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Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity. I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "E…
Currently, the USA population is 60.4% white [1]. So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general?? [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...
Anglo-gibberish is great for generating semantic nonsense and given the US is 9th in reading education, 31st in math, you expect these dim white people to work when they can generate cognitive noise to stay busy? Their dad owns a dealership and their mom is on a school PTA. They’re better than work.
It’s has nothing to do with data and the emotional entitlement.
1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors"
2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"
3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories
4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
"Anti" racists are professional victims. Don't engage with them. They will always find a way to twist a disagreement going against their favor into an oppression narrative.
The goal of something like this is to center race to gain power.
The first step in the playbook for entrenching a woke ideology into a bureaucracy is to demand racial data/reporting. "hey look, this is an obvious problem... just look at the data". The next step is to demand a full diversity initiative. Next is hiring diversity inclusion and equity bureaucrats be installed. Once you have your own bureaucrats installed "inclusion" is used to promote fear and stifle speech or any descent. Now that no one can disagree or challenge the bureaucracy you can grow it and force it into the other bureaucratic functions.
As an journalism specific example: this is exactly what played out at The New York Times
This seems to be a very effective political strategy to gain power. It does seem to work. The question is how much does our society benefit?
"Anti" racists are professional victims. Don't engage with them. They will always find a way to twist a disagreement going against their favor into an oppression narrative.
Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors.
The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there.
Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades.
Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3).
After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to.
Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors.
At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.
Somewhat related tweet thread from today: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth). You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution…
So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications. This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors.…
Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.