On Race, Gender, and Journalism

Hello all. This is a little essay on part of another essay that's been making the rounds over the holidays. Expect a proper end of the year post shortly.

One of the policy analyst Matt Bruenig’s best recurring bits is pointing out ⁠— to inevitable sputtering and pique ⁠— that most Americans are racial minorities and women. There’s not much political utility to that fact, but it can help ground other conversations. If we assume, for instance, that there are no innate differences between the races or genders in the desire or the capacity to pursue journalism as a profession, it follows that in a truly meritocratic world without barriers to entry, white men, who constitute less than a third of the American workforce, would also constitute a numerical minority of journalists. 

We don’t live in a meritocratic, barrier-free world, of course. And minorities and women have historically been less able to pursue careers in journalism due to factors internal and external to journalistic institutions. As a consequence, journalism in America was long dominated by white men. This was true not only of legacy publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker, but even of publications founded within recent memory. As Jacob Savage reminds us in his viral essay “The Lost Generation,” Vox was 82 percent male and 88 percent white as recently as 2013 ⁠— Mad Men numbers, somehow, at a publication launched just over a decade ago. But the years since have brought changes to the industry. Due largely to a surge in activism and advocacy around the unfinished work of redressing racism and sexism in American society, publications have made well-publicized and documented efforts to hire more minorities and women. “The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024,” Savage writes. “Condé Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. Buzzfeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.” And Vox, Savage adds, has changed most significantly of the publications he canvassed ⁠— just “37 percent male and 59 percent white” by 2022. 

Unfortunately, because there are a limited number of jobs in journalism, everyone who hopes to be a journalist cannot be hired. And the efforts to hire more minorities and women have led to some young white men, including some who surely would have been good journalists, not being hired. Savage’s essay frames those men as the victims of a wild cultural overcorrection. “Without any actual quotas to achieve—only the constant exhortation to ‘do better’—the diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure,” he writes. “No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.”

But while the proportion of white men employed at the leading institutions he references has clearly declined, Bruenig has noted that the proportion of non-Hispanic white men in their 30s ⁠—  Savage’s sub-sub-population of interest ⁠— employed in arts and media overall has not changed since 2013, per available statistics. As it happens, we also have whole-industry figures for journalism in particular, though Savage’s piece doesn’t bother to include any. According to a 2022 Pew survey of journalists ⁠— defined as those “who create, edit or report original news stories” ⁠— about 76 percent are white and 51 percent are male. Another survey by the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University the same year found that about 82 percent of full-time journalists in America are white while about 59 percent are male. For reference, the American workforce is about 59 percent white and 53 percent male. 

Helpfully, the Newhouse School’s survey also broke down employment in different segments of the industry by race and gender. Women, who make up about 47 percent of the workforce, make up about 44 percent of news magazine staffers, 37 percent of daily newspaper staffers, and about 40 percent of online staffers. And minorities, who make up about 41 percent of the workforce, make up about 11 percent of news magazine staffers, 15 percent of daily newspaper staffers, and 17 percent of online staffers. Per the survey, the proportion of women working in magazines and online media increased by about 10 points from the decade prior. The proportion of minorities working in online media nearly doubled while the minority employment at daily newspapers also increased significantly. Obviously, the industry’s efforts to diversify itself in recent years have made an impact. But just as obviously, white men haven’t been “shut out” of it, as Savage claims. 

Even as far as the high-prestige institutions he references specifically are concerned, it seems relevant that the editorial staffs of The New York Times (66 percent), The Atlantic ⁠(68 percent), ProPublica (62 percent), The Washington Post (60 percent) — and Conde Nast as a whole (60 percent) ⁠— are still as white or even whiter than the working population. All the institutions he references though ⁠— with the exception of ProPublica, whose gender balance has not shifted significantly since 2020 ⁠— really are significantly less male than they had been and than the workforce overall. Buzzfeed, notably, ⁠is the only national publication in the piece that is now less male and less white than the workforce. One of the pieces leading the front page of Buzzfeed at the moment is titled “‘No Way They Have Ozempic Santa’: 39 Funny Tweets From The Week That'll Have You Cackling All The Way Into 2026 (Thank...GOD).” It's not clear to me that the number of white men who desired and applied for jobs there in the first place would have remained constant over the last decade, though there's admittedly a chicken or egg question here ⁠— are there fewer white men at Buzzfeed because Buzzfeed publishes things like “‘No Way They Have Ozempic Santa’: 39 Funny Tweets From The Week That'll Have You Cackling All The Way Into 2026 (Thank...GOD)’” or does Buzzfeed publish things like “‘No Way They Have Ozempic Santa’: 39 Funny Tweets From The Week That'll Have You Cackling All The Way Into 2026 (Thank...GOD)’” because there are fewer white men?

Whatever happens to be the case there, the writers of ambition Savage is most concerned with are far likelier to seek employment elsewhere. “The alt-weeklies that gave misfit young men their start,” he reports, for instance, “have shed them entirely.” Arbitrarily, he notes that the The Stranger and Indy Week have no white men on staff. Just as arbitrarily, it might be noted that white men are on staff or write regularly at the Chicago Reader, the Phoenix New Times, the Washington City Paper, the Detroit Metro Times, the Las Vegas Weekly, The Austin Chronicle, the Dallas Observer, and Willamette Week, as well as a variety of alternative local news sites that have have been launched in recent years including Hell Gate, The Colorado Sun, Racket, and The 51st. 

What does the balance of information here suggest to us? Critics of Savage’s piece have been accused of denying a shift in hiring happened at all in the last decade. Again, one clearly did, though Savage overstates it. Critics have also been accused of not saying straightforwardly whether that shift was good or not. If so, that mistake won’t be repeated here. It is good, and obviously so, that journalism isn’t as overwhelmingly white and male as it used to be. It is good not because we should take it as a given that a “diversity of perspectives” always and everywhere improves journalism ⁠— the project of journalism is to present us with things that are interesting or true and most perspectives are not ⁠— but because qualified minorities and women should also have a chance at working in journalism if they would like to. It is good, given this, that the industry is working to bring in more of the qualified minorities and women it was systematically excluding from the profession until practically yesterday, in historical terms. It is good that it is no longer tenable to start an outlet that is more than 80 percent white and male, as though those figures actually represented the balance of people capable of working in media. It is good that the industry started keeping tabs on its demographics and worked to make that information available to the public. And it is good that the industry, even as it has diversified itself, continues to employ a healthy number of white men, who deserve to work in journalism as much as anyone else. 

It is also unfortunate that some white men are now finding it harder to enter and advance in journalism than it was when they faced little meaningful competition from qualified minorities and women and when the industry did not care at all how many minorities and women it was hiring. But the status quo in the industry a decade ago was absurd, as Savage himself concedes in passing. “The critics,” of the once common demographic imbalances, “were mostly right,” he says. And, again, the industry overall remains substantially male and extremely white. Per Savage’s numbers, it is true that the national publications referenced, while still predominantly white, are now predominantly female. But it’s not difficult to imagine all the hullabaloo about men in crisis ⁠— and perhaps Savage’s piece itself ⁠— spurring efforts to bring the genders into parity. 

All told, the push for diversity in journalism hasn’t gone far enough ⁠— editors and hiring managers should begin prioritizing applicants who can demonstrate that their parents had been making less than $100,000 a year when they graduated from high school, who were the first in their families to go to college, or who have not gone to college. This would help less affluent applicants ⁠— including struggling white men ⁠— compete for jobs in an industry whose leaders have been far less eager to address its elitism and classism than its racism and sexism.

It’s certain many who agree with Savage’s critiques of DEI initiatives would support this ⁠— though preferentially hiring less affluent journalists would surely make it more difficult for hard-working, talented, and qualified wealthy applicants to get jobs. No one chooses to be born into their wealth any more than anyone chooses to be born a white man. And yet it’s doubtful that efforts to diversify the industry by economic status would spur very many analogous essays standing up for the frustrated ambitions of would-be journalists whose parents just happened to be doctors or lawyers or journalists themselves. 

Why? One reason might be the growing perception that while the unfair privileges conferred by wealth are real, the privileges of white men are now less real or perhaps even fully illusory. As far as journalism is concerned, that perception is contradicted by the fact that white men are still, as Savage himself writes, at the very top of much of the industry. On race in particular, the noise about the post-Floyd moment has obscured an enduring stasis. The American people, racially benighted as this country has been, have elected a black president twice. The powers that be at The New Yorker, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, have yet to select a nonwhite editor in chief. Almost none of the country’s leading mainstream news magazines, in fact ⁠— not The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, TIME, The Nation, or The New Republic ⁠—  have ever been led by nonwhite editors. All but The Nation, edited by a white woman, and Newsweek, edited by a black woman, are presently edited by white men. That overall picture may well change in the years to come. If it does, it will be proffered by many as further evidence that minorities and women now have a tyrannical hold over the profession. 

Because they don’t, an editor at an outlet I once interned for ⁠— a white man ⁠— once offered a remarkable piece of advice. At a lunch I attended with the rest of my intern cohort, a young woman asked him if he could offer any tips on pitching stories.  He was quiet for a moment and then looked at us sternly. “You should pitch,” he said, “like a white man.” What he meant by this, he went on to say emphatically, was not that white men are better writers and journalists, but that some of the traits stereotypically attributed to white men ⁠— very often wrongly, of course ⁠— are useful in getting editors, and the industry as a whole, to take you seriously. A confidence and ambition undimmed by limited experience or the odds against you, a certainty that you deserve to write about whatever it is you want to write about, carrying yourself, to the fullest extent possible, without the weight of personal insecurity or victimhood ⁠— these would help, he said. 

A good disposition can only take one so far. This was a punishing and competitive industry to work in even in the best of times. But for anyone still clamoring for a ticket aboard the Hindenburg, that advice is still worth trying out⁠— even for white men.