Dear Reader,
As the Chronicle strives to do a better job of providing information and insights to the nonprofit world, we have undertaken multiple efforts to see that our newsroom is doing all it can to ensure our reporting reflects the diversity of the people who work at foundations and charitable organizations.
We are now unveiling a key benchmark we will use to measure our progress: an independent assessment of the race, ethnicity, gender, and geographic location of the people we include in our articles and whose opinion essays we publish.
This study was conducted by Inclusion NextWork, an organization we hired to examine articles the Chronicle published in the past three years.
We undertook this effort to do a better job serving readers, but we also see this report as a challenge to the nonprofit world.
The analysis found that while we have made progress since 2017, we can still do better. We learned, for example, that:
- From 2017 to 2019, representation of Black, Hispanic, multiracial people, and others who are not white increased from 20 percent to 30 percent of the people we included in articles or who wrote opinion articles. By comparison, 25 percent of executive directors are people of color.
- In those same years, roughly 50 percent of the people included in our news and advice articles were female even though they made up 60 percent of executive directors. In our opinion section, 60 percent of authors last year were female, an increase from 40 percent in 2017.
We plan to use this data as a baseline to measure our progress in doing more to include diverse voices in everything we do. The next time we conduct an analysis, we plan to add other measures of diversity, such as sexual orientation and disability.
While we undertook this effort to do a better job of serving readers, we also see this report as a challenge to the nonprofit world. Much of our coverage is aimed at the leaders of large foundations, big nonprofits, and the associations that serve them. As the nonprofit world changes, so, too, should the mix of people we include in our articles.
In addition to releasing this assessment, the Chronicle has:
- Hired a coach who is working with our reporters and editors to develop and carry out annual learning plans to enhance our intercultural knowledge so we can better connect and relate to people with backgrounds different from our own.
- Bolstered our opinion editing ranks so we can commission more articles from people whose voices are too often left out of these important conversations.
These efforts have been underwritten with foundation grants, including one from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, which underwrote this assessment and our training.
As we release this analysis, we would be remiss not to tell you more about who produces our editorial content. Our staff biographies are available online, but, in a nutshell, the 24 people who write, edit, lead webinars, and work on visuals and data projects are diverse in age — eight are millennials, nine are from Generation X, and seven are baby boomers. Fourteen are women and 10 are men. Twenty-three of us are white, and one is a Latina.
We recognize our current staff lacks significant racial diversity, and we are working hard to build and retain a more diverse team. We are also seeking to diversify our ranks of freelance contributors.
With more diverse voices, we know our reporting will be even stronger. We’re striving to improve every day, and we welcome your advice and questions at feedback@philanthropy.com.
Stacy Palmer
Editor
