Panel explores lack of diversity at magazines

By Christina Caron
NLGJA Reporter Staff

When Richard Perez-Feria arrived for his first day of work at Esquire, he was greeted by baffled looks. It was 1986. His colleagues, many of them white, Ivy-League graduates, took in his khaki pants, paisley tie and fair complexion.

Staff photo/Bryan Kills Crow

Marcus Mabry, of Newsweek, right, makes a point at Friday's panel.

“You don’t look like the guy with the accent and hyphen on his last name,” they said. Perez was beginning to learn about the misconceptions and stereotypes that exist, even among the well-educated.

Although internship programs and freelancing have helped improve magazine diversity over the years, “there are many magazines where you won’t find one single person of color in any senior editing role,” said Sheryl Hilliard Tucker, executive editor at Money magazine. Tucker was moderator of the Friday panel “Why We Can’t Wait: The State of Racial Diversity in Magazines,” which discussed ways to find and retain people of color, as well as gays and lesbians.

Because newspaper staffs are larger, they tend to have a more diverse staff, panelists said.

“The main obstacle (for magazines) is that there is very little hiring,” said Howard Chua-Eoan, Time magazine’s news director. When Chua-Eoan hires, he often finds candidates by “abusing the freelance system,” going to job fairs and getting referrals.

“Diversity has become an important corporate policy at Time-Warner,” Chua-Eoan said. He has observed that such policies may produce skepticism, even among liberal journalists. “Journalists tend to be on the slightly cynical side — if there is policy they tend to rebel against it,” Chua-Eoan said.

The panelists emphasized their desire to recruit only the best, noting that people of color have often been overlooked in the hiring process. But magazines have fewer hiring opportunities because of their small staff, Marcus Mabry, chief of correspondents for Newsweek said.

In addition, magazines, unlike newspapers, are targeted to a specific demographic. “They don’t feel obligated to have more blacks on the staff, for example, or more lesbians,” said Diane Weathers, editor-in-chief of Essence.

“There are few people of color who are at the top of their field,” said Mabry. And that won’t change until today’s interns of color rise through the ranks, he added.