The Hechinger Report’s mission is to examine and report on inequality and innovation in education. To do so with integrity, we include diverse perspectives in our stories and ensure that our writers and editors also come from varied backgrounds.
In our coverage, we seek to elevate voices of people who are Black, Latino, Native American or low-income, as well as those who come from rural communities and other places that aren’t regularly represented in the debates about how to improve U.S. education.
We are also committed to having a diverse group of journalists weighing in on which stories to cover and how to approach them. We know the news industry as a whole has much more to do, and we do, too.
Among some 300 news organizations surveyed by the News Leaders Association in 2018, about 22 percent of journalists were people of color and around 42 percent of journalists were women. The survey has not been conducted in recent years because of a lack of participation.
The Hechinger Report surveys our full-time editorial staff annually to understand the demographics of our team. In 2025, 12 out of 16 respondents were white, four identified as Hispanic or Latino, one is Black and one is South Asian. Fourteen are female; two are male. Both of our top two editors are women; one is South Asian and one is white.
A survey of freelance writers who have written for Hechinger in 2024 found that 54 percent of the freelance writing contracts we signed were with women and 30 percent were with men. Demographics were not captured for some contracts, and some freelancers wrote more than one story for us.
Another way we measure how we’re doing is by comparing the demographics of our journalists to the people we cover: students. About 44 percent of K-12 students and 52 percent of undergraduate college students in the U.S. are white. Fifty percent of K-12 students are Black, Latino, Asian or Pacific Islanders; 43 percent of college students are members of those races or ethnicities.
Our challenge is not unlike the challenges faced in education, where the teaching workforce is overwhelmingly white despite research showing that teacher diversity is linked to higher student attainment. That’s why we’ve explored solutions similar to some of the models we’ve written about.
We’ve recruited young people of color to participate in our internships as one potential path to full-time employment with our organization. We’ve also created a diversity, equity and inclusion committee that prepares for and advises in our hiring process, to ensure we’re seeking out and including diverse candidates. That also helps us identify journalists who may contribute to our coverage as freelancers.
We have a long way to go, but we’re prepared to continue this work and to be transparent with our readers as we do.