During our annual editor elections, almost all members of The Chronicle's staff took an anonymous demographics survey. We found that we are fairly representative of Duke in terms of socioeconomic status and gender, but not of the University's racial and ethnic diversity.
These statistics shed light on our need to improve our diversity and to gain more representative voices. We have long recognized the need to create a more diverse staff, and these concrete numbers will help recenter our efforts to achieve that goal, as we strive to tell the diverse stories of this University.
We plan to use this knowledge to shape our organization's future. All students are welcome to join The Chronicle, and we hope that undergraduates recognize the unique opportunity we provide to do real work in media.
The only Chronicle positions that require applications are the independent Editorial Board and a spot as a regular opinion columnist. For these positions in particular, we are committed to fostering a wide variety of viewpoints. Our demographics survey was not given to opinion columnists, because they vary each semester.
In our survey, we found that the median household income range of The Chronicle staff is $125,000-$200,000. This is comparable to Duke as a whole, which has a median family income of $186,700 according to the New York Times.
In terms of gender, about 51 percent of The Chronicle's staff identified as male—which is equal to the University's distribution, according to the U.S. News and World Report data from 2015. However, this was not consistent across sections. Eighty-one percent of sports reported identified as male, and 75 percent of The Chronicle's news reporters identified as female.
Approximately 14 percent of our staff identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
We also identified several areas where we are unlike the University.
Approximately seven percent of staff identified as black or African American, and about five percent identified as Hispanic. In comparison, 11 percent of the Class of 2019 is black, and 10 percent is Hispanic, according to the admissions office.
The Chronicle also has a higher percentage of Asian Americans—35 percent—compared to the Class of 2019, which was 28 percent Asian or Asian American. In the news department, the percentage of Asian Americans was 48 percent.
About 34 percent of Duke students are Greek-affiliated, and that number is 25 percent for our staff. A little more than half of The Chronicle is independent, and the Editorial Board had one of the lowest rates of Greek affiliation on staff.
The Chronicle is also under-representative of engineering students. More than 95 percent said they were in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, but about 20 percent of undergraduates are enrolled in the Pratt School of Engineering.
Regarding political affiliation, approximately 62 percent of the staff identified as liberal. According to the survey, only two percent of The Chronicle identifies as conservative, and 30 percent identified as independent or moderate.
Moving forward, we plan to alter our recruitment strategies to inform different organizations on campus of what we have to offer. We will also pitch more stories that are relevant diverse members of the community and reach out to leaders of cultural groups to better engage with them. For the past two years, our staff has received bias prevention training, which is something that we plan to continue.
We encourage anyone with a passion for writing, sports, photography, digital development or graphic design to join our staff—our door is always open and we're always having fun.
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