Call to action

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 1995 by Charles F. Whitaker, Tony Silber

I'M PLEASED to complete your survey even though our record of hiring minorities isn't impressive. However, I haven't hired anyone for eight years (extraordinary staff longevity in this business), so I won't claim to be embarrassed about it. I suspect that the industry is pretty monochromatic, but since I'm basing that assumption on nothing more than my own haphazard observations, I would be interested in the responses you receive.

JOHN K. MANOS, EDITOR IN CHIEF, CONSUMERS DIGEST

For years, estimates of the number of minority staffers working in the magazine industry have been based on little more than the empirical observations of people with a vested interest in initiating such a head count--which generally has meant people of color concerned that so few of their colleagues were also people of color. Although many magazine publishers and editors have expressed embarrassment about what everyone admits is a dismal record of hiring and retaining minorities, efforts to prod the industry into undertaking a baseline survey that would establish some employment benchmarks and help in the development of hiring goals have been soundly rebuffed.

When speaking on the record, industry executives base their reluctance to support or participate in such research on the proprietary nature of the information. "We're talking largely about privately held companies," says Vaughn P. Benjamin, director of the Workforce Diversity Council of the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA). "There is a strong belief that releasing information about employee numbers could provide an advantage to competitors."

Adds MPA president Donald Kummerfeld, publishers have dismissed data-gathering on minority hiring practices as a "statistical game of who is doing better or worse."

But the fact is, more than 70 percent of the magazines we polled had no minority employees at all. This included the bulk of the 32 regionals surveyed, many of the enthusiast and shelter publications, and three New York City-based magazines, each with a circulation of more than one million.

Our polling method was simple--and random. Focusing solely on consumer magazine editors, my research associate and I dispatched surveys to 625 publications. There were 211 responses, for a response rate of 34 percent, and they encompassed a broad range of magazines, from publications with more than eight million readers and 53 editorial employees to small operations catering to fewer than 20,000 readers. In the survey, each respondent was asked to identify the demographics of his or her staff, a process that produced data on 1,169 people.

Although only 3 percent of the editors who responded to the survey work for publications directed at minority audiences, their staffs accounted for about 19 percent of the 1,169 staff members covered by the study. Furthermore, of the 28 minority editors and managing editors identified in the survey, 20 (or 71 percent) work at minority publications.

Again, the 211 responses we tallied confirm what a glance at most magazine offices will tell you: The minority presence in the industry is indeed small. About 12.6 percent of the 1,169 employees in our pool of respondents are of Asian, African-American, Native-American or Hispanic descent. But on a positive note, we found several happy surprises in the numbers and in the anecdotal information collected in follow-up interviews. It turns out that the nineties may very well be a watershed period for American magazines in terms of staff diversity; in fact, the call to action on this front is perhaps louder these days than at any other time in industry history. And it's not just minority employees who are joining the crusade.

"I think we're seeing greater recognition in the industry that we haven't done well in terms of recruiting and retaining minorities, and that perhaps we need to cast our recruiting nets wider," says Marion Beale, director of financial planning for The New York Times Sports/Leisure Magazines and chair of the Trumbull, Connecticut-based company's diversity steering committee. "This has been a very incestuous business. We've tended to just hire ourselves over and over again."