Media Briefing: Efforts to diversify workforces stall for some publishers

• Condé Nast layoffs, Q&A with Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships, The Onion’s failed bid to buy Infowars and more.

A third of the nine publishers that released workforce demographic reports in the past year haven’t moved the needle on the overall diversity of their companies, according to the annual reports that are tracked by Digiday.

Condé Nast, Gannett and The Washington Post’s overall staff were more diverse this year compared to the previous year. Business Insider, The Los Angeles Times and NPR were less diverse year over year. And the diversity of Hearst, The New York Times and Vox Media stayed the same.

That’s compared to last year’s analysis, in which almost all of the 10 media companies tracked improved their overall workforce diversity year over year — other than one company whose diversity stayed the same and one whose worsened.

“Any improvement in DEI figures is welcome,” Richard Prince, a columnist at Journal-isms.com who covers diversity in the media, said in an email. “It’s hoped that media companies will not only stand up to the anti-DEI pressure in-house, but bring to the table more who can reach diverse audiences.”

An FT Strategies survey of over 450 news and media employees released this year found that while over half of respondents said they had diversity goals at their companies, it was ranked last out of a list of commercial priorities, and many said they did not have the resources to improve diversity.

Publishers aren’t alone in their challenges with diversity, equity and inclusion progress. Some brands have reversed course on their DEI commitments. A number of DEI executives have left their roles due to burnout, lack of agency or being let go because of budget cuts. And media agencies have had to evolve their strategies around DEI programs.

Overall changes in diversity

Here are the changes in overall diversity at the nine publishers that released their employee demographic data this year:

• Condé Nast’s workforce was 61% white in 2023, down 1 percentage point from 2022.
• Gannett’s employees were 63% white as of January 2024, down 8 percentage points from 71% in 2023.
• The Washington Post was 52% white in June 2024, down 2 percentage points from 2023.
• Business Insider was 65% white in March 2024, up 4 percentage points from 2023.
• At the L.A. Times, 49% of the overall workforce was white in December 2023, up from 42% in 2022, according to internal data shared with Digiday.
• NPR was 57% white in November 2024, up 1 percentage point from 2023.
• Hearst’s overall workforce was 70% white in 2023, the same share compared to 2022.
• The proportion of white employees at The New York Times’ also stayed the same, at 60% in 2023.
• Vox Media was 61% white in June 2024, same as in 2023.

BuzzFeed has not released its annual report yet. Its last workforce diversity report was published in November 2023. A spokesperson did not respond to a question about when the next report will be published by the time of publication. The L.A. Times shared internal demographic data with Digiday in December 2023 but has not published a full report since 2022.

Business Insider’s report noted that the large shifts in its year-over-year workforce diversity is a reflection of its staff changes: “Between March 15, 2020 and March 15, 2024 … Business Insider reduced hiring and experienced layoffs. Changes in employee population can have a more pronounced effect on year-over-year demographic data, as smaller workforces are more sensitive to fluctuations in averages and demographic representation,” its report reads.

When asked about the large year-over-year shift in the demographics of Gannett’s employees, a company spokesperson told Digiday in June that this was partly due to a change in the way the data is being published. The company now publishes its company demographics annually in January, when previously it did so twice a year. (Condé Nast’s and Hearst’s next reports won’t come out until sometime in first quarter of 2025.)

Editorial

Editorial departments continued to see progress in their diverse representation this year. Nearly all of the companies in this analysis improved the diversity of their newsrooms.

• Condé Nast’s editorial division was 62% white, down 1 percentage point from 2022.
• The L.A. Times’ newsroom was 50% white in 2023, according to the company spokesperson — down 1 percentage point from 2022.
• NPR’s “audience facing journalists” (including reporters, hosts and correspondents) were 62% white, down from 66% in 2023.
• Vox Media was 62% white, down 1 percentage point in 2023.
• The Washington Post was 61% white, down 2 percentage points from 2023.
• Business Insider was 68% white, up 6 percentage points from 2023.
• The New York Times’ news and opinion departments remained 66% white, the same as last year.

Leadership

Three of the eight publishers that shared data on the demographics of their company managers had improved the diverse representation in those roles, while another three companies had a slightly larger share of white people in those roles year over year.

• Senior leadership at Condé Nast was 75% white, down 3 percentage points from the year prior.
• At Gannett, leadership was 80% white, also down 3 percentage points.
• Vox Media was 57% white, down 4 percentage points.
• Business Insider was 73% white, up 3 percentage points.
• At The New York Times, leadership was 68% white, up 1 percentage point.
• The Washington Post was 64% white, up 1 percentage point.
• Hearst leadership — defined as managers and above — remained the same at 77% white (that number hasn’t moved in three years).
• NPR was 61% — the same as last year.

New hires

People of color represented a larger percentage of new hires in the past year at about half of the media companies that reported this data, based on how new hires self-identified.

• Half of the new hires at Condé Nast self-identified as white, 1 percentage point up from the previous year.
• At Hearst, 59% of new hires self-identified as white, the same as in 2022.
• At Gannett, 33.9% of hires were people of color, up 3%, according to the company.
• At Vox Media, 42% of new hires in 2023 self-identified as people of color, up from 39% in 2023.
• At The New York Times, 55% of new hires were white (down from 53% in 2022) and 42% self-identified as people of color (down from 44%).

Business Insider’s report noted that it had 58 new hires in the U.S. in the past year, and this “small sample size means we can not present new hire analysis as we have in previous years without placing individual privacy at risk. Business Insider also experienced a slowdown in hiring and a decrease in employee count from 792 to 601 as of the time of this report. These are all factors that impact the data.”

Gender

Gender diversity at the media companies’ overall employee base decreased at four media companies year over year, the first time Digiday has tracked a downward trend in this category since it began analyzing these reports in 2020.

• Business Insider was 59% female, down 1 percentage point.
• The share of women at Condé Nast was 66%, down 1 percentage point.
• Gannett was 45% female, also down by 1 percentage point.
• The Washington Post was 46% female, down 1 percentage point.
• NPR was 56% female, up 1 percentage point.
• Vox Media was 61% female, up 1 percentage point.
• In 2023, the share of female employees stayed the same at Hearst (48%) and The New York Times (55%) compared to 2022.

What we’ve heard

“In 2025 we have to figure out sustainable economics for the open web. … The open web doesn’t work on short term, multi-million dollar deals. … That gives us a window to figure out what the economics [are] but there is no sustainable economic model for the open web yet in an AI world. In the next couple years, we all have to go figure that out.”

— An anonymous digital media publishing exec on evaluating deals from AI tech companies

Back in October 2023, Digiday reported on Forbes testing a new generative AI search tool called Adelaide. The publisher was applying the user experience of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT to the search function on its own website to see if it improved audience engagement. (Since then, a number of publishers have tested and updated their on-site search functions.)

Forbes has found that it does improve engagement, according to Vadim Supitskiy, the company’s chief digital and information officer. Audience members who used Adelaide had a 20% increase in time spent on the page compared to those using Forbes’ regular search function, he said. Engagement also was up by four times compared to regular search, he added – meaning more people were either asking a follow-up question in the search function or clicking through to more content on the page when using Adelaide.

“That’s very encouraging. That’s what we’re looking for: improved engagement,” Supitskiy said. Adelaide tests showed “people want information to be provided to them in the format that they can consume easily. But then it doesn’t mean that they will leave quicker. Actually, it means most of the time they will find the right information, but then dive deeper into engaging with it more to look for more details around the topic,” Supitskiy said.

As a result, Forbes is working on rolling out other AI-powered features on its site, such as adding article summaries and highlighting key sentences in articles.

Forbes first tested Adelaide with a randomized 5% of its audience and with a model trained on 12 months of the publisher’s archives. Supitskiy said his team got feedback internally and externally, from features such as a thumbs down/thumbs up options to rate the quality of the generated answers, that helped inform page layout and the number of related articles that surface.

Adelaide is launching to all site visitors this week, now that the tool is trained on Forbes’ entire archive. Supitskiy said millions of people have used Adelaide, without sharing a specific number of users.

“2024 has been the year where we tested a lot. And now we are ready to roll out some of these products,” Supitskiy said.

Numbers to know

22: The number of Conde Nast employees getting let go (including a number of C-suite and other managers), according to the company’s union.

$701 million: The amount the owner and publisher of the New York Sun is reportedly offering to buy the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph (with possible help from sports team owner Todd Boehly).

11: The number of years Matea Gold has worked at The Washington Post (where she was reportedly a candidate for the top editor role), which she left to become senior editor at The New York Times.

What we’ve covered

Google’s decision on third-party cookies hasn’t changed publishers’ own plans

• Google’s decision over the summer to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser has not changed publishers’ plans to move away from tracking consumers using third-party cookies.
• 80% of publishers surveyed by Digiday+ Research said their companies are more likely to continue with plans to find alternatives to third-party cookies.

Read more from the Digiday+ Research survey here.

Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships on what the AI tech company wants to offer next year

• Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s new head of publisher partnerships, spoke to Digiday about the five-month-old program, what it offers and what’s in store for the AI tech company next year.
• Perplexity added more than a dozen new media companies to its publisher program, including Blavity, Gear Patrol, The Independent, Lee Enterprises, Los Angeles Times and MediaLab.

Read the Q&A with Chan here.

What we’re reading

Judge rejects The Onion’s bid to buy Infowars

A bankruptcy judge has rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ right-wing conspiracy website Infowars, NBC News reported. The judge ruled that the auction process was unfair.

The Hill braces for layoffs

The Hill’s newsroom is bracing for layoffs, after a letter from The Hill’s union announced that owner Nexstar plans to cut up to 17 jobs from its ranks, The Independent reported.

Boston Globe Media could buy Boston magazine

The Boston Globe’s parent company is exploring a possible acquisition of Boston magazine, according to Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation blog. Boston Globe Media also owns health and medicine news site Stat News.

Politico, Gannett, Nexstar are being sued for sharing consumer data

Separate but nearly identical lawsuits brought against Politico, Gannett and Nexstar claim the three media companies shared consumers’ IP addresses, device data and personal information with third parties without proper consent, Bloomberg Law reported.

Future signs content licensing agreement with OpenAI

Future, the owner of publications like TechRadar and Marie Claire, signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI, joining a number of other publishers that have announced similar deals giving them access to the AI tech company’s tools and giving ChatGPT users access to their content, The Verge reported.