My friend Dori Maynard passed away last week. She was just 56 when she succumbed to lung cancer.
If you don’t know Dori Maynard, she had the pedigree and the legacy to fight the good fight for diversity. Her father was the late Robert Maynard, the noted African-American reporter for the Washington Post, who later went on to become the editor and co-publisher of the Oakland Tribune.
It was a natural that Dori would become a reporter, working her way up from Bakersfield, California, to Quincy, Massachusetts, and then on to the Detroit Free Press.
It’s a similar path for a lot of minority journalists. Like a baseball career, you take a shot and hope to go from the minors to the bigs.
My path in TV and radio news took me from Houston to Boston to St. Louis to San Francisco to Reno. Then Dallas, San Francisco, Washington, then back to San Francisco. There was a lot of discouragement along the way. But I didn’t give up. But maybe I should have from the start. My first real job in broadcasting was a part-time six-hour-a-week shift at $3/hour, playing records and reading news wire.
Oh, and did I mention? I never encountered more than a handful of journalists of color along the way. Black, Latino, Asian, Vulcan. Very few.
What’s alarming is we’re talking journalism. The Fourth Estate, essentially, a public trust. How could there be so few journalists of color?
