Minority Presence in Journalism

Public project summary

There is a lack of minority representation in journalism. Despite organizations working to bring more minorities into journalism, all minority groups combined account for only 22.4% of television journalists and 13.34% of journalists at daily newspapers (White, 2015). This problem has negatively impacted the voice of minorities because they are not represented in mainstream media. According to the Center for Media Literacy, “currently only about 40% of the nation's 1,600 daily newspapers employ any minorities in editorial staff positions” (Cort, 2017). A possible cause of this problem is the lack of minority participation in high school journalism programs. Perhaps a study which investigates minority presence in high school journalism by collecting data to determine the effectiveness of a project encouraging minority students to get involved in high school journalism could remedy this situation and increase the number of minority students in the journalism program at Palo Alto High School.