Acel Moore and the legacy of The Inquirer's Career Development Workshop

Thirty years ago, Acel Moore found a willing partner in his newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to create a program to give high school students a taste of being a reporter. He had been a reporter for more than 20 years and a columnist for nearly five, and had seen the paucity of journalists of color in the nation's newsrooms, which also meant the daily news report did not adequately cover many communities.

Moore started the multicultural high school program in 1984, an extension of his interest in diversifying his own newsroom: A few years earlier, he had helped to start a program at The Inquirer to train African American, Asian, and Hispanic journalists for copy-editing jobs, another area where minorities were barely represented.

Moore has mentored hundreds of journalists throughout his career and continues to inspire. He retired from The Inquirer in 2005 and holds the title associate editor emeritus. In a Q&A, he talks about the Acel Moore Career Development Workshop and its legacy.

Question: How did the high school program get started? What precipitated it?

Answer: In the mid-1970s, newspaper diversity became a priority of the National Association of Black Journalists, an organization that I and several other journalists had just organized. At the time, no more than 2 percent of the thousands of journalists who worked for 1,500 or 1,600 daily newspapers in America were either black or Hispanic or people of color. It had been an issue with me since I began in journalism in 1962.

If your only knowledge of black people and people of color in America was what you read in the newspaper, you'd have a totally inaccurate picture. That was because of the lack of diversity at newspapers and other news entities around the country.

Black people never died because you never saw their obituaries in the paper. They never got married. You never saw wedding announcements or engagements in which photographs of black people and other people of color were represented in the newspaper. That was not a true reflection of the community the newspaper served. We needed people of color to write about the communities that had been neglected.

We realized that we needed to get people interested in journalism before they entered college, in high school. We were among the first newspapers to do that. Other newspapers around the country looked at what The Inquirer was doing and began to do the same thing.

Q: When you were coming up, there was no program like this. How did you learn to be a journalist?

A: I served as an apprentice just like my white colleagues did, by being a copy boy, an editorial clerk. It was clear to me in the first four or five months of working in that capacity that my eclectic interests would be best served by becoming a journalist. So I focused all my attention on learning how to write, reading stories, understanding what stories were better than others and how they were put together. I had some help from a number of people - who obviously were not black but white - who saw in me someone who had an interest in journalism. That's what their focus was, not on the fact that I was black but that I was trying to emulate their craft. I got support from individuals I initially thought would never support a young black man trying to become a journalist, but they did.

I also motivated myself in many ways. I took classes at the Charles Morris Price School of Journalism on my days off during the week (and worked weekends), and became a reporter at The Inquirer in 1968. I was one of the first African Americans to produce a national television program when in 1972, the late Reginald Bryant and I co-produced Black Perspectives on the News.

Through the years, I wrote about teen gang violence in our communities, politics in the city and the nation, and race. I was a court reporter and general assignment reporter, but most important, I wrote stories about the lives of everyday people. I collaborated with reporter Wendell L. Rawls Jr. to write a series of articles in 1976 about inmates who were being abused at Farview State Hospital. We were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting by not only The Inquirer, but also community groups in the city. We won the award in 1977.

In 1980, I joined the Inquirer Editorial Board, and a year later I began writing a column called "Urban Perspectives." I continued to focus on the same issues and people as in my years of reporting. Because of my work as a journalist, I was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1979, among many other commendations.

Q: You were able to get newsmakers to speak to students in the program. How were you able to do that?

A: People knew me as a journalist and what I had done as a reporter at The Inquirer. I wrote not only about newsmakers but about people who were working to make their communities better and safe, people who almost never got their names in the newspaper. Some of the speakers were politicians, some were academics, others were community leaders.

The students got to see the same individuals who they had read about in professional stories in The Inquirer and the Daily News. It made them more a part of the structure. They were, in effect, journalists, even though they were high school students. They were putting together a publication, First Take, and they were able to get some of the major newsmakers in the city to submit themselves to press conferences and questions. The newsmakers found it not only interesting but challenging to have students politely ask them tough questions.

Q: The program is a first step. What was expected of the students beyond the program?

A: Other than producing First Take and writing their stories, the students were encouraged to keep in contact with the journalists who were teaching and working with them. They were encouraged to pursue journalism, either majoring in journalism or majoring in English or majoring in other fields. The main thing was to write for the newspaper at the university they attended. They could apply for a reporting internship at The Inquirer. All things being equal, we gave priority to students who went through our high school program. We had a direct connection between the high school program and the reporting internship.

Q: How have changes in the newspaper industry affected the program?

A: The industry has changed because of technology; the digital age has changed people's lifestyles and the way they communicate with each other. People have less time to read and that has had a negative effect on newspapers. Reporting has changed, too. No longer are broadcast and print separate entities. They have converged in the way news is gathered. Reporters today not only have to be able to write, they have to be able to do video and take photographs. The program has kept up with that. Students are asked to produce work online and to do video. Convergence is a part of First Take.

One thing that hasn't changed is the proper and correct way to gather news. The young people are taught to master not only the skills of writing but the values and principles of good journalists, although the technology has changed the methodology of how we put the product together.

Q: Are programs like this - whose original aim was to diversify the newspaper industry - still necessary?

A: Yes, there are fewer people of color at The Inquirer and other newspapers across the country than there were 30 years ago. Programs like this are necessary to maintain diversity, and newspapers have to be more aware of these deficiencies. Our high school program must also remain vigilant in its mission and include more students of color. Once you don't have that diversity, what you produce is going to be affected in a very negative way. We'll be back where we were when I first started.

Q: When you look back over the program, what are you most proud of?

A: I'm proud that the professional journalists - not just people of color but everybody - who still work at the newspaper are committed to seeing the program succeed today as they were 30 years ago. I praise their efforts.

The reason the program has been successful hasn't been because of me. It has been because of the people who have seen the value of a program like this and who want to instill in young people the principles of what makes a good news story, of what makes good journalism. That's reflected in the product you see today in First Take.

In 30 years, a minimum of 700 students have finished the program, dozens of whom are working as professional journalists. I'm sure that those who chose other professions have benefited as well.