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Home » Features » NSJC symposium on sports diversity Sept. 14

A symposium this month at IU’s National Sports Journalism Center will feature top media pros and academics discussing the issue of diversity in America’s sports news departments and its impact on coverage.

NSJC Director Tim Franklin will moderate the symposium, “From the Press Box to the Locker Room: The Diversity Divide,” at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Informatics & Communications Technology Complex, 535 W. Michigan St., Indianapolis, on the IUPUI campus. The event is free and open to the public and will be recorded for broadcast on the Big Ten Network.

Franklin cited a 2008 report on diversity in sports as the spark for this symposium, the second the NSJC has hosted since it launched in January. The 2008 report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida showed that only 6 percent of the nation’s top print and online sports editors are minorities, and only 13 percent of sports reporters are people of color, even though the athletes they cover in several sports are overwhelmingly minorities.

The report also found that women make up only about 11 percent of print and online sports news departments. And, there has been virtually no change in the number of minorities and women in sports departments in recent years.

Panelists will examine this issue as it relates to sports newsrooms and the impact it has on what sports news consumers see, read and hear.

The panelists are:

Smith	Rhoden	Huckshorn	Howard	Lapchick

• Stephen A. Smith, a long-time television analyst for ESPN-TV and ESPN Radio and columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, now is a contributor to MSNBC. He’s the former host of ESPN TV’s talk show, "Quite Frankly."


• William C. Rhoden, a sports columnist for The New York Times, author and regular guest on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters, is author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves.


• Kristin Huckshorn, the senior news editor for ESPN in New York, is a founding member of the Association for Women in Sports Media and has won the organization’s Pioneer Award. Before joining ESPN in 2007, Huckshorn was the deputy sports editor of The New York Times for five years.


• Garry D. Howard, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors, the nation’s largest professional sports media organization, is the sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He has been a senior sports editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The St. Petersburg Times.


• Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, is a researcher on the subject of hiring practices of women and people of color in sports news organizations.

In March, the center conducted a discussion on the future of sports media that included ABC/ESPN basketball analyst Steve Lavin, ESPN SportsCenter anchor Sage Steele, ESPN.com senior national columnist Gene Wojciechowski and Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Kravitz.

The National Sports Journalism Center, which opened in January, offers undergraduate sports journalism courses on the IUPUI and Bloomington campuses, internship opportunities for students and a speaker series. The center also is the national headquarters of the Associated Press Sports Editors.

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