UCF Study: Newspaper Sports Staffs Overwhelmingly White and Male

By Chad Binette June 22, 2006

For nearly two decades, sportswriters and columnists have reported on Richard Lapchick’s studies examining racial and gender diversity in professional and college sports.

Now the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has turned his attention to racial and gender diversity among newspaper sports editors and staffs. The results show that editors, columnists and other newspaper sports employees are overwhelmingly white and male.

The inaugural Racial and Gender Report Card of the Associated Press Sports Editors, which was released Thursday, reviewed the staffs of more than 300 newspapers that are Associated Press members. More than 5,100 newspaper employees, including reporters, copy editors, page designers and clerks, were reviewed for the study.

Lapchick’s study concluded that 95 percent of sports editors, 90 percent of sports columnists and 87 percent of assistant sports editors and reporters were white. Also, 95 percent of sports editors, 93 percent of columnists, 90 percent of reporters and 87 percent of assistant sports editors were men.

The APSE asked Lapchick last year to pursue the study, marking the first time that any organization has asked the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport to evaluate its own members.

“The media has been excellent at reporting the diversity records for professional and college sport. Yet the media had never turned the mirror on itself,” Lapchick said. “When it did so through this study, APSE newspapers saw how little progress they had made regarding representation of women and people of color in decisions on what is covered, who covers it and who offers opinions on it.” 

The institute’s studies of professional and college sports have included letter grades evaluating their progress related to racial and gender diversity. The APSE report does not include grades because it is the first one in its category.

Had grades been assigned, Lapchick said the APSE members would have fared worse in racial and gender diversity than the sports they cover. But he praised the organization for “having the courage to initiate the study so there will be real transparency.”

John Cherwa, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel, said the idea for the survey came last year during the APSE convention in Orlando. A couple of sports editors said they should be held accountable for the standards that they are using to evaluate professional and college sports, and the APSE asked Cherwa to work with UCF to conduct the study.

“I guess I hope that any sports columnist who has chided a professional sports league for its lack of diversity will look at these results and decide whether they should be challenging their bosses to do better,” Cherwa said.

More diversity among sports staffs “might lead writers to ask questions or look at angles that might shed light on the particular situation of an African-American, Latino or female coach or athlete,” Lapchick said. “The chance to make the stories more interesting and, in some cases, more accurate, should be apparent.”

The full study can be viewed at http://www.ncasports.org/press_releases.htm.

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