USA Today’s editorial staff is now made up primarily of women, the paper announced this week.
According to a recent internal survey, 51.7% of the paper’s reporters are women, and the percentage of Black employees has also increased to 13.6%, Hispanic employees to 10.1% and Asian American employees to 7%. Overall, reporters of color make up 34% of the newsroom, USA Today’s editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll wrote on Wednesday.
“It is a proud moment to see the progress we have made to reach this milestone in recruiting and retaining women, particularly women of color,” Carroll wrote.
Holly Moore, director of planning for the USA Today Network, said the designation was important because “the news industry records history, and for the longest time, that history has been written from the male perspective.”
The newspaper was founded in 1982, when women made up just over 30 percent of journalists working in the United States.
When USA Today first recorded staff gender, women made up 27.6 percent of staff, but by 2001 that figure had only risen slightly to 29 percent.
“About a third of newsroom professionals have always been women, and I recall our newsroom being roughly the same as the newspaper industry,” the paper quoted former editor-in-chief Wanda Lloyd, who worked there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as saying. “I was proud to have worked in a newsroom where every section was led by women, and in the early days, women sometimes held top positions on the news, life, international, USA Weekend, cover stories and editorial pages.”
Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, president of parent company Gannett and publisher of USA Today, published an op-ed Wednesday separate from Carroll’s report, pledging to strengthen the media company’s commitment to inclusive and diverse newsrooms that are representative of all demographics across the country.
“To be sure, this work must continue and move forward. The most recent U.S. Census numbers, released after conducting an internal review, highlight the growing diversity of our country,” Perez Wadsworth wrote. “We are committed to reaching our 2025 goal as part of our mission to expose injustice in all its forms and accurately reflect the concerns, issues and lived experiences of the people we serve.”