Around New England

‘Diversity Advisory Board’ To Evaluate Cape Cod Newspaper’s Coverage

August 22, 2020

The Cape Cod Times has announced plans to create a Diversity Advisory Board “to foster understanding and to evaluate and discuss our coverage” at least once a month.

The board is designed to “ensure it reflects the diversity of voices on Cape Cod,” according to an article by the newspaper’s executive editor, Anne Brennan.

The new outreach also includes hiring. Brennan wrote that the newspaper is “committed to broadening our search to be more inclusive.”

“In the past, we simply have not looked hard enough to find people of color, women, and LGBTQ applicants,” Brennan wrote.

She said the daily newspaper, which is headquartered in Hyannis, has 24 newsroom employees, and that 96 percent are white and two-thirds are male. Only one “identifies as LGBTQ,” she said. All the “newsroom leaders,” she said, are white:  five men and three women.

Gannett, which owns The Cape Cod Times (as well as USA Today), has a goal of mirroring in its staff the racial makeup of the communities its newspapers cover by 2025.


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