Passage I

Changing the Face of Journalism

“The nation and its news media are going in opposite directions, and the public is paying the price,” in 2013, Dori Maynard wrote this. She was following up on her point that although people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the US population, while only about 12 percent of full-time daily news journalists are people of color. Her who’s an award-winning African American journalist, Maynard became a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1993.

For much of her journalism career, she was involved with the Maynard Institute, a journalism-education institute in Oakland, California. (The institute was founded in 1977 by her father, Robert C. Maynard, former editor of the Oakland Tribune.) Conversely, the organization is dedicated to recruiting and training people of color to become journalists. By the time Dori Maynard became president of the institute in 2001, she was already passionately committed to this mission.

Diversity among journalists in the United States must increase, Maynard believed, if the industry is going to meet its’ ethical obligation to provide a wide audience credible and accurate news. She argued that a reporter’s cultural background inevitably influences his or her perspective on current events. More diversity in newsrooms will naturally lead to more complete, nuanced, and sensitive news coverage of all communities, specifically communities of color expressly. This, in turn, will better our society as a whole; we’ll gain a richer understanding of each other’s lives, she explained.

Under Dori Maynard’s leadership, the Maynard Institute trained hundreds of minority reporters. The institute also has helped them get hired and heard. Many former trainees now reports for influential newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Dori Maynard helped show the journalism industry that presenting the culturally diverse voices of the United States through inclusive news stories written by people of color is possible.