Journalists must learn there’s no one Hispanic community

Two years ago, when I became chair of Florida International University’s Department of Journalism and Broadcasting, we inaugurated an aggressive media outreach program to let news organizations in on a well-kept secret: We have a solid journalism program.

Six of our graduates have won eight Pulitzer Prizes — and 69% of our students are Hispanic.

According to a recent Knight report, about one in four newsrooms are all-white. So the second point about our student enrollment is a fairly tantalizing hook to recruiters, editors and broadcast producers seeking to diversify their staff.

Our journalism department has had a longtime relationship with The Miami Herald. Approximately 35 of our graduates and interns — the majority Hispanic — currently working at the paper.

But editors and producers of news organizations all across the Southeast are awakening to their emerging Hispanic communities and the need to reflect them. Our Hispanic journalism students are now a coveted commodity and can be found in virtually every major newspaper around Florida — The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post, The Naples Daily News, The Ft. Myers News-Press, The Orlando Sentinel, as well as the two local papers, The Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

This is, of course, a positive development for our students and the media. Yet, as many editors are discovering, there is more to diversification than merely employing an intern or young reporter with a Hispanic last name. Now that Hispanic journalism students are breaking the culture barrier, the next big challenge on the editors’ to-do list is to know how to make use of their new Hispanic journalists.

And that means they will need to better understand the demographics of their emerging Hispanic community. Which really means they will need to understand what it means to be Hispanic. Which, finally, means they will need to understand that that is not a single-answer question.

This whole process may leave some editors perplexed because a Mexican-American living in Texas may have next to nothing in common with a Cubano or Colombian in Miami. Hispanics are not one group of people. And it’s going to take some time and sensitivity to really develop awareness to the shifts in our population and to figure out how to cover emerging communities accurately. The point is, this is a process, and the good news is, this process seems to have finally begun.