National Sports Journalism Center

Because Lauren Gustus grew up in Massachusetts, she was a fan of the Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots. Because she was a girl, she asked her father, “Can I be a cheerleader?”

He said, “No.”

The little girl went all quiet.

“But,” her father said, “you can play.”

Then she turned happy and stayed happy.

Soccer, basketball, track, tennis – played ‘em all.

Now, laughing as she tells the story, she says,  “Best ‘no’ I ever got.”

And now Lauren Gustus, 31 years old, is the sports editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Even a generation after Le Anne Schreiber ran The New York Times sports department, it’s still unusual to find a woman in charge. One of Gustus’s old bosses wants to change that. Michael Anastasi is a managing editor of the Salt Lake Tribune and the new president of the Associated Press Sports Editors organization. He has announced a Diversity Fellowship Program. It will help train mid-career women and minorities for management positions. At the annual APSE conference, he told the gathered editors that the initiative is “aimed at increasing the number of women and people of color who sit in this room, who are one of us, who are sports editors. Look around. You know we have work to do.

True confession. I was once a member of a club that accepted white men only. I was a sportswriter. Seventeen years into my professional career, I had not worked on a staff with a woman. It was 21 years before I worked with an African-American. In those years, it seemed natural that sportswriters would be white men. Natural? It was natural only in the unthinking way that all of a person’s life seems natural until, one day, he stands at the back of a press room and feels embarrassment, if not shame, in recognizing himself as a player in a de facto segregation based on gender and color.

Whatever sexism confronted women in most jobs, the barriers were raised higher in a world of sports that men believed belonged to them and to them only. No such single rationale explains the dearth of African-American journalists. Racial biases of all kinds turned away men and women who might have covered Jim Brown and Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O’Neal and Terrell Owens.

For anyone who recognizes how closed our business once was, it is disheartening to recognize it’s not much better today. We’re 57 years past Brown vs. Board of Education and 39 years past Title IX.  We should be past what I saw last month at the U.S. Open golf tournament. I stood at the back of the press tent and, in Michael Anastasi’s words, looked around. Hundreds of reporters were at work.  I saw five women and no African-Americans. Hard statistical proof of the segregation comes in a survey conducted by Dr. Richard Lapchick of the University of Central Florida. His numbers show that sports departments continue to be a white man’s enclave.

Anastasi believes this exclusive club is an anachronism in a multi-racial, multi-cultural world. He has pungent words for critics who believe that reaching for diversity is a distraction from the industry’s panic-driven work of regaining readers and revenue. “To those I say this:  horse shit. It is not only the right thing to do, it’s the vital thing to do. . . .  it’s the urgent thing . . . it’s key to our survival. Our newsrooms will not succeed in the long run unless they reflect the communities we purport to cover . . . .”

More than ever, those communities are comprised of African-Americans and whites, Asians and Hispanics. What’s news to one man may not be news to the next woman, and it’s each news organization’s obligation to know the difference. That knowledge comes best, Anastasi believes, when a newsroom is diverse. “Newsrooms,” he says, “need to look like America in 2011.”

Anastasi is 45 years old. He grew up in a small northern California town, Knights Landing, population now near 1,000 with Hispanics in the majority. At 21, while studying international relations at the University of California, Davis, he became the sports editor of the tiny Davis Enterprise. There his pool of job candidates, usually from the UCD, was so diverse that he developed a hiring process that involved minorities “without really thinking about it.”

In nine years as sports editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, Anastasi discovered that his system of hiring “seemed to work just as well at a metro as it did at a small paper. When there is diversity among candidates, you just end up naturally having diverse people on your staff.” He hired Karen Crouse, the first woman columnist in Los Angeles, and made Marc J. Spears the first black baseball beat writer in the city. He assigned Gary Washburn to the Clippers and worked with Paola Boivin, Ramona Shelburne, and the woman who gave up her cheerleading idea to go play everything, Lauren Gustus.

She had crossed the country for college, to California’s Pepperdine University, where she wasn’t good enough to play soccer but by then she’d discovered a better way to be in sports – covering Paul Westphal’s basketball teams for the school paper. From Pepperdine, she went to the Daily News as an intern alongside students from Stanford, Northwestern, and Southern California. “They all were great, hard-working examples,” Gustus said. “And Michael gave us all kind of opportunities.”

She practically sang those last words, “all kinds of opportunities.” The music in them might suggest to a layman that her kindly boss had sent her to Bermuda for the polo, to the Mediterranean for yacht races, perhaps to India for the cricket.

Not really.

“We’d run quotes,” she said.

Grunt work.

“We’d do sidebars,” she said.

 Cleaning up leftovers.

 But when you’re young, passionate, and ambitious, you run quotes until everybody stops talking and you finagle every sidebar the stars don’t want to do. You do it because it’s mad fun. No surprise, then, that Michael Anastasi, on moving to Salt Lake City, hired Lauren Gustus there. No surprise, either, that she soon moved on to Reno as the Gazette-Journal’s youngest sports editor ever and its first woman in the job.

She understands diversity is important in the big picture ways that Anastasi has defined. At the same time, she says her more immediate problem is finding someone to cover prep football on Friday nights. Nor does she think much about how her sensibilities differ from those of a man and how that changes the nature of the Gazette-Journal’s sports coverage.  “I do have a fondness for the human element of the story, the part of the story that makes you feel,” she said. “But I think that any good editor knows that’s an important part of any strong piece.”

Perfect, all that. She’s 21st century. She’s old school.

May her number increase.