Diversity at Work

A group of Tampa Bay journalists had spent a year at Poynter learning about the area's ethnic diversity and weaving new people and insights into their storytelling. As the program wrapped up, one reporter told of how, having heard about a recent tragedy in China, she'd found herself worried that maybe someone she knew had been hurt.

It was a silly thought, she said, using the point to prove how much she still had to learn. Here she'd met just a handful of Chinese Americans over lunch in St. Petersburg, and now she was thinking she might know someone suffering on the other side of the earth. She laughed at herself.

Aly Colón

Aly Colón stepped in and adjusted her vision.

Maybe, he said, you're looking at it all wrong. You may not know anyone directly affected by the tragedy. But now, he told her, whenever you write about someone from that part of the world, you'll do it from your heart, as though they were the people you just sat down with over lunch.

"Imagine," he said, "how much better that story will be."

That quick burst of insight and perspective lifted our departing group from self-deprecating humor to the highest aspirations of the journalism ahead of them. Aly has often had that effect. In 10 years of teaching journalists at Poynter, he has moved with ease along the continuum from funny to profound.

"Aly has an amazing knack for getting into the hearts and souls of the journalists sitting around the table," says Susan LoTempio, readership editor at The Buffalo (N.Y.) News and a regular teacher in Aly's signature "Untold Stories" seminar. "He respects and values them, and he brings out the best in every one of them -- personally and journalistically."

Now he's moving on, trading journalism for geography. He's taking his family back to their favorite address, Seattle, where he'll start a job in corporate America at Safeco, the insurance company. It's a big loss for Poynter and comes during a distressing period in journalism. The unrelenting layoffs and buyouts in our profession have left newsrooms depleted and done great violence to the cause of diversity in newsrooms and in the news. That last part strikes at the core of Aly's legacy.

Diversity has been his greatest passion from the start.

He first came to Poynter in 1996 as a participant in a diversity seminar. He and columnist Jerry Large arrived as a team from The Seattle Times, where Aly held the title of diversity writer and coach. We'd soon get a taste of that passion.

One night, we combined our seminar group with journalists who'd come to the Institute for a reporting seminar. We'd brought in a racially and ethnically diverse panel of local folks and set about asking them how journalists might cover their communities better.

It didn't go too well. Reporters in the other group were blunt bordering on rude. One reporter told the visitors that the real problem was that people like them needed to do a better job of bringing their stories to the attention of reporters, rather than waiting for the journalists to come to them.

Aly's diversity group, which focused all week on reaching out to people in under-covered communities, found their colleagues particularly insensitive. As the night session ended, Aly stormed out of the amphitheater and proclaimed loudly, "I've never been so embarrassed for my profession!"

Well, the profession had a little shame left in it.

RELATED RESOURCES

You can find all of Aly's Poynter Online writing here.

Over the next decade, Aly became a voice for ethical journalism as well as diversity, leading Poynter's ethics and diversity programs during some of the industry's more infamous meltdowns: the plagiarism and fabrication scandal at The New York Times, a fake news controversy in the state of Washington, the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and countless others.

Through the years, whether launching the "Journalism With A Difference" column for Poynter Online or editing the "Best Newspaper Writing" anthology, whether running workshops in the building or helping journalists on the phone, on the Web or in the newsroom, Aly has brought passion and insight to the job.

"He and others gave me something my degree and my career experience had not: the courage I needed to look inside myself, as a reporter, a writer, a Salvadoran, an immigrant," says Esmeralda Bermudez, a reporter at The Oregonian in Portland. "For that reason, I now feel whole as a journalist."

Aly has engendered that kind of appreciation over the years, in spite of the volatile, sometimes draining nature of diversity work. He has told the story frequently of once wrestling with a good friend over a race relations matter completely unrelated to journalism.

"Don't you ever go off duty?" the friend finally asked.

Apparently not.

Aly's new title in Seattle?

Diversity program manager.