By Jessica Villagomez

Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence

Newsrooms across the country are looking for ways to capture a variety of perspectives from multiple demographics of people. In seeking these different perspectives, the traditional newsroom model finds itself dealing with a fatal flaw— many of the people, communities and experiences they desire to capture in writing are often not represented in newsrooms themselves.

Of the 42 reporters in the New York Times’ Metro department, only three are Latino, according to the New York Times. New York City has the second largest Hispanic population in the country, yet the demographics of the department that prides itself on capturing New York City’s news doesn’t reflect the city, not even by 10 percent.

This leaves the few reporters of color to become representatives of the minority populations they write about. The burden of representation, the concept that people of color feel a pressure to accurately, objectively and holistically represent a marginalized group is real because of the small amount of reporters of color in newsrooms.

During the summer going into my senior year of college, I interned at HOY Chicago, a Spanish-language daily newspaper under the Chicago Tribune Company. HOY Chicago is unlike any local paper within Illinois and throughout Chicago. As a bilingual publication, reporters, writers and editors at Hoy are committed to report on issues affecting the Latino community in both Spanish and English. Accessibility to news is one of Hoy’s largest priorities, focusing on assuring that Chicago and World news is broken to all populations of Latino households including but not limited to immigrants, Spanish-speakers, or “billenial”, bilingual millennials. Hoy is the largest circulating Spanish-language daily newspaper in Chicago, the website states.

Within my first day I immediately noticed the hard work put in by the reporters working there. Long hours and juggling multiple articles at one given time is commonplace in any newsroom, but there is built in additional stress knowing how important the work you are doing is for a demographic of people. Given that Chicago also has one of the largest Latino populations in the country, I hoped resources would include hiring more reporters to alleviate pressure on current editors and recruiting more writers would be a priority. However less than 10 editors and writers produced the paper and were therefore in charge of producing the news for their audience, every day.

Lessening the burden comes by prioritizing and valuing work produced by reporters of color. In order to get well-rounded newsrooms that are reflective of the communities they report on, a greater push through increased diversity hiring must first occur.