Five years after a Temple audit suggested The Philadelphia Inquirer increase its civic engagement, the paper announced it is dissolving its communities and engagement desk.
The dissolution included the dismissal of ten newsroom staffers, sparking questions about the future of the largest Philadelphia news publisher’s community-based journalism.
Following backlash to a 2020 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Buildings matter, too,” and as part of the Inquirer’s Inq4All initiative, the Inquirer created the desk in 2022 to address lapses in diverse stories that the Inquirer previously had not covered.
However, the desk’s dissolution was a business decision to save money, wrote Inquirer CEO Lisa Hughes to the paper’s staff.
“There are certain competencies and skills that people can specialize in that focus on engagement work, but it would be valuable to sprinkle those across the news organization to make them more of an essential work component of the news organization,” said Andrea Wenzel, a journalism professor at Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication. “Just so they can’t be so easily excised from things when the budget gets tight.”
Klein’s 2020 audit dove into the Inquirer’s diversity and inclusion efforts to supplement the paper’s efforts toward committing to both a diverse newsroom and inclusive coverage.
Wenzel and Bryan Monroe, a former Klein professor who passed in 2021, led the audit. Multiple other Klein professors also contributed to the interview and research process of the report.
The report found that the Inquirer featured white people in 58% of its coverage, compared to 26.4% of Black individuals, 3.3% of Hispanic people and 1.6% of Asian people. Men accounted for 77.9% of people featured in stories, out of the surveyed stories that included 10,193 people. When Black people were featured in a piece, 53% of the Inquirer’s coverage was about sports and 23% in news — compared to when white people were featured, who were equally represented between news and sports in 31% of the Inquirer’s coverage.
The report also found that out of 225 Inquirer’s employees, 42.7% were white men and 31.6% were white women, meaning 74% of the Inquirer employees were white in August 2020. Black women represented 6.7% of the staff, and Black men at 4.9%. Their sports desk was entirely male at the time, and no people of color were on their 10-person investigations team.
In 2020, white people made up about 36% of Philadelphia’s population, and Black people made up about 40%. About 52% of Philadelphia are female, with around 48% as male, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The audit recommended creating inclusive sourcing practices, increasing workplace equity and the integration of community engagement. The Inquirer’s community desk was launched about a year after the report’s release. At its launch, four reporters and a coverage editor worked with community leaders and members to continually produce community-based stories and underrepresented community content.
“Journalism represents the people, so if you have those in power in front of you with a pen or microphone or video camera or cell phone, what are the questions they are interested in,” said Christopher Malo, a former Temple professor and an interviewer for the audit. “All journalism should go back to the human element of things.”
Members of the communities and engagement desk published multiple different pieces covering underreported topics affecting communities, neighborhoods and people that had previously received little media attention.
Lynette Hazelton wrote about the Holmesburg prison experiments and their lasting effect. In the 1950s, a dermatologist began experiments on imprisoned individuals using hallucinogenic drugs or painful procedures — a program that lasted 23 years, ending only after the Tuskegee Study reports came out in 1972 and after Philadelphia banned medical testing two years later.
Another article was about a group of Black women who sew reusable period pads to send to women in Africa and the Caribbean. The period pad piece, written by Valerie Russ from the communities and engagement desk, boosted the sewing group’s popularity, earning the organization a new sewing machine, fabric and dozens of interested volunteers.
The desk’s articles were not under a paywall, making them free to all non-subscribers. Typically, the Inquirer utilizes a metered paywall, which measures the amount of times a user reads a section of the paper and blocks articles after a certain quota.
Inquirer reporters and editors received an email notifying them 10 jobs would be eliminated and offered buyout packages to the eliminated positions on March 21. Four out of the eight people on the communities desk were journalists of color, the Philadelphia Tribune reported.
Inquirer Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar met with members of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Philadelphia chapter and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Keystone Pro chapter on April 2. Attendees of the meeting criticized the decision, claiming the move would undermine trust in the city’s most underserved communities, the Philadelphia Tribune reported.
Escobar called the desk an “experiment” for the Inquirer at its peak operation.
“When I look at how the paper is managed, and I know that there are certain fights that I have been fighting with this particular news organization almost my entire career, it feels like no matter who owns it, this is just how it’s going to be,” said Denise Clay-Murray, the president of Society of Professional Journalists Keystone Pro chapter. “That’s not fair to the citizens of Philadelphia and to the folks in the tri-state area, because they expect better from you.”
Clay-Murray, alongside P. Kenneth Burns, the president of the SPJ New Jersey chapter and a NABJ-Philly member, presented a joint letter to Escobar at the April 2 meeting. Escobar confirmed that the end of the desk was not linked to the Trump administration’s recent moves to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sector.
The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, a coalition supporting journalists and staff from the Inquirer and other Philadelphia news outlets, also released a statement condemning the desk’s dissolution.
The Inquirer is owned by the Lenfest Institute, a non-profit that invests in local Philadelphia news. Klein Dean David Boardman served as Lenfest’s chairman when the Inquirer asked Temple to conduct an audit. Malo and Wenzel attribute Temple’s audit to Boardman’s involvement with Lenfest, alongside Temple’s journalism department prioritizing community and diversity-focused learning and reporting in its curriculum.
Wenzel currently teaches ethnic and alternative news at Temple Rome, and Malo was the director of Philadelphia Neighborhoods, the capstone course for journalism majors where students report and write stories serving different communities around Philadelphia that tend to go under-reported.
“I think after as much pomp and circumstance the Inquirer did when showcasing all their commitments to change and value particular communities, the desk wasn’t even absorbed into anything else,” Malo said. “There’s a significant loss to that.”
Malo, Wenzel and Clay-Murray each chose to not speculate on possible explanations on why the desk was dissolved, but warned of future ramifications to community-based journalism.
“After Wednesday’s meeting, my question to them became, ‘Do you really want to do this? Do you really want to be as much a part of Philadelphia as you do Cherry Hill or any of these after places,’” Clay-Murray said. “And if you don’t, then take Philadelphia off your title, call yourself the something-else Inquirer, because it’s obvious that you’re not necessarily trying to do the job for Philadelphians.”
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