Situation Report

ALTHOUGH the number of black journalists in the U.S. has increased over the past decade, less than 5% of all reporters and photographers are black. There is only one black syndicated columnist. There are no black managing editors on white publications. Many newspapers, particularly in the South, employ no blacks at all, except as clerks or janitors. The Washington Post, with 19 blacks out of an editorial staff of 222, is the most "integrated" large daily newspaper. The New York Times (13 blacks out of 374 editorial employees), the San Francisco Chronicle (four out of 196), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (six out of 150) and the Detroit News (five out of 300) have more typical percentages.

In network television news, ABC employs one black among its 45 correspondents. NBC estimates that of its 60-odd nationwide correspondents about a dozen are black. CBS does not release specific figures. Among magazines, the Reader's Digest has only one black on its masthead, Look five, LIFE five. Newsweek has ten blacks among its editors, correspondents and researchers; TIME has ten.

Perhaps the bleakest statistics of all come from the two major wire services, which have traditionally provided the main training ground for young journalists. With a U.S. news staff of almost 1,000, the Associated Press has only 12 blacks. Of the 650 news staffers who are now employed by United Press International in the U.S., about ten are black.

Black journalists who prefer to work for black-managed or black-oriented publications find the choice severely limited. Among predominantly black general-audience newspapers, New York's Harlem-based weekly Amsterdam News is the largest, with a circulation of 82,123. The Baltimore, Richmond and Washington, D.C., editions of the Afro-American have a combined circulation of only 97,600. Muhammad Speaks, the propaganda organ of Elijah Muhammad's Black Muslim sect, has a circulation of 400,000. The leading black magazine is the LIFE-like Ebony (circ. 1,216,626), published by John H. Johnson, who also publishes the newsweekly Jet (circ. 394,134) and the polemical journal Negro Digest (circ. 50,000).

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