"'That's not Timesean' can be used to exclude": The New York Times gives the big report treatment to enacting "sweeping" cultural change » Nieman Journalism Lab : vimarsana.com
May 15, 2014In 2014, The New York Times produced its pivotal Innovation Report. The report, which was the product of six months of work by Times staffers and was meant to be an internal document before it was leaked, outlined the digital challenges that the paper faced and argued that The New York Times must become a digital-first organization in order to survive. “We are falling behind in … the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.” That 2014 Innovation Report was written by 10 white people and does not mention the words “diverse,” “diversity,” “racial,” or “race” once. In 2014, as the paper recognized that growing its audience and was crucial to its survival, it did not, in this report, recognize that readers and staff members of color were a key part of that mission. The 97-page report mentions race exactly once, in an aside about how reporters use social media (“Jon Eligon wrote a gripping first-person account on Facebook about his experience as a black reporter approaching a white supremacist in North Dakota”). The report does not include a single photo of a Black employee.