This blog post is a project update in collaboration with Hailey Lee. Our project outline can be seen here.

Over the past week, Hailey and I have been developing questions for our video component. We have also been reaching out to various Boston news organizations for appearance requests. Here’s a working list of organizations we have contacted:
• New England Cable News
• WCVB
• WBZ
• WHDH
• WFXT
• WUNI Univision
• Boston Neighborhood Network
• Cambridge Community TV
• Roxbury.TV
• Boston Latino Television
• Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston
• Boston Regional US Census Bureau
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• National Association of Black Journalists
• National Association of Asian Journalists

Any additional suggestions for organizations to contact would be appreciated.

We have also decided to cover 15, not 10 years of census data, due to the fact that trends appear to not have changed greatly in the past 10 years.

We have also begun a literature review, looking for scholarly works on minorities in mass media in relation to ethnic media. “Don’t Patronize Me: Media-by and Media-for Minorities” was written by Dan Caspi and Nelly Elias in 2009 in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

They characterize mass media s a “media-about” model, that does not give comprehensive information to minority communities, and instead serves the “majority.”

“The media-for may not suffice to guarantee the minority’s authentic expression, since they are primarily committed to the majority’s goals, whereas well-developed media-by are likely to offer a better means of minority expression. Hence, characterization of media along a continuum between the two poles is likely to identify the conditions under which minority media serve as an arena for the minority’s positive representation and promotion of its interests.” (Caspi and Elias, 2009)

A 2011 Report by the Radio Television Digital News Association in collaboration with the Communications Department at Hofstra University on women and minorities in TV and radio said that in 2011, the percentage of United States population that are minorities is 35.4% but the Minority TV workforce is only 20.5 %. In 1995 17.1% of the TV workforce was minority and the minority population of the US 25.9%.

This study has great statistics for United States-wide TV minority data, but we are still looking to find Boston specific TV industry data.