By Dan Dixman
Reno Gazette-Journal

A lot has been made in recent months of the number of African-American coaches in college football and how the low numbers don’t accurately reflect the racial make-up of the teams they coach.

But what about the people whose job it is to uncover such detail?

Greg Lee, an assistant sports editor with the Boston Globe who is also the head of a sports task force of the National Association of Black Journalists, said the number of African Americans who cover college football for newspapers and other media is akin to that of the coaching profession.

A study recently by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review determined that blacks account for 60.4 percent of Division I men’s basketball players and 22.9 percent of its head coaches. In Division I football (FBS and FCS

combined), blacks make up 45.9 percent of the players and 5.8 percent of the coaches. There are only four black football coaches in FBS — Turner Gill at Buffalo, DeWayne Walker at New Mexico State, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Randy Shannon at Miami (Fla.).

Getting an accurate number of black sportswriters who cover college football is difficult because some sportswriters are beat writers, some are columnists and others have different primary beats but also cover college football to some degree. Lee provided a list of 23 black sportswriters nationwide who cover college sports and said the total number is probably no more than 30.

There are more than 300 daily newspapers in the United States.

Of the primary newspapers that cover the nine Western Athletic Conference schools, only one, the Fresno Bee, has an African-American as the main beat writer for football.

“I think the percentage (of black sportswriters who cover college football) is pretty low,” said Lee, also the NABJ treasurer. “When it comes to college beats, I’m not surprised by the low number.”

Paul Mitchell, the recruitment and retention coordinator at the University of Nevada’s Reynolds School of Journalism, supported Lee’s position.

“There are 319 Division I programs,” said Mitchell, who teaches a sports-writing class and has covered Philadelphia’s major sports teams for the Philadelphia Tribune and Asbury (N.J.) Park Press. “When you look at that, and you look at the number of daily newspapers, by comparison I think the percentage is pretty low. The number is not surprising to me.”

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Reno Gazette-Journal May 17, 2009.

By David Ubben

Last year, Ivan Orozco told the story of a San Diego-area soccer player whose mother had been deported to Mexico, tearing apart his family in an all-too-common scenario within his California community. But after the San Diego Union-Tribune’s most recent round of layoffs—which included Orozco—stories like that might not be told so often.

“Those stories are everywhere, but they just won’t get told to some writers,” said Orozco, who covered high school sports, soccer and boxing for the Union-Tribune. “A lot of the people in this community just won’t relate to you if you’re not Latino.”

For a community whose population is more than a quarter Latino, that could be a problem for newspapers already trying to survive unstable times.

Orozco felt that some sports the Latino population embraced, namely boxing and soccer, don’t get the play the community demands. But Union-Tribune sports editor Chuck Scott says on nights the Southern California freeways will be jammed with fans trying to get a glimpse of the Mexican national team, the paper will provide extensive attention in advance of the event, and significant coverage in the following morning’s paper.

“It troubles me when you lose people who represent diverse categories of people,” Scott said. But we’ve lost a boatload of people of all ages, races and ethnicities.”

The issue of losing writers who reflect diverse readerships is not unique to San Diego. Terrance Harris covered Texas A&M football for the Houston Chronicle before he was laid off on March 24. That round of layoffs eliminated the jobs of six black employees.

“We disproportionately took a hit,” Harris said.

Chronicle sports editor Carlton Thompson does not agree. He called reflecting his community a “priority” and pointed out that while others lost their jobs, the Chronicle still employs a black columnist and sports editor, along with several female and Latino writers.

The budget strains haven’t been limited to newspapers. Justice Hill, formerly an editor for MLB.com, lost his job after a round of layoffs in Dec. 2008. Hill also helped recruit interns for the Web site and said it’s important for minorities to be integral parts of the continuing growth online.

“The Internet world seems dominated by white males,” Hill said. “If they don’t bring in minority voices, pretty soon it’s going to look like newspapers did 25 years ago.”

Hill worries that his concerns sound more like complaints that lack solutions. In today’s market, both inside and outside the world of journalism, his ideas, by his own admission, simply aren’ t feasible.

“Newspapers are just handcuffed in trying to fix these things,” Hill said. “There’s no solution, in this economy, that pleases everybody.”

No immediate solutions, that is. But that’s not to say an answer won’t arrive.

“Any young writer I see, I tell them, ‘Don’t aspire to be writers or copy editors,’” Orozco said. “Be the people who make those decisions, and help solve these problems.”