Susan Denley, director of editorial hiring and development for the Los Angeles Times, called Unity "the best place to meet, recruit and have our sensitivities raised."
Minority journalists say they lack representation in newsrooms. Although minorities represented more than 30 percent of the U.S. population in the 2000 census, they made up 12.5 percent of the workforce in the nation's newsrooms in 2003, according to an ASNE report. The percentage was 9.9 among supervisors.
Phonethip Liu of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville confers with students Walter Gabriel, left, and Gregory Lee, deputy high school editor for The Washington Post, about a graphic they are working on for the Unity News.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Today, Unity will release its own study of diversity among reporters covering the White House and Capitol Hill, which shows striking underrepresentation of minorities in that elite group.
Race, minority journalists say, is the unacknowledged elephant in newsrooms.
During last year's plagiarism scandal involving New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who is black, minority reporters in general, and black reporters in particular, said they were reminded of how racially tense newsrooms can be. They noted that several white commentators focused on Blair's hiring through an affirmative-action program and suggested that such recruitment should stop, but did not mention race in subsequent scandals that led to the resignations of Times reporter Rick Bragg and USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, who are white.
At the same time, race has also divided Unity's planners.
After Gonzalez and Sutton sold the idea in the late 1980s, the four organizations sent representatives to a negotiating table in Baltimore.
"It was kind of like those Cold War meetings between the U.S. and the Soviet Union," said DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist who was president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) when Sutton and Gonzalez broached the Unity idea. "We were trying to agree on whether the table should be square or round."
As talks progressed, a leadership consultant was hired to mediate planning sessions leading to Unity 1994. The consultant, Ron B. Brown, noticed that body language and tone of voice divided speakers as much as issues of power, money and control.
At one point, a black woman raised her voice while making a point, offending someone who is Asian, Brown said, and at another time, a Latina jabbed a finger at a black woman, who recoiled, saying, "Don't point your finger at me!"
