The media-wide reckoning over race and inequality amid the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement isn’t limited to age-old legacy institutions like the New York Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer or, for that matter, Condé Nast (which owns Vanity Fair). Even at some of the most progressive and forward-looking news outlets, tensions about management composition and equal opportunity can and do arise.

Before the May 25 killing of George Floyd, which led to protests around the world and put race front and center within the journalism community, these issues were already beginning to percolate at BuzzFeed News. A couple of weeks ago, the newsroom’s union began surveying its 74 members about diversity within the organization. One of the takeaways, according to people familiar with the survey, was that many employees are concerned with the overwhelming whiteness of newsroom leadership.

Those concerns are now the responsibility of the news division’s new editor in chief, Mark Schoofs. He’s a highly respected veteran investigative journalist with a track record of quarterbacking coverage related to social justice, like a 2018 Polk Award–winning BuzzFeed series about innocent men framed for murder by a Chicago police detective. He’s also now the person who decides what the masthead looks like, and BuzzFeed journalists are pressing him for more inclusivity. A summary of the diversity survey’s findings was shared with newsroom management this week, and the subject has also come up in recent all-hands meetings.

Schoofs, for his part, isn’t unaware of the issue. “I want to acknowledge an elephant in the room: We have a glaring diversity problem in our leadership,” he wrote in a May 15 staff memo that outlined a newsroom restructuring. “As soon as we can hire again, one of my top priorities will be to find editors and leaders of color, and I’d love to hear your ideas about how to make that happen.” In a meeting, Schoofs likewise urged his staff, “Judge me over time.”

It’s a fair point considering Schoofs, a Pulitzer Prize winner who worked at the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica before creating BuzzFeed’s investigations team in 2014, is only a month into the top job. (He was named editor in chief on May 5, following the departure of Ben Smith two months earlier, and officially started on May 18.) Moreover, BuzzFeed, like many media companies, has been dealing with cuts due to the economics of the pandemic, so recruitment and hiring are already limited. But it didn’t sit well that Schoofs’s initial flurry of internal appointments and promotions went mostly to white men, including the leaders of a new “inequality desk.”

“How can we cover this moment with an inequality desk that’s led by only white men?” one source said. “I’m not saying this stuff is intentional, but you have to do better. It’s something that’s been happening over time, but when you come in, small changes like elevating one white man, or taking one woman away as a head of a department—it has huge reverberations across the newsroom.”

BuzzFeed News has always been seen as a place with a stated commitment to hiring people of color. But a number of such employees have left the company either voluntarily or through downsizing, including several who were in leadership roles during Smith’s tenure, like Shani Hilton, Kovie Biakolo, and Saeed Jones. The rank and file have taken note. “Over the past couple of years, it feels like there’s been a bit of a drain where the company doesn’t work as hard to retain people of color,” another source said. “If anything, Mark has bent over backwards to say, we know there’s a glaring problem here. But we don’t have a huge newsroom, so who the people in charge editorially are makes a big difference.”

During an all-hands meeting on Friday, Schoofs announced a number of measures being taken to address the problem, including outreach to different professional organizations representing people of color, as well as the creation of a Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Committee, which the union had asked for. To avoid getting ahead of his own internal messaging, BuzzFeed didn’t make Schoofs available for an interview on Thursday. But in a recent conversation with CNN, he talked about the impetus for starting an inequality desk in the context of the public health and economic disparities that have been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Inequality has been a major issue in American life and a growing issue in American life over a long period of time, and now COVID-19 has made those rifts in our society deeper and also made them more neon,” he said. “Everybody is aware that there is a great gap in who’s getting and dying from COVID-19 both in terms of economics and in terms of race, which is obviously a bright red thread that runs through American history. We’re facing an economic depression in which almost a quarter of Americans have lost their jobs, and that is going to lead to a very acute awareness of the haves and the have-nots and the way in which our society, for better and for worse, is structured.”

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