ESPN Walks the Walk, On Screen and Off

ESPN’s senior management holds that a diverse audience demands diverse programming, which, in turn, requires a diverse workforce, both in front of and behind the cameras. The network’s commitment and efforts on this front have netted this year’s Diversity Champion award from the Walter Kaitz Foundation.

“[ESPN] has been a strong advocate for diversity and has really walked the walk,” said Kaitz’s executive director, David M. Porter Jr.

Network president George Bodenheimer will personally accept the award at Kaitz’s Sept. 19 fund-raising dinner. Asked why diversity is important, Bodenheimer responded: “A, it is the only way to run a successful business; b, it is the right thing to do.”

Diversity is a key component of the network’s business, said Bodeheimer. “You are trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you don’t have a broad collection of voices contributing … you are just not going to be as successful as you want to be. I don’t think it is any more complicated than that.”

But ensuring diversity among the network’s most senior executive ranks has apparently proven to be plenty complicated. None of Bodenheimer’s eight direct reports are African-American, Asian or Latino.

Move one, two and three levels down the ranks of management, though, and there is plenty of diversity. “At the director level, at the vice president level, we are starting to build definitely a strong bench. These are the folks that are poised for continued growth,” said ESPN’s diversity director, Lorie Valle-Yañez. “I actually feel pretty good about where we are as a company, with respect to that.”

Valle-Yañez is referring to, among others, some of the managers who report directly to ESPN executive vice president of content John Skipper.

Skipper, a native of Lexington, N.C., speaks as forcefully about diversity as he does about sports. “I have no patience with the notion that we can’t find qualified candidates,” Skipper said. “It is just not true.”

Skipper, who oversees all of ESPN’s content efforts across multiple platforms, noted that in order “to create the best possible content for a broad array of sports fans, then we need to have the best talent and the best ideas. And in order to have the best talent and the best ideas, we need to pull from the largest pool of candidates. We need to have different points of view so we need to have people with different experiences and different ethnicities and people of both genders.”

He points to the value of different viewpoints when it comes to covering stories like the dog-fighting ring operated by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick: “I like very much that I have senior executives who I can [ask], 'Am I, as a white American, missing something here with Vick?’ I’ve got southern African-American employees [to whom] I can say, 'Am I missing something here that I don’t understand?’ And we did that every day when we were covering Michael Vick to make sure we were being sensitive and representing different points of view.”

In the Vick case, the extent of the racial divide was documented by a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll that found 51% of blacks believed the media had treated Vick unfairly. Only 12% of whites polled felt the same way.

“We operate in the world of sports, which is very diverse. We have to reflect that. And we’ve done that. I think we’ve been a leader,” Skipper said. He has sought to avoid pigeonholing and looked to mix it up, naming a woman to head National Football League coverage and assigning African-American and Latino talent to cover the NASCAR stock-car racing circuit.

Beyond ensuring there are a variety of perspectives and faces on air, Skipper said the network has “tried to dramatically diversify what we cover … our ambition is to cover a very broad range of sports.” He cites the network’s purchase of a cricket Web site and a rugby Web site, as well as its coverage of women’s softball and volleyball.

But one of the largest programming-expansion efforts is the network’s Spanish-language service. “The whole ESPN Deportes cross-media that we’ve created — the magazine, the radio, the network — is about our understanding that there is a growing Hispanic population that we want to serve and we want them to believe that ESPN is a network for them,” he explained.

ESPN Deportes has 3,3 million subscribers, the radio service has 25 affiliates and the magazine has 55,000 readers.

“It is diversity in programming that drives diversity,” said ESPN Deportes general manager Lino Garcia, who coincidentally was a Kaitz Foundation fellow in 1988.

“You want to reach a diverse audience, you provide diverse programming and then you hire people that are able to make that happen,” Garcia added.

But hiring Asian-American talent as opposed to African-American or Latino staffers has proven a particular challenge, even if not for a lack of effort.

“Having gone to the Asian American Journalist Association conference over the years, it has been a little bit of a challenge to find people who actually are interested in being on-air to focus on sports. That group is very, very small,” said Valle-Yañez. “As we sit at the ESPN booth at conference, the NBC booth has a huge long line of people who want to be anchors in that role and not as many that are really focused on sports.

“Again, it is a challenging area. That doesn’t mean we stop trying. We keep trying.”

The network has had greater success, according to Valle-Yañez, with hiring women for on- as well as off-camera positions. Three of Bodenheimer’s direct reports are women.

“I’m feeling very good about the company’s commitment to diversity,” Garcia of ESPN Deportes said. “I feel good that I work here.”

Of course, today’s limited presence of Asians, African Americans and Latinos in the senior executive suites at ESPN, not to mention throughout the cable industry, is directly related to their limited access to entry-level positions at networks 15 to 25 years ago. And, as is often the case in any industry, length of professional experience plays an important role in promotions.

But Skipper, for one, thinks experience is often used as a “crutch” by those who have yet to appreciate and embrace the importance and benefits of a truly diverse workforce. “I have always said to people, I take brains over experience because last time I checked you can get more experience,” he said.