Explore the Report

• An Introduction From Amber, Carolyn, and Anand
• Our Plan
• Putting Our Plan Into Action

For over a century and a half, The New York Times has succeeded in part by recognizing when it needed to change. This is such a moment.

Eight months ago, against the backdrop of a societal reckoning around race, we commissioned a diverse group of senior leaders from across the company to help us examine how we were falling short within our own walls, and what it would take to change. We picked this group — led by Amber Guild, Carolyn Ryan and Anand Venkatesan — because they were respected truth tellers. And we told them not to pull any punches.

Today, we’re sharing the results of their work. In the report that follows, you’ll find a frank look at our workplace, which will feel familiar to many of you, and new and difficult to others. You’ll also find a bold plan for building a more diverse, equitable and inclusive New York Times — one that reflects our unchanging mission, our growing business ambitions and our aspirations for the kind of company we intend to be.

The report found that we have made progress in diversifying the company in recent years — and that work will continue. But its central finding is that The Times is too often a difficult place to work for people of all backgrounds — particularly colleagues of color, and especially Black and Latino colleagues. It calls for us to transform our culture.

The plan, like the recent plans that led us to transform into a digital-first newsroom and a subscription-first business, calls for sweeping change. The actions it recommends will require the most substantial investment The Times has ever made — in terms of time, money and energy — in advancing our culture. We believe this work represents an important and necessary next step in the broader evolution of the company.

Our culture has long powered the world’s finest journalism operation, but one of the company’s defining qualities has been an insistence on looking hard at ourselves and finding ways to do better. We believe that the changes in this plan will make our journalism, our business and our company stronger. We also believe it will make The Times a better place to work, for all of us.

We and the senior leadership of the company have spent the past several months deeply immersed in the goals and actions of this plan. They are consistent with the highest ideals of our institution. And while it will take time to realize them, it is entirely within our capacity to do so.

We are deeply thankful to Amber, Carolyn, Anand and the rest of their team — Jay Chen, Jon Galinsky, Rasheedah Hasan and Corey Jamison, along with experts from the Ivy Planning Group and the dozens more colleagues from around the company who supported this work — for the care they put into developing this plan. And we are eager to work together with all of you to bring about an even better New York Times.

Thank you,

A.G., Meredith and Dean

For many, this report is long overdue. For others, it will be a new and uncomfortable portrait of The Times. For all of us, it is a call to action.

When the three of us were asked to lead a review of the company’s culture and practices and develop a plan for change, we pledged that we would not let this moment pass. We sought to go beyond surface-level commitments by digging deep into issues of inequity and their root causes. We held in-depth conversations with colleagues across the company, scrutinized workforce data and collaborated with outside experts who have helped other companies conduct such reviews.

After several months of interviews and analysis, we have arrived at a stark conclusion: The Times is a difficult environment for many of our colleagues, from a wide range of backgrounds. Our current culture and systems are not enabling our workforce to thrive and do its best work.

This is true across many types of difference: race, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic background, ideological viewpoints and more. But it is particularly true for people of color, many of whom described unsettling and sometimes painful day-to-day workplace experiences.

We heard from many Asian-American women, for example, about feeling invisible and unseen — to the point of being regularly called by the name of a different colleague of the same race, something other people of color described as well.

We found that our Black and Latino colleagues face the largest and most pervasive challenges. Black and Latino people are notably underrepresented in leadership — compared with the company over all, and to the country. Black colleagues who are not in leadership positions leave the company at a higher rate than white colleagues. Black employees, and Black women in particular, rated the company lower across nearly all categories of our 2020 employee survey, with the lowest scores around fairness and inclusion.

We cannot accept this. We must change our culture and systems. And we must be bolder in making The Times more diverse, equitable and inclusive. Doing so will improve the experience not just for our colleagues of color, but for everyone at The Times.

This report focuses on what isn’t working, and what we will do about it. We should acknowledge briefly what is working. In our most recent annual survey, 95 percent of Times employees said they feel pride in working here. And a majority of employees, no matter their background, report fulfilling careers and positive experiences.

The Times has also made meaningful efforts in recent years toward achieving greater diversity, including rolling out unconscious bias training; requiring diverse candidate slates and interview panels in hiring; publishing a diversity and inclusion report annually; and launching a newsroom fellowship program to help diversify our industry.

These efforts have led to significant progress in diversifying the company. Last year, 48 percent of new hires were people of color. Since 2015, we have increased the overall percentage of people of color at the company from 27 percent to 34 percent; and we have increased the percentage of people of color in leadership from 17 percent to 23 percent. We have also increased the percentage of women at the company from 45 percent to 52 percent; and we have increased the percentage of women in company leadership from 40 percent to 52 percent.

1. Transform our culture to create an environment where we all can do our best work.

Our values — independence, integrity, curiosity, respect, collaboration, excellence — drive the distinctiveness of The Times. The company’s culture works for many people, who take pride in the institution, achieve personal and professional success and feel like full members of The Times community. But the fact that many others are experiencing The Times and its culture in far less favorable ways means that we are not fully living up to those values.

Our assessment found that many aspects of our culture stand in the way of us becoming a more diverse, equitable and inclusive company.

Together, these factors can make our organization an unwelcoming place for many people. That must change: Once we ask someone to join The Times, we should do everything we can to ensure that the person belongs and has the opportunity to succeed.

There’s much about our culture that we will need to change. But there’s also much that should not change: from our independence, to our commitment to excellence, to our collective devotion to The Times’s mission of seeking the truth and helping people understand the world. We will be deliberate in differentiating between the company we have been and the one we need to be.

We have changed our culture in fundamental ways before. For instance, until the 1990s, The Times was an unwelcoming place for gay and lesbian people. Our leaders made a choice to change that, and built a culture that instead embraced gay and lesbian colleagues, offering a clear message of inclusion and providing spousal benefits decades before other companies did. More recently, we set aside many decades-old traditions, assumptions and habits from the print era — including outdated restrictions on collaboration between journalists and their colleagues in other parts of the company — to transform for the digital age. In each of these cases, our journalism has become richer and more nuanced, and our company stronger.

Transforming our culture is the most important element of our strategy. It’s what is required to ensure that talented people from all backgrounds who join The Times stay and thrive. And it’s what will allow us to better fulfill our journalistic mission.

Although cultural change takes time, particularly at a nearly 170-year-old institution like ours, we must take tangible actions to move quickly toward the culture we want.

The first step is to clearly define what we want our culture to look like. Three years ago, the company spelled out its mission and values, taking ideas that were implicit and making them explicit. This will be a similar exercise. To address what’s not working about our culture today, we will be more explicit about the behavioral norms and expectations that determine success at The Times, as well as those that don’t.

How we go about our work and relate to each other are critical elements in the quality of what we produce, and we will hold ourselves to high standards on both. That starts at the top, and it will be essential that leaders model the standards and norms we emerge with. To support that, a group of newsroom and business leaders will gather broad input and define a clear set of standards and norms that will govern the “how” of our work.

The culture that results must be more inclusive but also more intentional — one in which everyone’s voices and differences are treated with respect and dignity. That starts at the outset, and we will bring employees into the conversation as this work begins. We will formalize an ongoing advisory group to ensure we continue to hear from employees from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. The input and support of our 11 employee resource groups, which already play a central role at the company, will also be critical. And we will continue to engage with representatives from the Guild and our other unions and seek their input and ideas in moving this work forward.

We want a culture in which differences of all types are embraced. Our values should speak to every one of us. Living them must be a core part of what it means to work at The Times.

2. Elevate how we lead and manage people.

We have always celebrated people who make outsize individual contributions. Getting the story was long seen as an individual pursuit at The Times, with the front-page byline prized above all else. But today, nearly everything we do at The Times — from publishing immersive digital journalism to building new products to selling ad campaigns — requires teams of people to collaborate effectively.

Our assessment found that individual success is often valued at The Times more than successfully leading people or contributing effectively to teams. This fact can be detrimental to everyone in the organization, but we know it takes a disproportionate toll on people of color.

Too often, we heard, people are spending time managing how they appear to the bosses at the expense of leading, developing and collaborating with others.

Many employees also want more honest conversations about where they stand and more actionable feedback that can help them achieve their goals. “The only time I get feedback is if I do something really good or really bad, and I am not looking for that,” one person told us. “What I am looking for is the constructive type to get better and develop.” We also heard questions from some people of color about whether their managers were giving them the same degree of constructive feedback that they were giving white colleagues.

Our strategy is to change the shape of what we value. We must elevate how we lead and manage across the company, in order to enable the excellence of all employees. And we must establish clear expectations and feedback mechanisms to ensure we follow through.

Right now, leading people is often viewed as a secondary part of what Times managers do, a distraction from the company’s real work. We need a mind-set shift in recognizing that there is in fact no distinction between leading people and the work itself: Effective leadership helps many people deliver great work, and we need leaders to be creating and enabling environments where people can live up to their highest potential. We also want to recognize and elevate leaders who may not stand out as much on their own but who have developed strong teams that are producing excellent work — and, critically, who are elevating those who report to them.

We are working with the company’s most senior leaders to define a set of principles and expectations for what it means to be an effective leader, which we’ll open up for feedback. If diversity, equity and inclusion are to become core parts of our culture, our leaders must learn to successfully lead diverse teams.

We are taking steps to make sure we develop managers into leaders and hold them accountable for excellence. This work will rely on getting the right feedback, the right learning and development support, and enough time and space to invest in making progress.

To ensure that managers develop as people leaders and both benefit from and are evaluated based on the experience of those who report to them, we will build a feedback process that gives employees the opportunity to provide upward feedback for their managers. We will also provide new learning and development opportunities to support the growth and development of leaders as we set new expectations. And we will ensure that promotion rationales and compensation decisions for managers consider leadership abilities, making explicit in policy and practice that poor leadership of our employees will hold them back from advancing through the organization.

Our leadership is still not as diverse as it needs to be. We are setting ourselves a clear and ambitious target: increasing the representation of Black and Latino colleagues in leadership by 50 percent over the next five years. (Leadership here is defined as director and above on the business side and deputy and above in the newsroom, which equates to roughly the most senior 10 percent of the company.)

Setting this goal is a way to hold ourselves accountable for people of color advancing through our organization in equitable ways. Achieving it will require us to do a better job at developing all employees, and building a culture that encourages them to stay. And more diverse leadership will accelerate changes in our culture. Some may question why we have chosen to set a goal for representation specifically for Black and Latino colleagues in leadership: The answer is that it’s where we have the biggest representation gaps.

To fulfill our ambitions for leadership, we will need more management bandwidth in certain parts of the organization where we have not given managers the time or support they need. In the newsroom, for example, the crush of news has meant that many employees have not gotten the level of attention they need from their editors to understand where they stand and how to develop in their careers. It has also become clear that we are giving our desk heads much less time to lead, with the demands of an ever more dynamic news cycle, new journalistic forms and a growing array of distribution channels.

Over the past year we have appointed specialized deputies in some areas of the newsroom to support department heads. We will now add these roles to more desks to help department heads manage all of the aspects of running a modern journalism operation. This will include in part ensuring that individuals can do their best work and grow in their roles, as well as sharing other responsibilities with department heads so that they can do the same.

On the business side, we are investing in roles that work with the leaders of major functions to strengthen career frameworks; invest in onboarding, learning and development; and build community.

3. Strengthen systems and practices for developing people, and for supporting work to make The Times more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

While leadership and culture are critical to making The Times more equitable and inclusive, strong people practices are equally important.

Our assessment, however, found that despite improvements in recent years The Times’s human resources systems and management practices remain underdeveloped.

Newsrooms are historically allergic to anything that feels like bureaucracy. In our own newsroom, and in the company more broadly, we have often relied on informal ways of operating. But without high-functioning systems to define the ways in which people experience an organization — hiring, feedback and evaluations, development, and more — informality can lead to a lack of consistency and fairness. And it can deprive employees of opportunities to grow.

In recent years, The Times has invested significant time and resources to build a strong foundation for progress. By the end of this year, spending on Human Resources will have more than doubled since 2018, and the department has brought aboard a range of talented experts. But we still have more to do.

Our goal is to strengthen our people practices — how we hire, develop, promote and enable our people as they manage their careers.

A first step was our recent hiring of a veteran executive with deep expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion to lead our Human Resources department and help drive these crucial changes.

The highest priority will be the systems and practices that ensure we develop and support the careers of people who are already at The Times. We found that many employees are unsure of the pathways open to them, what they need to do to advance in their careers and how decisions about advancement are made. While we have instituted new processes in some parts of the company, our systems in most areas remain undefined.

Our plan is to develop clearly defined, rigorous and fair career pathways, advancement criteria and promotion processes throughout The Times. This will take time, and the details will look different for reporters and software engineers, for example. But all employees deserve to know where they should aim, to have opportunities to put their hands up and to have a fair shot at advancement and opportunities to grow in their existing roles.

The systems that our Product Development organization has adopted are helpful models. There, career paths are well defined and promotions for those who are ready to rise in the organization are granted in specific windows each year. Managers and employees know when and how to propose promotions, and at the end of the process, employees receive clear decisions and feedback. While these processes are by no means perfect, they have the power to bring considerable rigor and fairness to personnel decisions.

The newsroom has begun to develop its own set of clear, fair career development processes. We need to ensure that people of color share in the opportunity for stretch assignments that can lead to more senior roles or growth in employees’ existing positions. And senior leaders should be judged by how well they create pathways for a diverse group of deputies to succeed them.

Recruiting — traditionally the primary focus of diversity efforts — is ahead of much of our operation in its focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Since companywide mandates were established in 2018, for example, more open jobs have been publicly posted with competitive processes (up to nearly 85 percent), and we have gone from just a third to a vast majority of jobs having diverse candidate slates in terms of gender and race.

This work shows in our results. We will build on that progress by increasing the requirements for diverse slates in areas where we see underrepresentation, and we will continue to strengthen compliance and tighten our exceptions process.

Two additional steps will support these efforts. First, to ensure fair, competency-based hiring, we will roll out interview training for all hiring managers and all of those who make up interview panels. We began to introduce that training to parts or the business side late last year, and we will extend it across the entire company in 2021. We will also add dedicated recruiting capacity to ensure that we are drawing from broad, diverse talent pools as we continue to hire aggressively.

More broadly, we also need dedicated staffing to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion as a whole at The Times.

To date, we have not had the kind of centralized way to drive and monitor progress on making the company more diverse, equitable and inclusive as we have had for other top priorities. Our lack of clear ownership and uneven systems has meant that people of color have shouldered a disproportionate share of this responsibility, often on their own time and without additional compensation. They lead employee resource groups (E.R.G.s), like Black@NYT, the Latino Network, the Asian Network, the M.E.N.A. Collective and others. They serve on diversity committees (including this one) and participate in focus groups and listening tours. And they often read and edit articles concerning race to ensure accuracy and fairness in between their other duties. All of this work has been essential and has illustrated the commitment of so many people of color at The Times to the institution and to improving our workplace culture.

The Times has already taken some steps to bolster our companywide approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. We recently announced, for example, that E.R.G. leaders and committee members will receive annual stipends to recognize the work they do.

More broadly, we will build out an office within Human Resources to add expertise and oversee our efforts at making the company more diverse, equitable and inclusive. While this office will play an important coordinating role, the ultimate accountability will live with senior leadership, as it does for our journalism and business results.

Essential to any workplace are basic standards of behavior and procedures for managing them. We need to ensure we have clear policies, equitable and fair processes and accountability when violations occur.

Amid recent events, employees have pointed to a “star” culture. They have questioned The Times’s commitment to fairly enforcing its policies and rules — and whether they are clear and rigorous enough in the first place.

The Times’s leaders have committed to a review, now underway, of our procedures for investigating employee behavioral issues, and for determining the appropriate discipline. The goal of this work is to clarify for all employees what our procedures are, to assess whether they are rigorous enough and to determine how to make them more transparent. The result must leave colleagues with confidence that standards are applied consistently, that processes are rigorous and fair, and that action is taken when violations are found to have occurred.

4. Ensure our journalism benefits from the judgment of a more diverse and inclusive newsroom.

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is focused on our employees, our culture and our ways of operating. But this commitment will ultimately be reflected in our journalism and the mission it supports.

A more diverse Times, with a more equitable and inclusive culture, will lead to a stronger news report.

We know this because we have already seen it happen: As our staff has become more diverse, the range of stories The Times has pursued has widened and the overall report is stronger.

Media organizations have been slow to diversify. While The Times has a more diverse workforce than the broader industry, we are not immune from the effects: coverage that remains rooted in white perspectives, from characterizations and discussions of race to notions of what’s newsworthy. As we continue to diversify our newsroom, we will see more coverage that captures the lives of people and communities of color with deeper understanding and nuance. After all, while our journalists rely primarily on reporting and expertise in the subjects they cover, personal experience can also deepen and enhance their work.

Our Overlooked project, for example, in which we documented those whose deaths went unreported in The Times over the years, was a testament to how greater diversity and inclusiveness inside The Times can lead us to cover stories we had missed. The same can be said for our coverage detailing physical and verbal attacks on Chinese Americans in bias incidents linked to the coronavirus. Our coverage of the 2020 election and racial justice protests last summer similarly reflect a widening aperture, as does signature work like the 1619 Project.

Such journalism offers a truer, richer and more textured portrayal of the world. Without following through on our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion internally, we will inevitably speak to and reach only certain readers through our journalism. We want a subscriber and readership base that more fully reflects the breadth of the society we serve.

A group of newsroom colleagues is working through these and other issues to figure out how to better include the judgment of a more diverse array of colleagues, and specifically people of color, at every step of creating our report.

Their review makes clear that there’s significant work to do. Our newsroom is not diverse enough, which reduces our capacity to spot stories others are missing and to add nuance and insight to our coverage of every community. We do not adequately empower the talent we have to shape our coverage, from deciding what’s newsworthy to reporting it out to final editing and headline writing. We have not done enough to incorporate feedback into our journalistic culture. People of all backgrounds pointed out examples of coverage that suffered from a limited point of view.

The newsroom is taking initial actions while the committee’s work continues. Building upon last year’s expansion of the newsroom’s Standards operation, we will soon roll out a more muscular mandate for Standards to ensure that we’re meeting our goals of reducing gaps and biases in our report. Explorations are also underway to expand our Fellowship program to recruit and train a new and more diverse generation of journalists.

Several desks will experiment with bringing more voices and perspectives into the critical process of assigning stories and working with reporters as they develop. One approach will be to make sure that editors new to assigning are paired with veteran editors, allowing them to gain experience assigning, collaborating with reporters and shaping coverage as preparation for eventually stepping into more senior roles themselves. And the newsroom team is using qualitative and quantitative data to analyze how people and communities of color are represented in our coverage, both as sources and as subjects. The aim is to create an inclusive culture that emphasizes teamwork and organically incorporates diverse perspectives.

This work should ultimately render the informal practice that some now call a “sensitivity read” obsolete. These requests for additional feedback come with good intentions — for example, to determine if story framing and language hold up to our news standards and do not play into tired stereotypes — but often arrive unexpectedly, too late to remedy deep journalistic issues. The phrase itself conveys a timidness that’s out of keeping with coverage of the world without fear or favor. We will continue to encourage collaboration across the newsroom; another set of eyes, particularly from a different perspective, immeasurably improves our coverage. But more intentional and organic inclusion of people of color throughout the process of assigning, reporting and editing our stories should eventually curtail the need to call in journalists at the last minute to catch embarrassing gaps. For now, we will be adopting a system to enable departments to solicit added layers of editing expertise — on race or any other subject matter — in a structured way.

The audience for our journalism has expanded considerably in recent years and must continue to expand to reach more diverse readers, viewers and listeners. Our formula is to put distinctive, high-impact journalism at the center of our strategy; to recruit reporters, editors and producers with expertise and insights to distinguish our coverage in more areas; and to hone our approach of getting our journalism in front of the people for whom it is most relevant. Rather than subdividing our audience into demographic groups and writing stories to target them, we should reflect the complexities of our world through a report meant for all. Our commitment is to expand our reach among people of color and other groups by continuing to diversify our staff, eliminating gaps in our report and ensuring that the stories we publish reach more of the people affected by the issues and events we’re covering.

A full set of conclusions and additional plans from the newsroom committee will follow later this year.

As an independent news source, we don’t make public statements or join campaigns on issues we cover, except to defend the rights of the free press. But we do decide how we spend our own money as a company.

We are prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in our business relationships. The Times spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on goods and services across a range of industries, from paper and ink to marketing agencies and consulting firms. We are committed to building a best-in-class program to ensure that we develop business relationships that reflect the diversity of our society.

Our primary goal will be to increase the share of our spending that goes to companies with diverse ownership. We will prioritize business owners and operators of color in the early stages of the effort. We will also work to increase the share of our total business partners with diverse ownership.

We have already hired a senior leader with significant experience to oversee this work and have begun rolling out the underlying systems and processes required to launch it.

We will ensure our philanthropic initiatives also support efforts to diversify our industry. We will continue to contribute to organizations such as The National Association of Black Journalists, The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association, and to help train the next generation of journalists through the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. We will seek out other opportunities to support and highlight nonprofit organizations that support our goal of diversifying newsrooms and journalism.

Our ambition goes far beyond the steps The Times has taken on diversity, equity and inclusion to date. In fact, it resembles prior transformations of our journalism and business.

These transformations were successful, but they weren’t easy or straightforward. When we started them, we first recognized the need to change and agreed on a shared vision — but there was much we had to figure out along the way. The same is true today: We will need to build new skills, hire new people to enable this work and find ways for the rest of us to balance new priorities with existing ones.

We have developed our plan in deep partnership with The Times’s top leaders, and this work will require ongoing commitment and engagement from them. They must set the tone for a transformed culture, and model what it looks like to be a great leader and manager at The Times.

This transformation also requires commitment from everyone at The Times, from managers who can guide the careers of others to new hires in their first weeks on the job. This is not just about programs and processes, but about how we see and treat each other as people.

For decades, many people have avoided acknowledging the things that shape who we are — starting with race, but including gender, socioeconomic background, ideology, religion and more — in the workplace. That must change — we cannot pretend that these differences don’t exist. We need to be able to understand and engage with the perspectives of people who are different from us if we are going to build a culture that values and works for us all. To make that possible, we will need to allow ourselves to make honest mistakes, learn from them and move on. We all have much to learn.

People will inevitably question our plan, and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Some may decide The Times is taking a political stand. Some may think we already do our part by undertaking coverage that highlights injustice. And we know some will worry that in focusing on people of color we are leaving them behind.

We want to be clear about our commitment. Diversity is not in tension with our journalistic mission: Instead, it helps us find the truth and more fully understand the world. Diversity is also not in tension with our commitment to independence: We will continue to cover the world without fear or favor and portray the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Making the Times experience better for colleagues of color will make The Times better for everyone.

Our work has left us optimistic for the future. We are eager to get to it.

Contributions from Jay Chen, Monica Drake, Jon Galinsky, Rasheedah Hasan, Corey Jamison, Joe Kahn and Bo Kim.