A diverse newsroom is a better newsroom, I wrote not long ago in this space.

Despite my best intentions, as a white man, I am often blind to the experiences of my neighbors of color, to the experiences of the women around me. Because of those blind spots, I am more prone to make mistakes, to inadvertently paint an inaccurate or at least incomplete picture for my readers, to not ask a question I ought to ask.

That is less likely to happen if I work with women and people of color who can challenge my assumptions and point out angles and directions I might not have considered.

Gannett, my alma mater and the publisher of USA Today, apparently recognizes the value of diversity, too.

Last week, the company pledged to, no later than 2025, make all Gannett newsrooms and leadership as diverse as the communities its papers serve (see USA Today’s story on the initiative here: https://tinyurl.com/y27yw97m).

Since Gannett was bought by GateHouse Media last year, the company now owns 260 daily publications across the U.S., including heavy hitters like the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Des Moines Register, and the Arizona Republic, making it one of the biggest media companies on the planet.

Gannett says people of color make up 22% of its entire workforce and 18% of its news division, compared to 28% of the nation.

In Michigan, the Detroit Free Press’ newsroom is 70% white and its leadership is 68% white, USA Today reported, while the Free Press’ coverage area is 66% white (Detroit proper is only about 16% white). The Lansing State Journal’s newsroom is 80% white and its leadership is 100% white, while its community is 77% white.

Stats on other, smaller Gannett Michigan properties, such as Battle Creek, Port Huron, Petoskey, and Cheboygan, were not available.

I applaud Gannett for its initiative, which has the potential to produce better newspapers, better journalism, and better service to Gannett’s communities — if it’s done right.

See, the cynic in me — as a survivor of 12 years of layoffs, furloughs, and other cuts across the company — says Gannett may try to meet its self-imposed quota simply by making sure most of the people axed in its next rounds of layoffs are white, thereby boosting the percentage of reporters who are not white.

Newsrooms already are short-staffed and overstretched, so supplanting — instead of supplementing — reporters to make the quota won’t help anything.

To its credit, Gannett says “it’s adding or reassigning journalists to 60 newly created beats in a concerted effort to enhance coverage of topics such as criminal justice, educational inequity, the roots of racism, environmental justice, fairness in housing and employment, and LGBTQ issues.”

But therein lies another rub.

You can’t just hire a Black reporter to cover “Black issues” and say you’re committed to diversity. We need Black city hall reporters and American Indian statehouse reporters and Asian criminal justice reporters. And we need white reporters who work on all those beats to be aware of the issues people of color face and how those issues intersect with their subjects. And all those reporters need to talk to each other, sharing ideas and challenging assumptions.

In short, diversity must be ingrained throughout a news organization’s culture if it truly wants to tell the stories of people of color, which simply means telling the story of their community in a better way.

Otherwise, “these programs aren’t enough,” as Kathy Lu, a former Kansas City Star editor and minority journalism program graduate, wrote recently in Poynter.

“Essays have been written, programs created, committees formed, but there is always a dam in the flow” of efforts trying to make for more diverse newsrooms, Lu wrote. “Or not enough strength in the current.”

(Read Lu’s full essay here: https://tinyurl.com/y4hpazgm).

Finally, there’s one type of diversity Gannett didn’t talk about.

There’s been a lot of talk of late about the need for ideological diversity at the New York Times, but that’s bunk. Outside of opinion sections, ideology shouldn’t mean anything at a newspaper dedicated to unbiased truth-telling.

However, there is something to be said about geographic diversity. I think a big part of national papers’ weakness comes from writers who have been trapped too long in coastal bubbles in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, and more writing about the heartland needs to come from the heartland.

In local newsrooms, people who grew up in the region they’re writing about and know the values and traditions of the place need to mix with out-of-towners who can challenge the value of those traditions and question the status-quo.

Despite my concerns, it’s exciting to see the sixth-largest media company in the world make that kind of commitment to diversity. This is a big, beautiful country full of many talented people, and all those folks ought to get the chance to tell the American story.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.