Education Gender News Race

For 40 years, training next-gen journos

By Suriah Joseph

Student journalist Michelle Yang was looking for free journalism programs ”that had a diversity of participants” and would help her build upon skills she’s gained during two years of working on her high school newspaper. The New York University Urban Journalism Workshop, which selected her for its 2024 summer cohort, provided what she needed.

Like Yang, Lia Wong-Ferreia also was selected in 2024 for the more than 40-year-old New York Urban Journalism Workshop. “I always enjoyed writing. [This program] is perfect. This is everything I wanna do,” said Wong-Ferreia, an aspiring journalist.

Launched to help more aspiring journalists, the program has selected participants who reflect the faces of the U.S. public. That diversity does not always exist in professional newsrooms.

When it came to six areas of diversity, 12,000 journalists answering a Pew Research survey, released in 2022, said their newsrooms did least well regarding racial diversity. Their newsrooms did best with diversity in gender, then, in descending order, age, sexual orientation, political ideology and socioeconomic status. Regarding race, 32% of those surveyed said their newsrooms had diversity, 52% said their newsrooms did not have diversity and 13% said they were not sure. Regarding gender diversity, the same numbers were 67%, 19% and 11%. 

Imani Johnson, 26, a freelance documentary producer and former assistant producer in local television, said being a workshop participant helped her believe she could find a place in a wide field of storytelling that she, even as a girl, saw was not diverse enough.“Being a part of this program made me see that, ‘Oh, we really are a part of this industry … We are here,’” said Johnson, whose credits include Netflix’s “High on the Hog” and “Taste the Nation.” For the last four years, she has been an assistant instructor for the workshop.

NYU journalism professor Jason Samuels  NYU said he decided to become the workshop’s executive director several years ago because newsrooms lack diversity, which helps ensure that stories from a variety of communities get told. He wanted to help change that. . 

“I saw the need,” said Samuels, senior executive producer and a consultant at BET News/Paramount. “ … I see a lot of young students of color who may be interested in journalism but, maybe, in their high school, there might not be a newspaper, there may not be an emphasis on journalism as a career.” 

Participants said the workshop, with instructional directors Katti Gray and Ty Milburn, gave them the support, lessons, 10 days of on-campus living and journalism experience they were looking for. “I really liked the mission of the program, in terms of highlighting historically underrepresented backgrounds and individuals in journalism,” said Isabella Cabral, also one of the workshop’s 2024 participants. “You can clearly see that [not enough] people of color are becoming journalists.”