In the summer of 2020, I started working on a project that hoped to give real numbers to something we were all watching — layoffs. We didn’t just want to know how many people were laid off, though, we wanted to know how many of them were journalists of color. 

I worked on this project with three partners: Mazin Sidahmed, Moiz Syed and Rima Parikh. 

That summer, our industry was focused on covering two massive and overlapping events: the pandemic and the wave of protests that stemmed from the murder of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Newsrooms were starting to face their own past racist coverage and hiring practices. But solid numbers about job losses were hard to find.

Instead, again and again, we found several reasons we couldn’t get at those numbers. 

After months of research, we agreed — that’s the story.

What we found, which was published today, lays out three of the issues we ran into. They almost all get down to transparency. 

There is some good news here. We have seen some necessary changes since we first started working together, including several newsrooms that, for the first time ever, are led by journalists of color. 

But my colleagues in this work are not encouraged by hires, apologies or declarations.

“The pessimist in me says that we’ve been here before,” said Sidahmed, co-executive director of Documented,  a nonprofit newsroom in New York City that covers immigrants and immigration policy. “Every 10 years, there’s a moment like this.”

“I’m not hopeful because I think being hopeful in these times is akin to madness,” said Syed, a lead project designer at Mozilla. 

As an industry, we’re not good at tracking our own data, said Doris Truong, Poynter’s director of training and diversity and my boss. There’s no uniform way to collect it, and no common tool to measure across mediums. 

And even if we had numbers, they wouldn’t reflect the salary disparities that exist for women and people of color. 

This isn’t just about hiring, but making spaces where people feel like they belong, where they can bring who they are to their work, where they can grow, where their ideas are respected, Sidahmed said.

And guess where he sees that happening? In local nonprofit newsrooms. Look at Sahan Journal in Minneapolis, City Bureau in Chicago, El Tímpano in Oakland, Outlier Media in Detroit and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism in Memphis. 

They’re creating new ecosystems of news that are based in communities, look like those communities and are built with them.

You can read the full story here. What are you seeing in your newsroom? Any meaningful changes?