Times Corps | The New York Times Company

The New York Times selects students for an elite internship and mentoring program. A student local to where I live was selected – which is great.

I went through their online list and cross referenced to LinkedIn, personal websites, prior articles about them, and created this classification based on the U.S. government’s methods of classification.

Racial / Ethnic classification

• BIPOC – 7
• Hispanic/Latin – 6
• White 5
• Unknown 1

Sex

• 12 are female
• 6 are male
• 1 is unknown

Sex and Race/Ethnicity

• Female Black or BIPOC – 5
• Female Hispanic/Latin – 4
• Male white 3
• Female White – 2
• Male Hispanic/Latin – 2
• Female Asian – 1
• Male Black (mixed) – 1
• Unknown 1

One of the interns is from Brazil. I used the government’s unusual ranking of a person from Brazil as “hispanic/Latin” American. Brazil’s primary language is Portuguese, not Spanish. While a Latin language, the population is not “hispanic”.

The distribution of selectees by sex and race/ethnicity does not mirror the US population. However, this could be because those who choose to study journalism no longer represent the distribution of the US population. Currently, women studying journalism outnumber men about 2:1. Many will enter journalism from other fields, such as English Literature, Creative Writing, Political Science and so forth, which are also biased towards women.

“The New York Times Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.“

Or may be not: The Lost Generation | Compact. That article says since 2020, the hiring of white males is nearly forbidden in media organizations with media outlets publishing that the majority of new hires are women and persons of color. Just 10% of interns are white males, that article says. The media is becoming overwhelmingly (like almost entirely) female, persons of color, or gay – a reversal of the decade before when the media was mostly white and male.

Also said to be issues in the academic world too:

The white men who do get hired are often older and more established—or foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white men don’t seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested, is they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS) classify foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a white European on a work visa doesn’t register as “white” in diversity metrics. Among new PhDs with definite academic employment plans, white temporary-visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens or permanent residents to secure tenure-track positions (61.0 percent versus 33.1 percent in 2023).

It’s even more bizarre – this applies to all foreign-born temporary workers on H-1B, L-1, OPT and other visas: “Diversity hiring” gives incentives to hire those with an international background – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking