We are proud to publish California Times’ third annual Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) report. The data in this report shows the progress we’ve made toward the action plan we established in 2020 to increase our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

This progress includes improvement not only in our representation of the communities we serve but also in cultivating a sense of authenticity, inclusion and belonging among our staff. We understand this is an ongoing journey and comes with knowing we must adapt to the evolving workforce landscape. As we move forward, we are dedicated to consistently taking steps towards our DEI commitments.

Action Plan

As part of our commitment to improving diversity, equity and inclusion, along with a sense of belonging among all employees, we have focused our efforts on these areas: Recruitment and Hiring, Learning and Development, Performance Development and Promotion, Fostering a Fair and Inclusive Culture, News Coverage, and Diverse and Inclusive Leadership.

This report contains updates on the continuing progress made across these areas throughout 2022.

Recruitment and Hiring

We continue to enhance the practices that ensure diversity is considered in our hiring process across all areas of our business. Enhancements to our Human Resources Information System (HRIS), yielded an increase in the number of new hires that identify as women, moving from 57% in the previous year to 60%.

We are confident that our continued commitment and efforts to attract and hire increasingly diverse cohorts will positively impact the diversity of our overall workforce over time.

In the Los Angeles Times newsroom, all journalists, including members of our Black, Latino and Asian American Pacific Islander Caucuses, are informed about the creation of all new editorial jobs and recruiting efforts. The Assistant Managing Editor and Deputy Editor for Culture and Talent also engaged with the three affinity caucuses to discuss openings and promotion opportunities.

The Los Angeles Times Fellowship program, our diversity training program for early-career journalists, was highly successful in 2022. More than half of the fellows who participated in the program have landed full-time, paid positions in our newsroom and elsewhere, demonstrating the continued effectiveness of this program in nurturing and developing talent.

Our internship programs continue to see significant participation from students from diverse backgrounds. We also increased the cohort size of the internship program to provide more training opportunities for emerging journalists which included the creation of a spring program for local students.

Both the internship and fellowship programs continue to be vital pipelines to develop, mentor and empower talented and diverse early-career journalists. These programs provide invaluable opportunities for up-and-coming journalists to gain hands-on experience, career coaching and skill development. The interns and fellows also bring new ideas and varied perspectives to our coverage as we continue fostering a more representative workforce.

We have continued pursuing our goal of achieving a newsroom where Latinos make up at least one quarter of the staff, to bring Latino representation in our newsroom closer to that of the community. For 2022, 19.1% of non-management staff in the newsroom reported having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, which is up from 16% in 2021. As we pursue this goal, we remain committed to maintaining and improving representation of all other minority groups among the staff.

The company continues to partner with the L.A. Times Guild, the union representing editorial employees, to define the roles in our newsroom to fully encompass the skills and responsibilities of modern journalists. This follows efforts made in 2022 to revamp our newsroom job descriptions to ensure the language is inclusive. These efforts underscore our commitment to creating a more diverse newsroom and promoting fairness and objectivity in our hiring practices.

White and People of Color Comparison

People of Color - Ethnicity Breakdown

Learning and Development

Our training initiatives and opportunities are designed to provide employees with the necessary skills, knowledge and resources to create an inclusive and supportive environment. Through these initiatives, leaders are empowered to build teams where all individuals, regardless of their backgrounds or lived experiences, feel heard, valued and included.

The Assistant Managing Editor for Culture and Talent has built out and launched training offerings for Times newsroom staff. The learning workshops focused on building skills, such as trauma informed interviewing, reporting on crime with more nuance and covering mass shootings. Some virtual sessions brought various communities’ groups into our newsroom to foster dialogue, story ideas and diverse sources.

The Culture and Talent team launched its pipeline program for internal employees to share their ambitions for professional growth and receive tailored training and development opportunities to help them advance. As a result, several journalists were promoted to higher positions, obtained beat changes and received ambitious assignments.

In the first half of 2022, we introduced Management Fundamentals training for all newly promoted or hired managers across the organization. Additionally, we made executive coaching support available to leaders at various levels across the organization. In 2022, 12 leaders participated in the program. This program provides leaders with increased awareness of self and emotional intelligence to understand their role as a leader and how to increase engagement across the organization.

All employees continue to undertake mandatory anti-harassment training that meets compliance requirements. Managers from the newsroom and business areas also complete recruitment and unconscious bias training.

Performance Evaluation and Promotion

We have made significant advancements to our Performance Management program, transitioning from annual reviews to continuous performance management, which includes feedback opportunities throughout the year in the form of quarterly check-ins.

Launched in 2022, our quarterly check-ins promote continual feedback throughout the year, fostering regular reviews of progress towards goals and open dialogue on training needs, career development goals, resourcing, bandwidth and wellness.

Furthermore, we have taken steps to increase internal mobility by actively promoting and transferring employees to fill open roles within the organization wherever possible. All backfill and new roles across the organization are advertised internally but historically have required proactive search of internal systems by employees to locate opportunities for development. In 2022 we launched Career Builder, a system that enables employees to self-report their skills and interests which in turn matches job alerts of internal roles that best align to the information self-reported in the HRIS. We promoted 41 journalists to leadership roles in the newsroom, including 24 journalists of color.

Fostering a Fair and Inclusive Culture

Our ongoing efforts to improve employee engagement have resulted in successful initiatives, such as an expanded program of staff surveys and focus groups. Over the past year and half, these initiatives have allowed us to gather valuable feedback and insights from our employees on hiring, overall employee experience, management practices and company culture. In addition to our annual Employee and Culture survey, we conducted a New Hire Engagement Program. This program included surveys, touchpoints and coaching at multiple intervals, such as 2 weeks, 30 days, 90 days, 6 months and annually, reaching over 200 employees. It provided new employees with a resource outside of their direct team and allowed them the opportunity to reflect as they transitioned into their new roles. The insights gathered through these initiatives have been invaluable in shaping our approach to enhancing employee experiences and fostering a positive work environment by encouraging increased communication.

We continue to research and develop a strategy to establish a job architecture framework with career levels and job families that will support the employee experience and our ability to attract talent. Our commitment to continuous improvement, inclusivity and fairness is reflected in our ongoing efforts to review and enhance our practices, including annual compensation reviews to ensure pay equity through the organization.

News Coverage

We have taken concrete steps to highlight under-covered communities by adding more than two dozen editorial positions that help us reflect the diversity of California and give voice to often overlooked groups. This includes a Northern California reporter hired to cover the state’s more conservative northern region, rural farmers and small-town residents, and several social media content creators focused on Gen Zers and audiences of color, as well as the promotion of two staff members to lead a new initiative that will serve Latino communities by telling stories about culture and identity.

Our diverse newsroom continued developing ideas and initiatives that serve diverse audiences, such as a karaoke initiative, Día de Muertos project and event, and the ‘Behold’ portrait series. The newsroom has developed practices to filter stories through the lenses of equity and diversity and has extended coverage of events and locales important to diverse communities. The L.A. Times won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for “revealing a secretly recorded conversation among city officials that included racist comments, followed by coverage of the rapidly resulting turmoil and deeply reported pieces that delved further into the racial issues affecting local politics.� The newsroom also conceived and produced a special digital package and print section on Latinos in Hollywood, which had an emphasis on the overlooked and the undercovered. Our accountability journalism included many stories that asked whether various people and institutions were living up to their diversity pledges. We also continued to embrace the diversity of viewing (and reading) audiences and to bolster our coverage of artists and institutions whose core audiences represent a departure from The Times’ historically majority white readership.

The Times continued auditing its style guide to ensure use of inclusive language across our coverage. Changes were made to have more gender inclusive options for describing certain public officials, and to update language that could be deemed stigmatizing. This is an ongoing initiative, and we anticipate more updates in the coming years.

L.A. Times journalists continued exploring ways to bring new voices, with varied and fresh perspectives, into their reporting and sourcing. After exploring the tracking of source diversity in individual stories, which would put an undue burden on reporters over the long term, the newsroom began the process of examining what a diverse source list should look like, creating a template and beginning to compile sources from across the newsroom.

The Times has also taken steps to further enhance engagement with our audiences and build trust within the communities we serve. As part of that effort, the role of Community Engagement Editor was added to the newsroom to implement short- and long-term strategy and host regular conversations with community leaders, readers and critics to gather feedback and insights about our coverage.

Diverse and Inclusive Leadership

Between June 2018 and December 2022, we made strides in diversifying our L.A. Times newsroom management, moving from:

• 32% POC, 35% female to 51% POC, 52% female for all newsroom management; and
• 33% POC, 25% female to 57% POC, 58% female at the executive leadership level in the newsroom.

We are committed to continuing these positive changes and further increasing the diversity of the newsroom and company leadership.

While we acknowledge the gains we made in 2022, we recognize that we still have work to do as we continue building a more equitable and inclusive future. As an organization, we are committed to and focused on cultivating improvements in the programs we offer, systems we use and processes we put in place that promote a more inclusive, engaging, diverse and motivating experience for employees and future talent that will strengthen the culture of our workplace.