Black City. White Paper.
Editor’s Note
The following account of The Inquirer’s history, failed attempts at newsroom integration, and current efforts at internal reckoning is based on more than 75 interviews with current and former staff members, historians, and Philadelphians. Inquirer editors were uninvolved with the production of this piece, which was written by Wesley Lowery, an independent reporter. Lowery's reporting was edited by Errin Haines, a Philadelphia-based journalist, and member of the board of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which currently owns the paper.
Cassie Haynes started the morning of June 2, 2020, as she does most mornings, with a copy of her hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. What she read that day horrified and enraged her.
For weeks, Black people in Philadelphia and across the country had protested amid dual pandemics. They had been traumatized and enraged by cell phone video showing a Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life as his windpipe was crushed beneath the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis. And the millions who poured into the streets did so despite a global public health crisis that was disproportionately ravaging Black communities.
That Tuesday morning, The Inquirer published on Page A12 a column by the newspaper’s Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic beneath the three-word headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”
A More Perfect Union is a special project from The Inquirer examining the roots of systemic racism through institutions founded in Philadelphia. Read the series →
Two years earlier, Haynes, who is Black, cofounded Resolve Philly, a group that works with media outlets across the city to create community and solutions-oriented journalism. The Inquirer is one of their partners. Yet, here was the newspaper likening the value of her life to that of a few storefront windows. Her cofounder happened to have a meeting that morning with The Inquirer’s executive editor, Stan Wischnowski. Haynes said to tell him she was canceling her subscription.
Still upset a day later, Haynes sent a tweet chiding the paper for its insensitivity: “This headline from @PhillyInquirer is why Black people find it difficult, AT BEST, to trust the news. Do better. DO BETTER.”
By this point, there had been little reaction inside or outside of the newsroom to the headline. But now the reckoning came quickly and lingered. Within days, Wischnowski resigned. Nearly two years later, the fallout continues.
At the core of the racial reckoning that began in the summer of 2020 was an interrogation of the country’s deeply unequal institutions — from policing to housing to religion to journalism — many of which trace their roots to Philadelphia. To be the birthplace of American democracy is, after all, to also be the birthplace of American inequality. And so, last year, The Inquirer announced a project aimed at exploring the unfulfilled promise of American democracy as told through the histories and legacies of those institutions as the foundation for a new way forward.
That probe must begin with an examination of The Inquirer itself, one of the oldest continually operating news outlets in the country.
The years since Floyd’s death have forced the newspaper to face the reality that it, much like the democracy born in this city, has failed to fulfill the ideals of its founding. Rather than being an “inquirer for all,” as its motto proudly claims, the paper has for the whole of its history been written largely for and by white Philadelphians, and largely at the expense of the Black residents who currently constitute a plurality of the city.
The paper, of course, is not alone in its history. Its story is that of the modern American newspaper: The last half-century began with begrudging efforts at racial integration of both staff and coverage sparked by public pressure and protests; the decades to follow saw expanded efforts to recruit minority journalists before the industry cratered and many of those non-white journalists were the first to be shown the door.
This report focuses primarily on the culture inside the paper itself, while future installments will explore how The Inquirer's coverage has helped maintain discriminatory status quos within the city’s other institutions.
Today, in response to a new civil rights movement, The Inquirer’s leadership has made a bold new pledge: to be an anti-racist institution.
But whether — and how — a newspaper that, for generations, has remained complicit in systemic inequality can now be a collaborator in its defeat remains significantly less clear. What is apparent is that it will be impossible for the paper to navigate the challenges of the present, much less chart a path into the future, without first understanding its past.
An Inquirer for some
The Inquirer, like most surviving American newspapers, was not at its inception intended for or created by Black people.
The paper was first published on June 1, 1829, by John R. Walker and John Norvell, whose quote hangs today on the wall of the newsroom: “In a free state, there should always be an inquirer asking on behalf of the people.”
As an institution founded pre-Emancipation — even in a Northern city buzzing with abolitionism and home to a number of free Black people — The Inquirer was a white newspaper, serving what was then a white city.
The turn of the last century would see Philadelphia transformed into the Blackest big city in America outside of the South. In 1890, the city was less than 4% Black; by 1930, Black residents made up 11% of residents.
It was in this context that The Inquirer’s modern history began with its 1936 purchase by Moses Annenberg, a William Randolph Hearst protégé whose family would ride the 20th-century mass media boom to the upper echelons of American aristocracy. With his takeover of the paper, Annenberg vowed to “uphold the principles of our American democracy and reflect the diversity of the growing city.” He added a slogan to the front page: “An independent newspaper for all of the people.”
Despite its new motto, the paper, like all of the city’s white-owned papers, continued to largely ignore the daily life of Black Philadelphia. When the local NAACP chapter put out a list of demands in 1944, the first item addressed media bias, calling for Black residents to receive both positive and negative media coverage the way other racial groups did.
Mentions of Black Philadelphia appeared in the white papers primarily through the lens of crime. To read The Inquirer then would leave one wondering if Black people ever were born, ever died, if they lived lives in between — or if they simply sprouted, fully grown, in the city streets to call for civil rights, seek elected office, and commit various criminal infractions.
During this era, finding Inquirer coverage for Black readers by Black writers required patience. The first Black journalist to have his work appear in the newspaper, Joseph V. Baker, would get there via the Tribune, the city’s Black newspaper, where he was an editor. At The Inquirer, he authored a Black news column that ran from the 1930s through the early 1950s.
Then, in 1954, the paper took its first step toward truly desegregating its full-time newsroom staff when Robert “Bob” A. Thomas became the paper’s first Black full-time staff reporter. In the years that followed, integration moved at a halting pace, with few non-white journalists charged with the monumental assignment of producing news that truly represented an increasingly diverse Philadelphia. That only began to change on a significant scale when the civil rights movement and the urban riots of the 1950s and 1960s created a crisis that required newspapers of record to cover parts of their cities they had long ignored — and to hire people whose lived experience could help them gain entry into those communities.
The decades to follow would see the industry’s early attempts at the integration of historically white newsrooms, which were often openly hostile to the barrier breakers.
By 1964, Thomas had grown so frustrated by his work trajectory and lack of Black colleagues that he left journalism for the foreign service.
“It really got to the point that I hated to be referred to as the first and only Black reporter for The Inquirer,” he once said.
The paper’s second Black reporter, William R. "Bill" Thompson, hired in 1960, filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint that forced the paper to hire more Black reporters. Acel Moore, another early Black staffer who would later go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and help lead the paper’s diversity efforts, taught himself to write and report by retrieving early drafts of white reporters’ articles from the newsroom trash can so that he could see what changes had been made during the edits. Early in his tenure, he had to take an Inquirer editor outside and explain that he would not be responding to "boy."
Reporter Maida Odom arrived at the paper in 1978 after stints at two Ohio newspapers. Soon after her hire, Odom pitched a story on Marian Anderson, in town for a performance. “Marian Anderson,” she wrote in her lede, which she still recalls from memory. “To many, even her name rings resonant.”
But when she saw the newspaper the following morning, the piece had an editor’s byline on it instead of hers. When she demanded to know how this had happened, Odom was told the copy desk assumed her editor had rewritten the piece.
Years later, Odom complained to her editor after the business desk poached one of her scoops. He replied by describing her outrage as “Aunt Jemima goes to war.”
More than 65 years after Thomas joined The Inquirer staff and 15 years after Odom left, Black Philadelphians remain underrepresented both on its staff and within its daily news report. Just as troubling, the professionals who inherited that movement toward a newsroom for all continue to cite a persistent white sensibility and lens that governs what coverage exists of Black people.
On the day George Floyd died, The Inquirer employed just a single Black male on its news desk, although Philadelphia is 40% Black. An audit conducted in 2020 found that 74% of newsroom staff identified as white, less than 12% identified as Black, and that three out of every five people quoted in articles were white.
“The audit found what you already knew…,” said Irv Randolph, a Philadelphia native who has spent 27 years as managing editor of the Tribune and nearly four decades as a local journalist. “[The Inquirer] had, mainly, white people writing about white people. … The everyday, average African American man or woman who goes to work every day? Are their issues being covered? They’re not. Not by the mainstream press.”
Efforts at diversity, but often not inclusion
The frustrations of Black staffers persisted even during the storied era of the 1970s and 1980s, when, under the editorship of Gene Roberts, The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzers in 18 years. Roberts, now 89, noted in an interview that he inherited a paper with almost no Black staff, and worked with Moore to set up the recruitment programs that led to many of the paper’s early Black hires.
“If you’re going to cover society as a whole, you have to be representative of society as a whole,” Roberts said. “At the time we thought we were doing as much as we could.”
But while Roberts and the other white men who ran the paper may have thought they were doing as much as they could to diversify the newsroom and its coverage, interviews with former Inquirer staffers from this era revealed clear differences in how they describe their experiences at the paper.
White staffers described an ambitious and ascendent paper where they believed, if they worked hard enough, they could land any job in the room. Many Black staffers — even those who cherished their time at the paper — recalled a newsroom where few people who looked like them covered major beats, where their opportunities for advancement seemed limited, and where no one seemed especially invested in their success.
If this was the golden age of newspapers, Black reporters and editors weren’t receiving their cut of the bounty.
Take Cynthia Tucker, hired as a reporter in 1980 and sent to work in a suburban bureau. She dreamed of becoming an international correspondent. When she shared that dream with her bosses, they dismissed her ambition.
“And that was probably right, that I wasn’t ready to be a foreign correspondent, but they didn’t give me any sense that they thought I was going anywhere. To City Hall, or to the Washington bureau, or anywhere,” she said.
Within two years, Tucker quit to travel in Africa and freelance. Upon her return to the states, she took a job as a columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she eventually became the editorial page editor, won one Pulitzer Prize, and was twice a finalist.
“If I had thought that The Inquirer was taking the aspirations of any Black reporter seriously, I might have stayed,” Tucker said. “It didn’t seem like there was a future there for you.”
Within a decade of Tucker’s departure, some in the newsroom recognized a need to improve its recruitment and diversity efforts. Arlene Morgan, the first female editor on The Inquirer’s city desk, took on the work in the late 1980s. Under Morgan, who is white, the paper developed a five-year staff diversity plan and held extensive internal forums and workshops aimed at strengthening the paper’s coverage.
“I worked my ass off for 15 years to make that paper diverse and reflective of who lived in the community … so when somebody says ‘oh The Inquirer was always racist,’ no it wasn’t,” Morgan said.
Tanya Barrientos was one of the reporters recruited as a young Latina in that era. She spent 20 years at the paper, working her way from suburban reporter to national correspondent, to editor, and then to a columnist gig.
"These numbers sound pathetic now, but they were significant — there were maybe three Latinos and maybe four African American people who were hired all at the same time," she recalled. "That sounds paltry. But just think, this was like the mid-1980s. It was significant."
That’s not to say this wave of hiring soothed racial tensions internally. In 1990, Black staffers protested their own paper after an editorial writer published a piece suggesting that “underclass” Black women be incentivized to take birth control so they would stop reproducing. Barrientos recalls pitching her editor a story about the 1995 death of Mexican American musical superstar Selena, only to be told by her white female editor that she had never heard of Selena and that it wasn’t an Inquirer story.
“For as much attention as I thought we were trying to pay to diversity and race, I think we did a terrible job in a systematic way of listening to the African American people on our staff,” said Max King, a white man who spent more than 20 years at the paper and was its top editor from 1990 to 1998.
“It was a part of a larger trend in American journalism that covered race when something dramatic happened, but didn’t cover race in terms of the everyday lives, day in and day out, of the people living in the African American community,” King continued.
The gains in newsroom diversity in the 1990s were real, but they would be short-lived due to decades of cutbacks that followed as the newspaper struggled through corporate restructurings and a succession of local owners.
“We really had a strategic plan and tried to institutionalize the understanding of why diversity was important,” Morgan said. “Then the money issues really started drying things up, and it fell apart.”
As the internet decimated revenues and prompted staff cuts in the first two decades of the 2000s, journalists of color found themselves especially vulnerable. Per the terms of the union contract, the most recently hired staff members, which included most of the non-white newsroom employees, were the first to lose jobs. (Neither past union officials from the time nor the union's current president could be reached for comment prior to publication.) On a single day in 2007, the paper laid off roughly 17% of the newsroom staff. About 20 of those who departed were journalists of color.
“It really crushed us all,” recalled Vernon Clark, a Black journalist who left the paper in 2015 after 29 years. “We had been fighting from the very beginning, part of the job is to help bring in others. And for it to all be dismantled in one day?…That was a serious blow.”
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As had been the case during previous attempts to stem the bleeding in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the newspaper in the years to come would prioritize chasing white suburban readers, who they hoped would buoy the paper’s foundering financial fortunes.
“The Inquirer had a long history where they would go into the suburbs, then there would be budget freeze at Knight Ridder and they would pull out of the suburbs, and then two or three years later they would go back to the suburbs,” recalled Walker Lundy, who became the paper’s top editor in late 2001 and hired dozens of new suburban reporters the following year, nearly of third of whom were journalists of color.
Lundy, a white man, resigned two years into his tenure after confronting the possibility of eliminating 50 newsroom positions and realizing that would mean letting go of many of the people he had just hired. “I think you would find that…tension in every big city newsroom in the country,” he said. “The challenge was, the Inquirer had to look at the region, it wasn’t a city newspaper, it was a regional newspaper.”
Not only did that strategy fail, but it contributed to a simmering newsroom discontent that sat for decades ready to explode.
A city battered, and then, a newsroom
On the morning of May 31, 2020, Inga Saffron made a 15-minute walk from her home in Center City. The scene outside shocked her. The night before, she’d spent hours monitoring social media updates from the protests and rioting that had broken out across the city. Now, in the light of day, she surveyed the destruction.
Many liberal pundits online had advised against decrying the property damage. Broken windows, after all, are not broken bones. But Saffron, The Inquirer’s architecture critic, worried the destruction would aid President Donald Trump in the way the urban riots of the 1960s had helped Richard Nixon.
“That kind of damage was going to have terrible political consequences,” she said in an interview. “I wanted to examine it.”
The anger was justified, she conceded, but the property damage would disproportionately harm poor people of color.
“Racism is built on strong foundations,” she wrote in the piece. “The momentary satisfaction of destroying a few buildings does nothing to remove those structures,” Saffron concluded. “All it does is weaken our city.”
A veteran copy editor, a white man, found himself puzzled as he prepared the column for the print edition.
“Honestly, I thought: Do we really want to be saying this now?” he would recall.
It had been a busy news day. Trump had ordered the forceful removal of peaceful protesters who had gathered in front of the White House so he could walk across the lawn to a nearby photo opportunity. In Philadelphia, police had tear-gassed hundreds of demonstrators as they marched down I-676. The property damage decried by Saffron was now several news cycles in the past.
Reading and rereading the column, the copy editor struggled to capture its argument in the sliver of space allotted for the headline. With his final 9 p.m. deadline fast approaching, he typed the words “Buildings Matter, Too.”
“I was thinking of Black Lives Matter the same way I would have thought of Students for a Democratic Society — as a political force,” explained the copy editor, who agreed to an interview under the condition his name be withheld.
“It never occurred to me that people would read it as comparing the importance of buildings to the importance of human lives,” he said. “Because I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of the human lives of Black Lives Matter. I was thinking about Black Lives Matter as a social movement.”
A reckoning arrives anew in Philadelphia
Few people, even among The Inquirer staff, had seen the headline prior to Haynes’ tweet. But now it was circulating, and anger began building.
As it turned out, an all-staff Zoom meeting was already scheduled for noon on June 3. Between raging protests and the ongoing pandemic, the newsroom had plenty to discuss.
A photo editor, Rachel Molenda, was the first to speak up.
“I felt like, how dare we do this to our own people,” she recalled. “This isn’t how we should be talking to our community. We’re in a Black city. The Black community across the country is reeling. Read the room, folks.”
Next to speak was Anna Orso, a young reporter who said a mistake like this was an affront to Black staff members who labor to build inroads with Black Philadelphia. A headline like this, she said, threatened decades of their labor.
Across the call, eyebrows began to raise — especially among black staffers. Both of the speakers who had so forcefully addressed the newsroom leadership were white. Wischnowski offered an apology. Then, the editor who ran The Inquirer’s combined design and copy editing desk attempted to take responsibility.
Finally, the copy editor himself spoke up. “Look, I wrote the headline,” he told his colleagues. “I’m really sorry that I let everybody down.”
The levees had broken. The headline monopolized the entirety of the two-hour call even as the conversation was about much more. At least two people called for consequences for the employee who wrote the headline, and several questioned the point of publishing the column at all during such a sensitive moment.
“It was just one of those moments where ‘I’m sorry’ just wasn’t going to get it done,” said Michael Days, who at the time ran the paper’s diversity and inclusion efforts. “I said, ‘Look, we need to apologize, explain how it happened, and just fall on the sword.’”
The protests underscored how poorly equipped the paper was to cover Philadelphia. The lack of diversity in the newsroom had forced newsroom leaders to summon the news desk’s sole Black reporter back from vacation to help. Even as police were at times brutalizing demonstrators who were themselves protesting police brutality, some staffers felt the tone of the paper’s early coverage was too deferential to the police narratives of what was playing out in the streets.
All of this could have been prevented, journalist after journalist exclaimed, if newsroom leaders over the years had just listened.
They talked about diversity proposals rejected by management and frustration over pay inequity. Newer staffers who’d been recruited to a paper that promised it was charging toward a diverse digital audience told of seeing their work altered, time and again, to better cater to the presumed white, suburban Inquirer reader.
“Now do you believe us?” a young Black woman who had been with the paper for about seven years asked Wischnowski, according to several people on the call. “After hearing all of the pain that you’ve caused, that we’ve been telling you about, now do you believe us? We’ve been telling you for years … and now everyone knows.”
A ‘knee-jerk reaction’ to longstanding issues
Following the disastrous all-staff call, The Inquirer's top editors sent an email acknowledging the need to be more sensitive to the demands being shouldered specifically by their minority journalists. Both the editor who oversaw the print desk and the author of the headline offered their resignations, but Wischnowski declined to accept them.
Meanwhile, the newsroom’s journalists of color were determined to not let the moment pass. They began organizing collective action in a Slack channel. Together, they drafted a letter to the publisher and top editors, signed by more than three dozen Inquirer journalists announcing they’d be calling in “sick and tired” the following day.
“We’re tired of working for months and years to gain the trust of our communities — communities that have long had good reason to not trust our profession — only to see that trust eroded in an instant,” the letter read. “If we are to walk into a better world, we need to do it with our chests forward — acknowledge and accept where we make mistakes, and show how we learn from them. Your embarrassment is not worth more than our humanity.”
By Thursday morning, June 4, 2020, Wischnowski, who had worked at the paper for 20 years, including a decade as its top editor, was telling colleagues he expected to lose his job.
The perception across the newsroom was that Wischnowski had failed to loop Inquirer publisher Lisa Hughes into the acrimony, sealing his fate.
At 6:04 p.m. on Saturday, two days after the virtual sick-out, Hughes announced Wischnowski’s resignation. She declined to discuss the specifics of Wischnowski’s departure.
Wischnowski, now the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, did not respond to requests for comment. He was the only living former top editor at The Inquirer who did not participate in this report.
Several longtime staffers made a point to defend Wischnowski — noting his longtime service to the paper and that he had been uninvolved in writing the headline itself — and that his resignation did not have the unanimous support of the room, even among those pressing for more racial equity.
“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” said reporter Mensah Dean, who is Black. “Everyone got real, real woke, real fast.”
But critics also cite Wischnowski’s long tenure: The discontent at The Inquirer ran much deeper than a single headline and that discontent had been, for years, Wischnowski’s responsibility to remedy.
“Stan took these issues very seriously and what he was able to accomplish through this turnstile of ownership was highly impressive,” said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication and immediate past board chairman of the Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit that currently owns The Inquirer.
“That said, it became clear to me that the issues were more serious and more volatile and more urgent than that era of leadership perhaps recognized,” he added. “And I personally felt like frankly, there was a ticking time bomb under the desk of the new publisher when she walked in.”
Generational rift exacerbates tensions, complicates path ahead
What was to come at The Inquirer was among a wave of so-called reckonings across the media landscape. But the organization’s response stands out as perhaps the most sweeping and sustained efforts undertaken by any news organization in the years since George Floyd’s death.
The paper declared itself “anti-racist” and launched involved internal efforts to probe the paper’s policies and practices. After years of battling the union, The Inquirer commissioned a pay study that resulted in raises for 60 newsroom staff members found to be undercompensated. The paper has prioritized hiring journalists of color: according to the current leadership, 54% of new newsroom positions in 2021 (both hires and promotions) went to journalists of color, bringing the total percentage of journalists of color in the newsroom up to 31% (from 26% previously).
Last summer, Inquirer leaders recruited Rich Jones, a Black former staffer, to run the paper’s Editorial Board, and in November 2020, named Gabriel Escobar, a longtime Inquirer journalist who was serving as Wischnowski’s second in command, as his permanent replacement. He is the first Latino journalist at the top of the masthead. (To date, a Black journalist has never run the paper.)
“There is a very different leadership group today than a few years ago,” said Patrick Kerkstra, a white managing editor who, until January, was the newsroom’s second in command. He said he understands why some staff members remain hesitant to praise the internal efforts, why they might question if such attempts are more show than substance, and acknowledged that many of those running the paper — himself included — were part of Wischnowski’s leadership team. “The only thing that will address it will be results over time.”
Yet it’s difficult to assess changes without first examining a rift that quickly arose among the journalists of color whose activism prompted this reckoning. Across age groups, they largely supported the aggressive integrations of staff and coverage but disagreed on the best means to that end.
In one camp were the survivors: Veteran Black staffers who withstood decades of upheaval that decimated their ranks and continue to see their presence within the institution as an act of activism toward the unfinished work of integration. On the other side stood a multiracial coalition of young disruptors who draw a very different lesson from failures to integrate.
Where their elders saw scarcity of progress, these younger racial minorities saw abundance of opportunity. If their institution and industry were going to finally address racial inequity, why ask for a handful of jobs or diversity trainings? Why not demand more? Why integrate, person-by-person, a white room still driven by white sensibility? Why not just build a new room? Their elders fought their way into the building; they’d rather raze it, especially if that empowers them to shape their careers rather than suffer them.
“A lot of times the Old Guard can be more pragmatic and more reformist…and more enduring...It’s hard for you to lead when you’re that complacent,” said Ernest Owens, a self-described member of the young disruptors and editor at large at Philadelphia Magazine, who has spoken extensively with and advocated for journalists on both sides of this divide in his role as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. “A lot of those younger staff members are really invested in institutional changes…they want to work in better newsrooms.”
The tension first boiled over on a Zoom call held soon after Wischnowski’s resignation. The journalists of color had gathered to discuss next steps. Soon the conversation turned to Michael Days, a living legend in Philadelphia journalism and former editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia Daily News. He was then the highest-ranking Black man in The Inquirer newsroom, overseeing its diversity and inclusion efforts.
No one on the call advocated that the group seek Days’ ouster, but some of the younger staffers expressed frustration with what they saw as his previous failures to address complaints they’d brought to him in the past. “There was a sense that I wasn’t strong enough,” Days said, noting that some of the criticism of his style may have been fair.
But for some of the older Black journalists on the call, the discussion of Days seemed symptomatic of a larger issue. This reckoning, after all, was coming after the death of George Floyd, a Black man. Now it seemed to them that the moment was being co-opted as an excuse to criticize a Black man who was their friend and mentor.
And so seven newsroom employees, calling themselves the Veteran Black Journalists, sent a letter to Hughes and the paper’s top editors. Their demands were almost identical to those of the broader Journalists of Color group. But their top priority, number one on their list of demands, was protection for Days.
The two groups clashed as the organization moved forward in its efforts to address the racial inequities they all saw. Nearly two years later, members of both groups conceded the conflict impeded their newsroom activism efforts. Ultimately, Days took a buyout and left the paper, a decision he said was entirely his own.
“If I had to do it again,” Days said. “I would have worked harder, to try to figure out how to bring them together.”
The cautious, rocky road to change
The Inquirer has moved forward with its self-examination, led in part by Jameel Rush, a Black Philadelphia native who grew up seeing his parents read The Inquirer and came on as Days’ replacement in December of 2020.
“It’s a 190-year-old institution,” he said. “To fix damage or harm that’s been done over that long of a period of time does not happen overnight.”
Rush said that, as of the beginning of this year, seven of the nine desks in the newsroom had an editor of color, and that the Inquirer was aiming for its newsroom to be 35% minority journalists by the end of 2022.
The newsroom set up a series of committees, charged with reviewing its editorial policies and stated values around issues including objectivity and fairness. The Inquirer changed its policy to be more selective about publishing mug shots and crime briefs. Desk editors were asked to facilitate staff discussions about topics such as the ways that racial or socioeconomic bias can show up in the paper’s coverage. Often uncomfortable, the conversations were nevertheless remembered by many staffers as productive.
“We had never talked about these issues so openly, so authentically. So it forced really hard conversations and for people to really understand their role in the systemic racism of the paper,” said Cathy Rubin, a white editor who has worked at the paper since 2006.
“Before the last two years I would have been thinking of diversity solely in representation — Is everybody in the story white? Are all of our pictures white? — I wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about the framework,” Rubin said.
The paper created and distributed an anti-racism workflow guide, which asks reporters and editors to consider whose perspectives and experiences are being centered in a given story and whether or not they’ve fully considered how their own personal experiences or bias may have impacted their framing. And the staff launched a new Slack channel in which reporters and editors can seek pre- and post-publication feedback on coverage of sensitive issues, such as stories that touch on race, gender, and sexuality.
“Newsrooms have always operated with best practices … this is an evolution of those principles and best practices,” Escobar, the paper’s top editor, said. “It may require more thinking on the part of editors and reporters, but again, if it’s all in the service of producing better journalism, why would we not do it?”
The paper also settled on a new set of racial equity commitments, vowing to affirmatively oppose systematic racism, avoid extractive journalism and place current events in historical context that doesn’t erase generations of inequality. (“Our journalism is for and with the communities we cover, not merely about them,” reads one of the new value statements.) The Inquirer has declared that it must reflect the demographic diversity of the region it covers; and that the unique and diverse life experiences of its reporters are an asset, not a liability, to the paper’s credibility.
What comes next remains to be seen. While those inside the paper have been engaged in a robust self-examination, many in Black Philadelphia remain skeptical that these new policies and declarations of values will translate into substantive action. This is not the first time, they accurately note, that The Inquirer has declared itself a paper for all.
The Rev. Mark Tyler, senior pastor at Philadelphia's Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, said the paper has taken "baby steps," but that he thinks true change may require a "complete teardown and rebuild" of the institution. He said the paper's daily coverage is still soaked in white sensibility — from the obituary pages to coverage of culture to the way the paper handles gun violence — and that it is clear that there remain few Black people in major decision making roles within the news coverage.
Tyler said it is clear the paper wants to be better, even as it continues to fall short. But asked if the paper had taken necessary steps to hear from the city's Black communities, his answer was direct: no.
"When you talk to regular Black Philadelphians, if you ask them 'Does The Inquirer speak for you? Does it speak for your community?' Most Black Philadelphians will say no." Tyler said. "I don't know if The Inquirer is capable of the change that is needed, just like I don't know that America is capable of the change that is needed. But I desperately hope that it is…The Inquirer is still the paper of record in Philadelphia. What it prints matters."
Inside the paper, there is significant fatigue, not among the handful who believe the reckoning has gone too far, but for those doing the work. Two years of institutional examination has amounted, for many, to a second job requiring thoughtful work at a time when they are still grappling with both a global pandemic and the act of police violence that sparked this movement in the first place.
"People in their efforts to make change have not been able to process their grief and trauma," said Danese Kenon, who runs the photo and video desk as one of the paper’s highest-ranking Black women. "Who has had time to cry for George Floyd? You just keep moving."
And as the work continues, the paper must confront challenges of increasing depth and complexity.
"The longer we work on this...the harder the work gets," said Jonathan Lai, an Asian American reporter and editor who was one of the driving forces among the internal Journalists of Color group.
The key, Lai and others say, is the difficult, sustained work of not only addressing problems like pay inequity or a lack of staff diversity but fully undoing the internal culture and systems that created those problems in the first place. Otherwise, much like the gains of the 1960s and the 1990s, today’s progress will be lost amid changing leadership and economic realities.
And even if The Inquirer succeeds at constructing new, equitable systems, even if mainstream American journalism finds a way to become, for the first time in its history, an oppositional and not complicit force in American inequality, there is no guarantee either will ever earn the trust of the Black Americans it has failed to serve.
“It's easy for people at the top of this company to focus on the progress we've made and not focus on the road ahead. And it's easy for those of us who are very frustrated to focus on the road ahead and not on the progress we’ve made,” said Lai. “We've made real progress, we really have … And we have a long way to go.”
Correction
A previous version of this article misstated the terms under which Walker Lundy resigned.
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Acknowledgement
A More Perfect Union is produced with support from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Peter and Judy Leone, and Surdna Foundation. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.
Staff Contributors
- Contributing Writer: Wesley Lowery
- Contributing Editor: Errin Haines
- Deputy Editor: Ariella Cohen
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