In 2012, Marissa Evans wanted to make history when she applied to be editor-in-chief at Marquette University’s student newspaper, the Marquette Tribune.

If she got the job, she would become the second Black person — and first Black woman — to lead the Tribune since the paper was founded in 1916. Black students comprise less than 5% of the student body at the private university in Milwaukee, where Black residents make up 38% of the city’s population.

Besides having worked two years at the Marquette Tribune, Evans had already completed four internships and was an alumna of the prestigious New York Times Student Journalism Institute. By the time she applied for the editor position at the end of her junior year, she had already been selected for an internship at the Washington Post for that upcoming summer.

Despite these credentials, Evans didn’t get the job. A journalism professor who had knowledge of the hiring discussions later told her that there were concerns of how well she “would work with other people.” Instead, the hiring committee selected a younger white man.

Evans, now a health reporter at the Los Angeles Times, did not return to the paper for her last year at Marquette.

“I didn’t feel wanted by student media,” Evans said. Left unfulfilled were her aspirations of recruiting more journalists of color and leading the paper to focus on issues important to Black communities in Wisconsin’s most populous city.

Since Evans left, none of the editors who have led the Tribune have been Black. The one, and only, Black editor of the Tribune held the job a generation ago — in 1988 — a decade before many of today’s college students were born.

Our reporting shows that many college newsrooms across the country share a similarly bleak record for Black and Latinx representation in their highest ranks.

To gain a snapshot of how well editors-in-chief at student newspapers reflect the demographics of their schools, we identified 75 newsrooms that were honored for their work in 2020 from one of two organizations: the Associated Collegiate Press and the Society of Professional Journalists. We chose news organizations that won or were finalists for ACP’s Newspaper Pacemaker award or SPJ’s regional Best All-Around Student Newspaper award.

Read the full article about racial inequity at top college newspapers by Janice Kai Chen, Ilena Peng, Jasen Lo, Trisha Ahmed, Simon J. Levien, and Devan Karp at Nieman Lab.