231 RACIAL PROFILING IN THE NEWSROOM Although journalists of color continue to be vastly underrepre- sented in American newsrooms relative to the proportion of people of color in the U.S. population, much progress has been made in the past two decades. Minority journalists were 9.5% of all U.S. journalists in 2002, up from 8.2% in 1992 and 3.9% in 1982. 1 Minorities accounted for 12.95% of daily-newspaper journalists in 2004, up from 10.49% in 1994 and 5.75% in 1984. 2 Increasing the proportion of minority journalists in American newsrooms is an increasingly important subject within the news indus- try, 3 with wide agreement that racial composition of news staffs should reflect the communities they cover. 4 However, the discussion within the industry focuses almost entirely on hiring and retaining journalists of color. Little attention has been given to the ways news organizations use minority journalists after they have been hired, making it difficult to assess the validity of critical-race theory as it applies to diversity initia- tives. This article offers data about the role that race plays in the topics reporters write about at a metropolitan daily newspaper. Content analy- This article examines patterns of story assignments at a metropolitan daily newspaper. The study’s content analysis documents a form of racial profiling in which African American reporters write stories mostly about minority issues, while white reporters write stories mostly about govern- ment and business. Interviews with journalists documented the wide- spread belief that experience as a member of a racial minority helps the newspaper provide better coverage of minority issues. However, journal- ists of all races spoke of racial diversity only when they were talking about minority reporters and minority-oriented topics. The hegemony of whiteness was such that none of the journalists appeared to have thought about the role of whiteness in the coverage of the largely white realms of politics and business. J&MC Q J&MC Quarterly Vol. 84, No. 2 Summer 2007 231-248 ©2007 AEJMC David Pritchard is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Commu- nication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Sarah Stonbely, who received her M.A. from UW-Milwaukee, is a student in the Media Ecology Ph.D. program at New York University. The authors thank Tameka Haynes for expert assistance with the inter- views, Jessica McBride and Elana Levine for insightful comments on a draft of this arti- cle, two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript, and journalists at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for being generous with their time and thoughts. RACIAL PROFILING IN THE NEWSROOM By David Pritchard and Sarah Stonbely