspaper sponsored a community forum on the heels of printing a 10-page special section called The Crisis Within. The report, by Nancy Cambria and photographer Laurie Skrivan, documented how crime and poverty inhibits brain growth in children “inviting disease and slashing life spans.”

 

In another way, Debra Bass’ work is equally important when it comes to outreach. Her reports on fashion and lifestyle trends capture the community’s multicultural zeitgeist in a way that is upbeat and inclusive.

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Bass is black, loves her job and her colleagues. But she is frank about her newspaper’s faults. “I defend our news judgment and our coverage. I cannot defend the makeup of our staff,” she said. “You have people covering stories who don’t look like the people they are covering, and it raises issues.”

 

Recruitment slows

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Bass and others know that it has become increasingly difficult to recruit journalists of color. Job openings don’t come around as often, and when they do it’s hard to persuade an up-and-coming black journalist that St. Louis is the place to be.

 

Ferguson made the region seem inhospitable to people of color. But the region has never enjoyed a sterling reputation in that regard.

 

Jamila Robinson, a black journalist, worked in the features department at the Post-Dispatch from 2003 to 2007. “I felt that I had a lot of opportunity at the Post-Dispatch,” she said. “St. Louis is a different thing.” Robinson, a native of Detroit, spoke of blacks in St. Louis as “some of the most downtrodden” she had ever seen. “You could go downtown in St. Louis not see a black person in a suit. You can’t rise and create social capital there like you can in some cities. You don’t have a network to create that.”

 

Robinson does not have children, but at one time thought about it. She said she wouldn’t want to raise a family in St. Louis. “Absolutely not,” she said.

 

The Post-Dispatch once had a full-time recruiter, Cynthia Todd, a black woman who focused a lot of attention on minorities. Then it had a part-time recruiter in Irv Harrell, also black.  Now due to staff cuts, no one is officially tasked with recrutiment of staff members, minority or otherwise.

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But Mike Meiners, director of newsroom administration, said the Post-Dispatch remains eager to recruit African-American staff members. "Lee Enterprises, and the Post-Dispatch have a recruitment booth at the upcoming NABJ convention in August where we will have three representatives."

 

Recently Bailon had another opening to fill. Joe Strauss, a sports columnist, had died. At about the same time, St. Louis lost its football team, the Rams, to Los Angeles. There were fewer sports to cover. Even so, he hired the aforementioned Ortiz to replace Strauss. I wondered why Bailon didn’t seize the opportunity to hire a black metro columnist.

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In an email, he noted that sports did not get a hire when it lost Bryan Burwell, so it was really down two positions. Strauss, he noted, had written mostly about baseball and, of course, baseball in St. Louis is an obsession. Ortiz has extensive MLB experience.

 

Bailon remains non-committal when it comes to adding a black metro columnist to the Post-Dispatch lineup.

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“Would it be better if we had that voice? Absolutely. It’s something we do need. We would be better off with that. But we are up against it with tight resources. If this were a few years ago, it would be much easier to carve this out. I’m not saying we can’t or we won’t. It is a factor, we have to see…”

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The author, Richard H. Weiss, is a former member of the Post-Dispatch staff. He worked there 30 years as a reporter and editor and took a buyout in 2005. Weiss has continued to collaborate with the Post-Dispatch from time to time on projects sponsored by the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis where he  once served as president and for which he is now head of a committee that encourages enterprise journalism.

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