Gannett, citing Trump, backs down on DEI

The Weekly Wrap: April 11, 2025

Gannett, citing Trump, backs down on DEI

In 2020, following George Floyd’s killing by a police officer in Minneapolis and amid Black Lives Matter protests, Gannett — America’s largest newspaper company, home to USA Today and more than 200 other local newspapers — pledged to “make its workforce as diverse as the country by 2025 and to expand the number of journalists focused on covering issues related to race and identity, social justice and equality.”

Well, it’s 2025, and what a difference five years makes: Hanaa’ reported Thursday that Gannett will no longer report its workforce demographic data and has removed all mentions of diversity from a page on its corporate site:

The announcement was made in a company town hall meeting on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesperson told me the company is “adapting to the evolving regulatory environment,” and, in a follow-up email when I asked for clarification, referred me to Trump’s January 22 executive order eliminating DEI initiatives in federal agencies and calling for an end to “private sector DEI discrimination.”

Gannett did not specify whether the Trump administration had contacted anyone at the company, or asked them to make changes. Major U.S. companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta have also rolled back DEI initiatives this year.

Gannett also changed references to “diversity” on its corporate site. A quote from CEO Mike Reed that read “If we don’t have an inclusive and diverse culture, we’ll fail at everything else” was swapped out for the word salad “We embrace a culture where each individual’s unique perspective unlocks our collective potential, empowering an environment where everyone can thrive and make a difference.”

Gannett had most recently published a demographic report in 2024, for the year 2023. The four reports it released are here.

Gannett was not the only news company to make DEI-related promises in 2020. Hanaa’ is working on a story about what’s come of those promises: Do you know of newsrooms that have or have not followed through on them? You can share tips or ideas with her via email or on Signal @hanaatameez.01.

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

Gannett will stop publishing diversity information, citing Trump’s executive order The company also removed mentions of “diversity” from its corporate site. By Hanaa' Tameez.

The origins of Patch’s big AI newsletter experiment Local news aggregation was primed for automation. In the transition Patch left human curators behind. By Andrew Deck.

Testing Kagi, a premium search engine for a broken internet Is replacing Google worth $10 a month? By Neel Dhanesha.

Which types of people aren’t big fans of “impartial” news? People who don’t have power A new study finds that the poor, those with less education, young people, and women are less likely to prefer “impartial” news sources over those that align with their own views. By Joshua Benton.

Gannett launches a standalone true crime subscription powered by local journalism “What exists that will connect Palm Beach with Des Moines?” By Hanaa' Tameez.

How student journalists are making national news local From Arkansas rice farms to campus Title IX policy, college reporters are connecting federal decisions to their communities. By Chatwan Mongkol.

The Trump White House is now sitting on any reporters’ pool reports it finds unflatteringAmericans are really not into news chatbots, a study finds“Quartz is now a zombie brand”Student media groups issue “unprecedented” alert advocating changes to takedown and anonymity policies Highlights from elsewhereLinkedIn / Society of Professional JournalistsSociety for Professional Journalists’ “sin” contest for college papers, encouraging them to violate SPJ’s code of ethics and win $500, is…going over quite badly this year →Papers are encouraged to “make stuff up entirely. The wilder, the better” and “include the SPJ Code of Ethics with a letter from the editor explaining that you are showing what the world would look like without journalism ethics.” Commenters weighed in: “This is a shockingly bad idea”; “puts early career journalists in personal and professional peril while undermining their ability to actually defend their ethics from people who have been historically underserved by media”; ” Under the current conditions the press is facing, and the threat to democracy and the 1st Amendment, this Society of Professional Journalists contest for young journalists makes absolutely no sense.”Vanity Fair / Natalie KorachKaitlan Collins is CNN’s “joyful warrior” covering Trump 2.0 →“Collins’s multiplatform prowess — breaking news online, doing live hits throughout the day, anchoring at night, and sharing vertical videos outside the White House on Instagram certainly looks like a model for a next-generation cable news star. “Columbia Journalism Review / Lauren WatsonAt Outside Magazine: Layoffs, acquisitions, and a contributors’ revolt →“They were going to try to package everything on a subscription basis — apps, map apps, and other items — to hopefully make it a little more enticing for people to pay for it. But shortly after they took over, they just started whacking editors and freelancers, and the content went downhill pretty quickly.”Reuters / Jonathan StempelThe retrial of Sarah Palin v. New York Times starts on Monday →“Palin, 61, who was defeated in her 2008 bid for the nation’s second-highest office, lost her first trial against the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2022. But last August, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan found the verdict tainted by several rulings by the presiding judge, and ordered a retrial.”The Guardian / Margaret SullivanThe AP’s win against Trump shows principles still have power in America →“The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists, be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere, it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

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