The Black Track: Minority Problems at the Tribune
“My real failure,” Squires told us, “and what I’m concerned about, is that I’m not hiring them in enough numbers to increase the retention numbers. We’re hiring 30 percent minorities–we don’t even have to have an opening to hire minorities. And we’ve made no progress in the total numbers of people who have stayed.”
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You would be right in supposing that few black go-getters, urban to the core, are eager to be posted in Hinsdale. But Hinsdale, site of a major Tribune outpost, isn’t what lures white go-getters into journalism either.
“A phenomenon at work in the big top-echelon media outlets is that there is not a lot of mobility at the top,” Squires said. “We tend to get these jobs and stay in them. No one wants to quit being managing editor of the Tribune, or sports editor, or metro editor, or editor of the Tribune. So you put a kid on a fast track and they get to a certain point and no one moves. When that happens to a young nonminority worker, their options are not as great as the minority worker’s–and we’re talking about the hotshots, the good ones.”
Last summer, a Boston Globe editor Biddle remembered from an internship there called and asked him if he was happy. “The answer was a resounding no.” Then life got better. The Tribune brought Biddle back into the city and gave him the State of Illinois Center. But this assignment didn’t make Biddle any friends: “There was a lot of bad feeling over that beat. Everybody and their mother had put in for the job.” And after a few weeks he hung it up and joined the Globe.
She also didn’t want to keep suffering the perception that “you’ve gotten where you are because of the color of your skin. . . . When there are only a handful of blacks in a newsroom, those accusations seem to be much more common.” The Washington Post called and Norris split. “When you look around, and see four or five black editors in the newsroom, it makes you feel good.”
The third black reporter to split already had one of those choice assignments. Cheryl Devall, 30, three and a half years at the Tribune, her dues paid, was covering City Hall–“as important a job as we had,” said Squires–and she walked away from it. Devall decided she’d rather cover Chicago for National Public Radio.
