Newsroom diversity is improving in Canada, but news agenda still set by white editors

Newsrooms across the country continue to make progress in representing their audiences, but 83.7 per cent of supervisors identify as white, which skews the news agenda, according to the Canadian Association of Journalists’ (CAJ) new diversity survey.

As Brent Jolly, CAJ president, said at a news conference, “… what gets measured gets changed,” and there is no denying that the trend broadly points towards greater diversity among editors and reporters. But this finding comes with an important caveat: The data come from self reporting by media organizations (as of Dec. 31, 2024), many of whom — including such big names as the Globe and Mail and Global Television — remain leery of participating in the annual survey. 

See full list of participants here: https://caj.ca/programs/diversity-survey/diversity-survey-submissions/

The CAJ’s 2025 survey was the fifth in the series launched in the wake of the global racial awakening following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, in Minneapolis. The survey collected data from 5,662 journalists in 325 newsrooms covering radio, television, digital and print media in Canada. 

Only one third of newsrooms responded to the survey (325 newsrooms out of 900 canvassed this year, compared to 270 out of 715 in 2024). Newsrooms with fewer than 10 journalists were more responsive than larger ones. The survey had similar participation to last year.

While diversity continues to improve, “for full-time journalists, excluding supervisors, most racial percentages are close to their census data,” according to the CAJ report.  But among supervisors, 83.7 per cent identify as white compared to two per cent as Indigenous and 14.3 per cent as a visible minority — almost the same ratios as reported in the 2024 survey.

“White journalists hold 83.7 per cent of supervisor roles and 78 per cent of the top three leadership positions in newsrooms,” the CAJ said in a news release.

“As we look over five years of data, we’re seeing that white journalists are consistently overrepresented in leadership and full-time roles,” said Zane Schwartz, CAJ national chair and survey lead. “While we’ve seen marginal increases in the representation of certain racial groups, there is clearly more work to be done to foster the careers of non-white journalists.”

Other key findings include:

• Just over 50 per cent of all journalists identify as women, compared to 49 per cent who identify as men and 0.9 per cent who identify as non-binary, marking an increase in women and non-binary journalists from last year and a decrease in the proportion of men.
• About 75 per cent of journalists identify as white; 3.9 per cent identify as Indigenous; and 21.2 per cent identify as a visible minority.
• More than two thirds of media outlets have no Indigenous people or visible minorities in their top three leadership positions.
• Interns and part-time journalists are the only categories where white people are underrepresented compared to Canadian census data.

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