From reckoning to retreat: Journalism’s DEI efforts are in decline

In 2020, as George Floyd’s killing and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests set off a “racial reckoning” in journalism, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (MIJE) was flooded with newsroom requests for company-wide diversity trainings.

MIJE, a nonprofit founded in 1977, focuses on “equity, belonging, and diversity in news.” Martin Reynolds, the organization’s co-executive director, conducted 20 newsroom trainings in a single month in 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, MIJE earned $1.2 million from its training work.

This year, Reynolds said, MIJE is planning for exactly $0 in income from diversity trainings. The demand has collapsed.

In 2022, I reported, “American journalism’s ‘racial reckoning’ still has lots of reckoning to do.” Three years later, what we’re seeing looks less like a reckoning and more like a retreat from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The shift, fueled in part by the Trump administration’s efforts to quash diversity initiatives throughout the country, extends well beyond newsrooms. A recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that about 30% of Americans believe DEI programs increase discrimination; the perception of discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Asian people has also decreased since 2021. The number of S&P 500 companies that reference “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in their annual reports has fallen by nearly 60% since 2024. (My own employer, Harvard University, disbanded its DEI office.)

2020 saw headlines like “The truth in Black and white: An apology from the Kansas City Star,” “The [L.A.] Times’ reckoning on race and our commitment to meaningful change,” and “Gannett news president: Diversity and inclusion are choices, not just words. Today we reaffirm our mission.”

This year, though, a study of newsrooms’ race reporting projects found that “while some of the 15 projects have led to significant changes in how news organizations operate, most newsrooms largely published the race reporting projects and moved on.” There was “little evidence that reporters, photographers, and editors approached reporting on race differently as a result of the race reporting series.”

Race, diversity, and identity products are also being shut down. This month, Politico shuttered The Recast, its four-year-old newsletter about politics, race, and power. Bloomberg stopped sending its Equality newsletter in May (though its Equality reporting team remains). And last June, The Washington Post put its “About US” newsletter (“Candid conversations about race and identity in 21st century America”) “on hiatus”; it has not returned.

Fewer newsrooms seem to be recruiting at the National Association for Black Journalists (NABJ) and National Association for Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) conferences. In 2022, 51 news organizations exhibited at the joint NABJ-NAHJ annual convention. This year, just 34 newsrooms exhibited at the NABJ and NAHJ conferences.

Media companies are also less likely to publicly share workforce data than they were in previous years. Gannett said in April that it would stop publishing company demographic information, citing the “evolving regulatory environment” of Trump’s second term. A spokesperson told me then that the company remains committed to “treating all our employees with respect and ensuring a culture of belonging.”

Quantifying a “culture of belonging” may not be possible in our industry. It’s been notoriously difficult to track diversity in newsrooms, and the political right’s demonization of DEI contributed to challenges in reporting this story. Over three months, I reached out to more than 70 people to talk about DEI in their newsrooms. Most of my requests went unanswered, and many of those who did respond weren’t willing to go on the record, even anonymously, out of fear of retaliation from their employers or jeopardizing their own job prospects. In the end, 11 people spoke to me on the record, but several requested anonymity.

Numbers can’t tell the whole story, but they can show a slice of it. I combed through newsrooms’ public promises to hire and create new roles and found more than 150 newsroom jobs that were explicitly related to race, diversity, or equality and were posted between 2020 and 2024. I wanted to know: What happened to those jobs?

Diversity-related newsroom jobs haven’t totally disappeared — but they also haven’t stuck.

I scanned public announcements, industry publications, and social media posts and found 169 full-time journalism jobs related to race, diversity, and equality that were posted and filled between June 2020 and December 2024. The jobs had titles like “race and equality reporter,” “inequality reporter,” “deputy inequality editor,” “chief diversity and inclusion officer,” and so on.

I categorized the positions by type, company, and medium. I also verified whether the positions still exist today. This data is not meant to be definitive, but to explore one facet of the industry’s promises to take DEI more seriously. Here’s what I found.

Most of the roles created (62%) were reporting positions, meaning that the majority of the roles didn’t have explicit power to implement change in newsroom operations or culture. Forty (23%) were team, desk, or managing editor positions. And 12% were management-level roles, like company heads, vice presidents, and directors of diversity and inclusion.

“These numbers reflect a long-standing pattern in desegregating journalism: That most efforts are concentrated at levels with the least amount of editorial influence,” Meredith D. Clark, associate professor of race and political communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me after reviewing the data. Clark resigned from her position running the News Leaders Association’s annual diversity survey in 2022, telling Nieman Lab she’d “been met with the kind of crushing resistance that you would expect when you’re trying to do things that contribute to structural and systemic change.”

“Reporting roles are essential,” Clark added, “but editors are directly responsible for what reporters cover, and who gets to cover what.”

The roles in my sample were filled across various mediums, including newspapers (37%), digital-only outlets (25%), radio stations (15%), networks like CNN and ABC (11%), and wire services (8%).

The majority (78%) of these roles were created between 2020 and 2022. By 2023, I found far fewer new roles — suggesting that news organizations may have lessened their focus on diversity-related jobs well before Trump’s second term began. Diverse hiring in general has also slowed. As early as 2023, Sara Guaglione reported for that media companies like The New York Times, Vox Media, Condé Nast, and Hearst made marginal gains in diversity but were still mostly hiring white people. By 2025, Guaglione found that “major publishers are making barely perceptible progress, and in some cases — none at all.”

More than half of the jobs (59%) still existed as of this summer, while a third (34%) are gone.¹

Of the 99 roles that still exist today, 67% are reporter roles, 18% are editorial management roles, and 12% are in management.

“There is reason to be cautiously optimistic about the slight uptick in the retention figures for executive leadership positions,” Clark said. But, she added, “we should also question whether this number climbed a percentage point because of a lasting commitment to equity in hiring and promotion or just positions that needed to be filled anyway.”

Of the 58 roles that no longer exist, more than half (55%) were reporter roles, 32% were editorial management roles, and 10% were management roles.

Some roles have evolved over time. A couple examples:

• The Minnesota Star Tribune hired an editor for diversity and community in 2020. In 2023, that person was promoted to head of culture and community. Her previous role no longer exists, though she continues the work she started in it.
• In 2021, The New York Times posted a role for an editor focused on newsroom diversity in the publisher’s office. That position no longer exists, but a Times spokesperson told me the work that person was doing has been taken over by the culture and careers team.

The data I collected doesn’t show whether newsrooms have made real changes to be more equitable work environments. When I asked a Black former NPR reporter who requested anonymity what he made of my findings, he said it was the wrong question.

“It’s sort of like saying you have one Black friend,” he said. “You may have one, but what are you doing to either keep them happy or to pave the way to have more people like them in these positions? What are you actually doing behind the scenes and in the newsrooms to retain talent and to recruit new talent externally to bring them into the fold?”

DEI trainings are changing and are in less demand.

The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education is not alone in seeing decreased demand for its trainings: Companies of all types are cutting them.

The employment law firm Littler surveyed nearly 350 C-suite executives before and after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Pre-inauguration, 63% of executives surveyed said they wanted to provide such trainings to all employees. Post-inauguration, 45% said they would consider “rolling back or eliminating such training.”

MIJE’s Reynolds said some of the news organizations that requested trainings weren’t serious about them. While lower-level staffers attended and engaged, sometimes the leaders who requested them didn’t attend.

“The people who needed it most, in many instances, were the ones that skirted it,” Reynolds said, adding, “If a news executive comes in, says hello, and then rolls out, that tells you they’re not really committed to this.”

Now that the demand has almost completely dried up, Reynolds said MIJE is thinking about changing its approach to trainings. While it will still work with news organizations through embedding programs, Reynolds is looking into developing leadership cohorts where newsroom managers from different organizations can learn from each other and receive help from MIJE and other experts over a longer period of time.

Doris Truong, who led the Poynter Institute’s diversity-focused trainings for newsrooms between 2020 and 2023, also saw high initial demand for trainings. “I think people were hoping that there would be some magical fix to decades of inequity and underresourcing,” she said. In November 2024, Truong left Poynter to pursue independent consulting.

Poynter wouldn’t tell me how many DEI trainings it ran between 2020 and 2025, but Sitara Nieves, VP of teaching and organizational strategy, said newsrooms’ training requests have evolved since 2020. At the beginning of the decade, she told me, requests were “often urgent and broad, reflecting a widespread recognition that many newsrooms were fundamentally rethinking their efforts — or sometimes starting from scratch.” News organizations sought “basic workshops on bias, inclusion fundamentals, and how to create more equitable newsroom cultures.”

Over the past few years, though, inquiries have “become more nuanced and specialized.”

“There are many reasons for that, including that some organizations have brought those early efforts in-house,” Nieves said. “Organizations are increasingly looking for training on specific challenges: how to recruit and retain talent, strategies for inclusive leadership at all levels of the organization; managing conflict around how to do all this work effectively and responsibly; and how to use data to understand how to reflect the needs and interests of local communities served.”

Larry Graham, the founder and CEO of the Diversity Pledge Institute, left the American Press Institute in 2021 to launch DPI as an organization focused on diverse hiring, mentorship, and journalism skills.

In its first two years, most of DPI’s revenue came from helping newsrooms with recruiting and executive searches, Graham said. There was enough interest that DPI was able to hire four full-time employees in 2022. Between 2021 and 2025, DPI helped place more than 70 journalists in a range of roles in more than 20 newsrooms across the U.S.

Now, Graham told me, “there’s an added layer of fear around diversity because of the Trump administration,” and business has slowed.

“In the last year or so, more and more, my emails go unanswered,” Graham said, adding, “I still have newsrooms that are engaged and supportive, but I feel like I get fewer responses than I did when we launched…since diversity seems to have become somewhat politicized, it has made things a lot more challenging.”

Diversity committees see mixed success.

In her trainings, Truong said she stressed that DEI work must not be the responsibility of any single person or team. She pointed to the example, common before 2020, of “a very homogenous newsroom [with] somebody who’s tokenized in some respect.” The tokenized person was often “just kind of deputized” into leading the diversity committee or project, with little consideration of whether they actually wanted to take on the job.

“That’s a huge job to put on anybody,” Truong said. “What kind of resources are you going to give that person? Does this person even want to do it?”

Over the past few years, journalists and other staffers have banded together to create diversity committees in their newsrooms. One goal of these committees was to improve elements of the workplace beyond diverse hiring.

The committees and teams have had mixed success. In 2020, when former CNN president Jeff Zucker suggested in a staff town hall meeting that the outlet appoint a reporter to cover race in America, Delano Massey, a Black editor who had recently joined the network, told him that he didn’t think that was the right approach. Instead, Massey said, CNN should form a race and equality team. Zucker agreed, and said Massey — who previously oversaw the AP’s race and ethnicity team — should be the one to lead it.

At the time, Massey was the supervising producer overseeing coverage of the Department of Justice, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Homeland Security. “I didn’t necessarily want my career to be defined as the race guy,” he said. “The fear I had was that people would put me into a box and say ‘This is all he can do.’” Still, Massey agreed to lead CNN’s team in addition to keeping his current job. (He did not get a raise.)

Massey hoped to create a blueprint for how CNN’s entire news operation could benefit from the newly created team. His goal, he said, was to produce thoughtful, substantive stories — across CNN, not just in a siloed race vertical — that showed how race and inequality were connected to other issues. He held town halls and paired beat reporters with race reporters. For one story about racial disparities during the pandemic, senior race and equality writer Nicquel Terry Ellis worked with a business reporter to explore how the lack of pharmacies on Chicago’s South Side contributed to a COVID-19 vaccine shortage.

Massey also analyzed stories CNN was already covering and identified gaps his team could fill with coverage of underrepresented groups. For instance, the network extensively covered the case of Gabby Petito, a white vlogger who went missing in 2021. But, Massey noted, plenty of Black and Indigenous women who went missing did not receive similar wall-to-wall coverage. “Eventually,” Massey said, “we were able to move the needle on that story to cover it inclusively.”

Massey left CNN for Axios in April 2022. In July 2024 — exactly four years after it launched — CNN disbanded the race and equality team and dispersed its reporters to different desks across the newsroom. (CNN said at the time that its commitment to equitable reporting was still “100% there.”)

Charlie Vargas, who is Latino, has been a features reporter at Southern California News Group (SCNG) since 2021. The company, which operates 11 local newspapers, is part of MediaNews Group, owned by Alden Global Capital.

Vargas started working for SCNG in 2021 and joined its diversity committee shortly thereafter. Recently, the committee launched a newsroom-wide mentorship program that pairs new reporters with more experienced ones to collaborate on stories. The committee also created a Slack channel to discuss DEI and other topics, including community feedback on stories.

While the committee’s roles and initiatives have changed several times due to staff turnover, Vargas said its main focus has been on interviewing job candidates through a diversity lens — asking them where they grew up, what their cultural experiences have been, and which issues could be represented better in SCNG coverage. The committee passes its feedback on to the hiring managers, who are ultimately responsible for filling the positions.

As my data suggests, it’s relatively easy for many newsrooms to diversify their lower ranks by hiring younger, less experienced employees from marginalized backgrounds into entry-level roles. But when it’s time to make budget cuts, those newer employees are often the first to go. That was the case at the Los Angeles Times last year, when 63 union members of color were laid off, and it is the case at other outlets, too. A reporter at a California public radio station told me that layoffs this year disproportionately affected people of color who had recently been hired. These people, the reporter said, were the same ones who’d been covering or pushing for more coverage of underrepresented communities.

DEI, but at what cost?

Journalism isn’t usually a lucrative career path in 2025. For journalists of color, wage disparities can exacerbate the problem.

Unions representing staffers at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Gannett (USA Today), the Los Angeles Times, and others have uncovered wage disparities between white employees and employees of color. In 2018, the L.A. Times Guild found that white men in the union were paid 30% more than women of color; two years later, the Times paid $3 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed women and journalists of color were paid less than their white male colleagues. In 2021, 14 unionized Gannett newsrooms reported a 27% median wage gap between white men and employees of color. A Washington Post Guild pay study in 2022 found that white men earned 23% more than women of color.

Pay is inextricably linked to achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism. Studies suggest that concrete initiatives like pay equity and standardizing hiring processes are some of the most effective ways to retain employees of color, while short-term efforts like implicit bias trainings can be less effective. Conversely, multiple studies over the last 35 years have shown a direct link between a journalist’s pay and job fulfillment. One study published in March found that “Black journalists who earned the highest salaries report the highest job satisfaction.”

Some journalists I spoke with said their companies have been reluctant to increase salaries, even if doing so would help retain diverse talent.

In the case of one Texas newspaper, the union’s main priority was to codify an annual raise scale for members, a former racial equity reporter, who is Latino and requested anonymity, told me.

“The reality is that the city needs talented reporters with institutional knowledge, that are bilingual, that have lived experience,” he said. “But you don’t get any of that if you treat your employees like they’re disposable. You don’t get any of that if you say you don’t actually care how much it costs to live here and that we should be lucky that you’re paying us this much.”

The union went on a month-long strike and ultimately got a contract that included slightly higher salary floors but no raise scale. The reporter — who was one of the few bilingual staffers in the newsroom — eventually left for another journalism job with better pay.

“Ultimately, racial equity is good until it’s hard for [the company],” the reporter said. “No amount of ‘reckoning,’ programs, or whatever is the corporate equivalent of the black Instagram squares would result in anything that could potentially hurt their pockets.”

The Southern California News Group’s guild secured a minimum of 6% in raises over two years for its 120 members in 2024. The guild wanted the company to offer more pay to bilingual job candidates, but that didn’t make it into the final contract, Vargas, a member of the guild’s communication committee, said. Still, he said he feels good about where the company is now compared to when he joined.

“If we’re able to give journalists of color and journalists from underrepresented communities a living wage, it’s going to reflect back to us in our journalism,” Vargas said. “It’ll circumvent turnover, and we’ll have better coverage of that area because the journalists are staying.”

Is it possible to “change the language but keep the charge”?

After 2020, newsrooms made some positive changes, noted S. Mitra Kalita, a 30-year news veteran and the co-founder of URL Media. Many of those changes, she observed — teams covering race, DEI officers and “people at the corporate level focused on DEI” — were only “short-term helpful.”

“As long as we continue to [consider] diversity as an additive, as opposed to fundamental to our newsrooms and their missions, this is not going to work,” she said.

Explicit language around DEI is going away, too. In April, Thomson Reuters renamed its “diversity and inclusion” efforts “inclusion and belonging,” citing Trump’s executive order. In May, Bloomberg renamed its DEI team the “HR Inclusion” team, and Nexstar removed references to DEI from its website.

Can the mission that many newsrooms seemed to embrace in 2020 continue if it’s called something else entirely? The people I spoke with were divided.

“Even though this moment is scary and perilous, what we teach is that it’s not the time to shrink from the responsibility we have to serve and reflect local audiences,” Poynter’s Nieves said. “We can get even clearer about our values and journalistic purpose, and our commitments to serving and reflecting our audiences. That includes in hiring, story assignments, source development, editorial decision-making and newsroom culture.”

But the idea of “changing the language but keeping the charge,” is a difficult one to accept in an industry that deals in words, MIJE’s Reynolds said. He sees “the attack on [the words] diversity, equity, inclusion as an attack on the First Amendment and freedom of speech,” and worries that journalists aren’t “comfortable” fighting for those words.

Massey, the former CNN supervising producer, stressed that just because the political climate has changed doesn’t mean that the promises newsrooms made in 2020 should.

“If we can reckon with where things were in 2020, and we know that some things are wrong, then it doesn’t automatically just revert because of what’s happening in this climate,” he said. “If we think that it is actually right to include others, if we think that we should have diverse newsrooms, or we should be more inclusive in the way that we approach coverage of communities…all of that can’t just get undone in a climate that’s hot.”

1. For 12 roles (7%), it was unclear whether the roles still existed, since not all newsrooms publish or update newsroom staff directories. I followed up with those newsrooms via email to ask and received no responses. Two roles no longer exist because the organizations shut down.