By David Medina

The press availability in a small conference room at the University of New Haven’s Dodds Hall gets off to an awkward start as those gathered fumble over who sits where at the conference table.

The younger Anglo-American journalists, one of them a student, ask safe, standardized questions meant to elicit safe, standardized answers for an agreeable news feature on the keynote speaker for the university’s 2017 Women’s Leadership Conference.

“How did you get your start?

“Who were the people who most influenced you in your career?”

The subject of the interview is award-winning broadcast journalist María Hinojosa, who, minutes later, addressed a group of about 300 conference participants on “Raising Our Voices, Telling Our Stories; Claiming Our Power.” A five-foot tall, self-described chaparra, wearing a spotted-leopard dress and knee-high black boots with three-inch heals, she seizes the opportunity to recount her 30-year success story.

“I started in journalism as a college student at Barnard College, working in the student radio station,” she begins. “I never thought I could be a journalist because there were no Latina journalists when I was growing up. We didn’t exist,” she continues. “A career counselor at Barnard forced me to apply for an internship at National Public Radio. I didn’t think I was good enough, but she insisted.”

Hinojosa got the internship, which later grew into a permanent correspondent’s position, making her the first Latina hired at National Public Radio. NPR, it turned out, was the first of many firsts for Ms. Hinojosa. From there, she explains, she went on to become the first Latina CNN correspondent, the first Latina correspondent at PBS, and the first Latina to anchor a FRONTLINE report, a report called “Lost in Detention” that explored abuse at immigrant detention facilities. She has also done work for CBS News, WNBC-TV in New York and WGBH in Boston.

She currently heads Futuro Media Group, a non-profit company that produces her signature Peabody Award-winning show, Latino USA, which is distributed to 200 stations nationwide by NPR. She also anchors the PBS show America by the Numbers with María Hinojosa, a unique data-driven program dedicated to continually tracking the changing cultural and political trends in the United States, particularly as they pertain to Latinos.

“Did you know, that Latina women are the demographic group that American consumer companies most want to capture?” she tells her audience later. “Studies show that they are more likely to make all the purchasing decisions in their family than any other women.”

Ms. Hinojosa’s body of work has earned her four Emmys; the 2012 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism; the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Reporting on the Disadvantaged; the Studs Terkel Community Media Award; and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club for best documentary Child Brides: Stolen Lives. She is also the author of two books, Raising Paul: Adventures Raising Myself and My Son, and Crews: Gang Members Talk with María Hinojosa.

Things get interesting when she is asked why she chose to form her own media production company after PBS canceled her program and she did not return to on air reporting.

“The buck stops with me. I wouldn’t have to pitch my story ideas to anyone else to get a yay or a nay. I wanted editorial control,” she says. Many of the stories the Futuro Media Group produces for different outlets would not have gotten on the air otherwise. “I wanted a newsroom where young people of diverse backgrounds could propose story ideas and not feel like they were the odd person out.”

Those stories include a history of the sanctuary movement in the United States; an interview with an inter-sex Latina musician; a feature on an undocumented Mexican New Yorker tattoo artist; an hour long program on the 100-year-old Fiesta de Los Vaqueros, otherwise known as the Tucson Rodeo; and stories on Latino Jews; Latino Asians; Latino Trump supporters and bodegas.

For those who haven’t guessed by now, shining a light on the ongoing racial, ethnic and cultural diversification of the United States remains central to everything that María Hinojosa is and everything her company produces. Born in Mexico City, she grew up on south side of Chicago because her father had secured a university position in the city. She lives with her husband, artist Germán Pérez, and their two children in Harlem, where her production company is located. The family also owns a hideaway cottage named Boca Chica in an undisclosed part of Connecticut.

“I am the five things that this particular U.S. president may not be all thumb-up about: I’m Mexican; I’m an immigrant; I’m a journalist; I’m a woman; and I’m flat chested,” she says.

But, above all else, Ms. Hinojosa stresses that she is a true-blue American, who meant it when she took an oath to take up arms to defend the United States at her citizenship ceremony, but who is perplexed and uncomfortable that many like her, Latinos in particular, remain a relatively invisible part of American society.

“I am a living embodiment of diversity and change in America,” she says. “It’s part of my job to say we’re here.”

By Patricia Mazzei, The Miami Herald

Staff coverage of the Panama Papers, the international investigation that exposed how crooks and millionaires use the secret world of offshore companies, and the mordant political commentary of editorial cartoonistJim Morin in a year rife with material won the Miami Herald two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday.

The 2017 prize for explanatory reporting was awarded to the Herald, its parent company McClatchy and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for their dive into a massive cache of leaked documents that revealed a financial system of tax havens preferred by tax dodgers, corrupt politicians and drug dealers whose money often wound up in Miami real estate.

The 2017 prize for editorial cartooning went to Morin, whose unmistakable quill-pen drawings and piercing captions have anchored the Herald’s editorial pages since 1978. Morin became a two-time Pulitzer winner, having previously earned the coveted prize in 1996.

“In your late career, you don’t expect this kind of thing,” Morin, 64, said before being festooned at the center of the newsroom with a champagne toast. “I just work hard at what I do, and I’m never satisfied with it. I always want to make it better.”

Monday’s prizes, journalism’s most prestigious, were the 21st and 22nd bestowed to the Herald since 1951, when the newspaper won its first Pulitzer medal for public service. The Herald has more Pulitzers to its name than any other newspaper in the Southeast.

The Herald’s last Pulitzer had come in 2009, when Patrick Farrell won for breaking news photography after calamitous flooding caused by Hurricane Ike in Haiti. The newspaper had been a finalist in various categories several times since. The last time the Herald nabbed two Pulitzers was in 1993, for its staff coverage of Hurricane Andrew and for then-columnist Liz Balmaseda.

On Monday, reporters and editors huddled in the newsroom — cell phones and cameras in hand — around Morin and Panama Papers reporter Nicholas Nehamas. A second Panama Papers reporter, South America correspondent Jim Wyss, was patched in on video via Skype from Bogota. Everyone broke into cheers after each announcement, just after 3 p.m. Then came the hugs.

“That’s two, baby!” Metro editor Jay Ducassi could be heard hollering above the din.

The Pulitzer for public service went to The New York Daily News and ProPublica, who together exposed eviction abuse by the New York Police Department. The New York Times won three awards, for breaking news photography, feature writing and international reporting. And The Washington Post took the prize in national reporting for David A. Fahrenthold’s coverage of Donald Trump’s charitable foundation.

The East Bay Times in Oakland was awarded the breaking news prize for its coverage of the Ghost Ship fire, while the Charleston (West Va.) Gazette-Mail won in investigative reporting for digging into the state’s opioid crisis.

Miami poet Campbell McGrath, a Florida International University professor, was a finalist for the Pulitzer in poetry.

The explanatory reporting prize was shared with the ICIJ and McClatchy. McClatchy’s Washington bureau and the Herald were the only U.S. newspapers to take part in the international consortium that, in an unprecedented collaboration of more than 300 news organizations, sifted through the 11.5 million records leaked from the Panama-based global law firm Mossack Fonseca. The only other Miami organization to participate was Fusion.

“I cannot say how proud I am of this newsroom, the work that you guys do day in and day out,” said Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, the Herald’s executive editor and vice president, who also sits on the Pulitzer board. “What we lack in size we make up in heart.”

The documents detailed hidden financial dealings from around the world, including from current and former heads of state and their associates. The yearlong Panama Papers investigation, whose first installments were published last April and which has already earned many awards, prompted political resignations — including from the prime minister of Iceland — lawsuits, tax investigations and regulatory reform over shadow companies and money laundering.

The reporters on the project, including several others from the Herald, used a search engine built by ICIJ developers and protected by two-factor authentication to peruse the leaked documents — and then shared their findings using a real-time chat system and encrypted email, exchanging tips and helping each other with translations.

“It brought together journalists from so many different countries, speaking so many languages, to tell a story that would’ve been impossible for a single newsroom to tell,” said Nehamas, 28, an investigative reporter.

Wyss and Nehamas, then the Herald’s real-estate reporter, found that Franklin Durán, a Key Biscayne resident busted in Argentina with a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 in cash and jailed in the U.S. for acting as an undeclared agent for the Venezuelan government, had created a shell company through Mossack Fonseca, which claimed to follow rules requiring it to know the identity of its customers.

Nehamas and Leo Sisti, an Italian investigative reporter and ICIJ member, also uncovered that Italian businessman Giuseppe Donaldo Nicosia, who allegedly masterminded a $48 million tax fraud, laundered his illegal profits using an offshore company set up by two Miami firms.

And McClatchy’s Tim Johnson traced scores of shell corporationsto a single “zombie director”: a 55-year-old Filipina named Nesita Manceau who lists her occupation as “housewife” and yet sits on the board — on paper, at least — of companies including one tied to an arms-running scandal involving North Korea and Iran.

The two Herald stories were edited by investigations editor Casey Frank.

“These days many journalists feel like we’re part of an embattled and shrinking tribe — we’ve endured layoffs, newspapers going under and a president who came into office calling us ‘the enemy of the American people,’” said Michael Hudson, the ICIJ’s senior editor. “But we’re not dead yet. The Panama Papers story was an example of journalists overcoming all kinds of challenges to expose serious wrongdoing that affects people all over the world.”

For Morin — “the dean of editorial cartooning,” Marqués Gonzalez said — his second Pulitzer came 21 years after his first, and nearly 40 years into his Herald career. He shared with other editorial board members in a 1983 prize, and was a finalist in 1977 and 1990.

Morin, whose cartoons are syndicated, honed his incisive political instinct growing up in the tumultuous 1960s. He started cartooning for the Daily Orange at Syracuse University, where he graduated with a degree in illustration and a minor in painting. He still paints oils; for several years at the Herald, he did painstaking, frame-by-frame animations of some of his editorial cartoons. Morin has racked up awards and authored six books, including, most recently, “Jim Morin’s World,”a 40-year cartoon retrospective.

Unlike other cartoonists, who have switched to drawing digitally or with felt-tip markers, Morin has remained faithful to his pencil sketches, submitting several cartoons a day touching on different themes. His pen-and-ink final drafts come in two versions: black and white (to run in print) and color (to run online).

“Jim’s recognition is well earned, well-deserved, and way overdue!” said his editor, Nancy Ancrum, the Herald’s editorial page editor. “So much has changed in the world since he won his first Pulitzer, but, oddly, much of what he deals with in his cartoons hasn’t changed at all. There will always be politicians who behave badly, boneheaded legislative proposals, victories to celebrate, challenges to confront, and tragedy — natural and man-made. He responds to them all with fearlessness when necessary, and compassion when called for.”

The Pulitzer jury considered 20 of Morin’s 2016 cartoons, most of them satirizing the wild presidential election. Among his most memorable, Morin said, was a frame from last April featuring then-candidate Ted Cruz and his chosen running mate, Carly Fiorina, in the style of the iconic Grant Wood painting “American Gothic” — but with the caption “American Toxic.”

In May, Morin produced another one of his favorites: a depiction of Trump as George Washington, chopping down cherry trees.

The caption reads: “I can tell all the lies I want because enough people don’t care about the truth….”

By Jill Geisler. CJR

CJR Editor Kyle Pope and our resident management guru Jill Geisler talk about getting beyond platitudes in discussions about newsroom diversity, career prospects for journalism graduates, and where young journalists can turn for mentorship opportunities.

Kyle: Lack of diversity in newsrooms is getting extra attention since the election, and rightly so. Most managers know to look closely at hiring, sourcing and mentorship, as well as story selection. What else can we do if we’re serious about diversifying our newsrooms?

Jill: Attention to “hiring, sourcing and mentorship” sounds good, but those are very general terms. To get serious, let’s get more specific with these questions for news leaders:

• Are you so focused on day-to-day newsroom survival that you’ve come to see diversity as a luxury, not a necessity?
• Do you hire so infrequently that you’ve given up on creating a pipeline for those rare openings?
• Do you have a clear, strong response for those (even in your own newsroom) who dismiss diversity concerns as “political correctness”? Here’s a reply you can borrow: Diversity is essential to accuracy and it is good for business.
• Does your anemic budget preclude you from bringing in job finalists to meet your newsroom and your community? How does that affect diversity, and how can you creatively address it?
• Have you taken time to read up on “unconscious bias,” how it influences even well-intentioned people who are making hiring and promotion decisions, and can shape the way you frame news stories?
• Because businesses measure what they value, is diversity a metric that matters to you, not just as a numbers game but as a standard of performance that you share alongside others?
• Is your news organization’s business strategy (target audiences, demographics, platforms) a de facto “story killer” that telegraphs to staff that certain people, places, and things aren’t important? Even when ideas seem to fall outside the targets, great editors find ways to help reporters bring those stories to life.
• Have you revisited your organization’s longstanding assumptions about what it takes for people to “pay their dues” before getting an assignment, a role, a promotion? Are those ideas still relevant?
• Are you mindful of the potential challenges faced by those who are the “only ones” on your team? Do staffers who are unlike the others (including those with religious or political viewpoints) feel comfortable talking with you about their experiences as minority voices? What do you do for them?
• Does your team have the skill and will to go beyond the surface when a story has multiple layers, one of which relates to diversity? Example: When Sean Spicer tells April Ryan to stop shaking her head during a press briefing, is your automatic reporting frame: “White House spokesman cuts off reporter” or does someone just as quickly suggest a piece on why this interaction hits a nerve with many women—especially women of color? What sources do you cultivate to ensure that you’re providing cultural and historical context, not just a “vox pop” piece that adds heat but not light?
• How do you respond when online trolls shower your employees with racist, homophobic, or sexist spittle? Do you expect them to shake it off—or do you have a personalized and systematic approach to supporting them?
• When you ask your minority staffers to serve on a diversity committee, or serve on other projects to make certain they’re diverse, or to help recruit, or to mentor other employees—whom do you think should be most grateful, them or you? What kind of weight do you give their efforts when you write their performance evaluations? When I teach in ASNE’s Emergng Leaders programs, I remind the class not to let such tasks become “invisible work.” They—and you—should recognize and reward it. Bottom of Form

Kyle: It’s job-hunting season for college graduates. Has the current political climate changed how people should be thinking about their searches?

Jill: Students who chose journalism because they love hard news are graduating at a great time. The Trump administration is providing a feast of reporting opportunities for reporters—veteran and newbie—to dig into the impact of its policies. As Trudy Lieberman reported for CJR, that’s happening very effectively on the local level, where students get their start.

If J-grads are strong in open-records searches, data journalism, and contextual reporting and they also have multi-platform skills, they’re going to have a greater chance of being hired than their feature-loving friends. There’s a hunger for investigative talent right now, so showing evidence of that as an existing or developing skill is going to give graduates an edge. They should structure their resumes accordingly.

Then, when they’re hired, they should very gently break the news to their parents: They have officially become extraordinarily low-paid enemies of the people.

Kyle: As local newspapers continue to close, it’s hurting the mentorship opportunities for young reporters. Where can they go now for the kind of advice they used to get from small-paper editors?

Jill: In recent years, small-paper editors have been so squeezed that they’ve been doing front-line work themselves, so their capacity for advice may already have been diminished. But reporters, producers, designers, and photographers need not go hungry. With a little initiative, they can reach out for advice to respected colleagues close by or potential mentors in other newsrooms.

With a modest investment, they can cash in on low-cost training. Because I teach at so many journalism events, I see how these professional organizations are striving to provide value for their members. They have to, in order to remain relevant and solvent. That’s why they’re focusing on skills training. From state broadcasters associations to The Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) to regional media groups like the Mid-America Press Institute to national stalwarts like SPJ, RTDNA, NPPA, and IRE, there’s a widespread commitment to delivering learning close to home and online, not just at national conferences.

But media organizations, take note: If you hand off responsibility for your employees’ training and coaching to nonprofit journalism groups, and if you expect your staff to learn on their own time and dime, they’re very likely to pick up valuable new skills at those events—and network for new jobs.

By Farai Chideya

There are many ways to cover politics—data, field reporting, expert analysis—but all of them require a sense of not just what to seek and include, but what to exclude. So when I was verbally sexually harassed by a Trump supporter after an interview, that didn’t make my coverage. It wasn’t germane to the story I was writing. But it did make me think, once again, how reporters’ experiences in the field are shaped by things we can’t control, like the bodies we are born into; as well as ones we can, like the expertise with which we research our topics and listen for key insights.

Being a black woman reporter who covers politics, race, and gender has made me unafraid to enter spaces where I am not particularly welcomed. I once showed up unannounced at an all-white country church to interview a pastor who had threatened to dig up the body of a mixed-race baby from their cemetery. Most of the time, things are less dramatic than that. But I’ve learned a lot from having to remain compassionate under challenge, to navigate differences big and small with an eye on being fair in my final reporting. I’d wager that all political reporters who go out into the field have to deal with their own version of these challenges, which is one reason diversity matters in political teams. Different perspectives on as massive a topic as American politics should strengthen the work of the whole newsroom.

That’s me speaking through the lens of my experience, of course. I also believe it’s important to quantify the question of who reported the 2016 election, and whether political teams’ race and gender diversity had any impact on newsrooms. As a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, I’m researching the subject by conducting interviews with reporters and experts, and using the newly released MIT Media Lab analytics tool MediaCloud, and data from the firm Media Tenor.

But the most important data point for this project—numbers from newsrooms on their 2016 political team staffing—has been the hardest to collect because very few managers or business-side staff are willing to disclose their data. One company admitted off the record that they were not responding to diversity requests, period. The Wall Street Journal provided the statement that it “declined to provide specific personnel information.” An organization sent numbers for its corporate parent company, whose size is approximately a thousand times the size of the entire news team, let alone the political team. Another news manager promised verbally to cooperate with the inquiry, but upon repeated follow up completely ghosted.

There are exceptions. Liz Spayd, the public editor of The New York Times, wrote an excellent piece noting that of the paper’s 20-plus political reporters during 2016, two were black, and none were Latino, Asian, or Native American. Susan Page of USA Today responded within minutes of my sending an initial email to say that the paper’s core political staff consisted of 10 women and eight men; and among those, two Latinos and one African-American. Their level of candor is both refreshing and rare. So far, several other news organizations have promised numbers but are still in the process of delivering.

So I’m going to put this out there for everyone to see. I’m looking for metrics on the racial and gender diversity of newsroom political teams—notes on how to share yours are below—and for us to self-report because it’s the right thing to do. We should not be ashamed by these numbers, whatever they are, but we should be deeply ashamed if we hide them.

Arguably, 2016 was the most racially contentious and gender-fraught election of the modern era. This election required extraordinary things of journalists. Sometimes we lived up to the challenge; but in many other ways, we missed the mark. When it comes to the diversity of our political reporting teams, it seems we can’t even find out what the mark is, because despite our proclaimed love affair with data, we won’t disclose our own.

We’re going through a heady and self-congratulatory period in American journalism. A tough one, yes, but a time where we are arguably needed more than ever. We are demanding transparency from the Trump Administration, other branches of government, and business entities. We are using our role as journalists to claim the moral high ground, and patting ourselves on the back for speaking truth to power.

But here’s a truth: diversity in American media has nearly flatlined for more than a decade, and there’s no reason to expect it’s any better in our political units. The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ annual diversity study in 2014 noted that “The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 and 14 percent for more than a decade.” In 2016, it rose to 17 percent, which sounds good until you realize that more than a third of Americans are Latino or non-white. Women were 38 percent of the newspaper employees in 2016… and of course women are 51 percent of the population.

My own experience

I was the only black reporter in my newsroom at FiveThirtyEight during the 2016 election cycle, and the employee who had covered the most presidential elections. I was also a non-data journalist at a data journalism site, which led to debates over how to approach stories. For example, as someone who has written three books that deal directly with race or gender, I wanted to dig more deeply into the political science behind why racial rhetoric is both toxic and persuasive sooner in the cycle.

As a newsroom veteran, I tried to deal with any tensions in a productive way; spent time mentoring other employees; and also got the benefit of learning data journalism techniques from an amazingly talented staff. Was it easy? No. Any time there are differences in skillsets and/or diversity, there is more chance of conflict, but as many business analyses show, companies with more staff diversity outperform similar but less diverse ones. And in journalism, where our life histories help inform how we get the story, we should recognize diversity helps prevent groupthink—something there was far too much of this election cycle. (FiveThirtyEight has since hired a black political reporter and a black sports writer.)

In my time as a political reporter, I have learned to deal with the indignities of being a black woman on the road. A couple election cycles ago, a man at an offsite event at a political convention repeatedly used the word “nigger”—not to describe me, of course, just those other black people he hated. As mentioned, this cycle I was verbally sexually harassed by an interview subject, an older white construction worker who then had the audacity to thank me for not chewing him out the way the ladies at work did. In other words, he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he took advantage of the fact that I was on his turf and there in a professional capacity, hardly the time and place to have an outburst. (That’s not my style anyway, but it seems to be what he requires to stop).

These are small prices to pay to get a front-row seat while history is made. I never expected being a reporter to be easy. But what breaks my heart is when fellow journalists disrespect the idea that newsrooms should be integrated, and do their best to justify de-facto newsroom segregation. When I wrote an article several years ago on newsroom diversity, a person from a major newsroom wrote in response that they had done excellent work covering Hurricane Katrina with their disproportionately white staff. What kept coming to mind as I replied to him was: Do you want me to compliment you for being able to work without diversity? That’s like saying “We run an excellent segregated school in an integrated neighborhood.” It’s not a cause for applause.

In addition, I know on background that same newsroom paid a settlement to a journalist of color who’d had run-ins with a white journalist known for conflict with a series of reporters of color. Some of journalism’s more intense racial and gender problems—not just harassment, but being passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white or male reporters—are veiled behind settlements with non-disclosure agreements. (Think of the many settlements involving Roger Ailes that predated the public knowledge of allegations of sexual harassment.) As a journalist for 25 years, I’m privy to some of this insider knowledge, but the nature of the settlements make them hard to document publicly. Settlements with women and journalists of color are not just evidence of discord within America’s newsrooms, but also offer a secondary business case for diverse staffing and better management to avoid costly payments.

Judging from the spate of articles about the lack of diversity in President Trump’s cabinet, journalists know that there’s merit in reporting on race and gender metrics… except when they’re our own. Only doing the research will provide us with a sense of how this impacts newsrooms. But I suspect in the long run, in a world where audiences can cherry pick what they find relevant, less diverse newsrooms are likely to miss key stories, or join in late. That can’t be good for the bottom line. No matter what the numbers tell us, shouldn’t we want to know? And it’s better for us to learn sooner than later. If newsrooms want to be more diverse by 2020, it’s time to plan ahead and see about casting a wider net for talent, or giving new opportunities to those already in the newsroom.

If we journalists can’t turn as unsparing a gaze on ourselves as we do on others, it speaks poorly for us and the credibility of our profession. If the press lauds itself for demanding transparency from government but cannot achieve transparency in its newsrooms, that is cowardice. If we say we can cover all of America with representatives of only a few types of communities, we may win battles but lose the war to keep news relevant to a broad segment of Americans. This is as strong a business argument as a moral argument.

When it comes to race and gender, I have some means of getting rough data without newsrooms’ participation. My tireless research assistant and I are literally going through rosters of reporters and editors and coding them by race and gender. This has the potential to be incomplete, and the process is, frankly, comical. For example, we use membership in ethnic news organizations like NABJ and AAJA to help us categorize the race of reporters of color. But there is no affirmative categorization for whiteness, just the absence of other markers. Thus, most of the people in our rosters are now coded WX—meaning: White… eXcept how do we know for sure? To be rigorous—to move them from WX to a firm W—we need to literally call every person coded WX and ask: “Are you white?”

Doing this kind of work is tedious, and being stonewalled is humiliating. It’s not my fantasy to spend time harassing news organizations who pride themselves on fostering information transparency to be forthcoming about their diversity numbers. But someone needs to do it, and I’m in a position to give it a good hard try. If I can’t get it done, even with the imprimatur of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center behind me, it speaks to a deep and shameful resistance within our news culture to holding ourselves accountable.

This is our chance to do one small good thing for journalism, to stand up and truly be accountable. So let’s do this. Lay your metrics on the table, American journalism. We can congratulate ourselves afterward on having been brave about it.