Susan Goldberg

We were in better shape 10 years ago than we are now. The first thing we need to do is to get people to pay attention to the numbers again. The number of women and minorities in leadership positions has taken a huge decline in recent years. I think it’s because all of these media organizations were worrying more about the survival of the business, the transition in the industry from print to digital. Everybody’s attention was shifted elsewhere. Of course, those were important things, but where we’ve ended up is not in a good place. We’ve got to pay attention again to the lack of diverse leadership in newsrooms, whether they’re print or digital. There needs to be more than one female candidate for the job. There needs to be a real deliberate effort to make a search so that there are a number of women and men to choose among when you’re looking to fill a top job. I don’t know that people are making those efforts the way that they used to. It isn’t going to happen by accident. People almost got used to this status quo, where there are so few women that every time a woman gets hired or fired, it becomes a major national news story. That kind of tells you how screwed up it is.