Coming soon to this spot will be an overview of and excerpts from a major interview and research project P+P and additional staff completed recently on U.S. newsroom diversity and the news agenda. Our staff talked to editors at more than 300 newspapers that failed for whatever reason to complete the American Society of Newspaper Editor’s (ASNE) annual survey on diversity. ASNE has long furnished relevant statistics. Our interest was in talking to editors about the subject and seeing what they had to say. We wanted to know why they didn’t respond to the survey and what they thought about the topic of the survey in general. We were interested in the answers but we were just as interested in simply expanding the conversation on the relationship between the news we read and the people who are writing it and how editors think diversity fits in to that equation. We also hoped that our research staff of predominantly journalists-in-training would benefit from pursuing the topic as well, pressing people on an issue that still today can be tense, a source of apprehension tied to lack of communication and misunderstanding as well as resistance to change and occasionally ill will.

Come back soon.