New APSE president Michael Anastasi isn’t worried about why sports editing jobs are so rarely filled by minorities and women.
Instead, the Managing Editor at the Salt Lake Tribune has decided to address the issue by introducing APSE’s Diversity Fellowship Program, a nine-month course designed to groom mid-career professionals for future management opportunities.
“In a way, I think we’ve been looking at the problem from the wrong direction,” Anastasi said, following the program’s unveiling at the 2011 APSE Conference in Boston in June. “A better way of looking at it than saying, ‘Why are there so few?’ is saying ‘What can we do to create more?’”
The seed for the program was planted long ago, when the then 21-year-old started making hires as young sports editor at a daily newspaper in Northern California.
“It became important to me as a young editor when I started hiring all these young people that were diverse. I realized the way I was going about it wasn’t reflective of the business model at all…” Anastasi said. “I’ve been increasingly active in supporting it, and I just said that’s what I want to do as (APSE) president.”
Some have wondered why a leader in an industry that faces larger issues such as declining readership and ad revenue would put his time and energy into improving the composition of the country’s sports departments.
“As I started thinking about it, I realized it’s fallen by the wayside as we entered survival mode,” Anastasi said. “But I don’t think it’s any less important and I don’t think it’s something that you can’t think about simultaneously…Just because we’re saying this is going to be important to us, doesn’t mean other things are not important.”
The nine-month course will take enrollees to IUPUI School of Journalism, to judging meetings in February and to the 2012 APSE Conference in Chicago, which will be held in conjunction with the Association for Women in Sports Media annual conference.
APSE plans to begin accepting applications for the program in August. A maximum of four participants will be enrolled in the first-ever class, which will be identified by mid-September, Anastasi said.
Neither the participant nor his or her employer assumes any cost for the program. APSE, along with partners at the Sporting News and IUPUI, and hopefully others, will pick up the estimated $1,000 tab per student.
“The thing I want to emphasize is that anyone can apply for this,” Anastasi said. “It doesn’t cost any money, and you’re going to get a lot out of it. If training opportunities by definition are going to be limited, here’s a way to provide someone with high potential some key training opportunities.”
To that end, APSE has reached out to professional associations representing women, black and Hispanic journalists and plans to do more before the application period opens.
“Our newsrooms will not succeed in the long run unless they reflect the communities we purport to cover,” APSE’s new president said during his incoming speech in Boston. “No more than wishing our jobs were as simple as they were 10 years ago will make it so.”
