I think it's commendable for people to bemoan the lack of diversity on newspaper op-ed pages. But guess what? Newspapers aren't the only print media that publish opinion pieces, and magazines are doing pretty poorly in the diversity department too.
The piece is a bit dated, but a couple years ago, Gabriel Sherman wrote about the issue of racial diversity in the magazine industry. For reasons he discusses, it can be hard to figure out who's doing editorial work based on mastheads alone, but the results of his work were not inspiring. At The Nation -- where Ari Melber posted the item that got everyone talking today -- only 8 of its 99 editorial people were minorities. Perhaps they've done better since, but they would've had to do monumentally better for their numbers to look good. At The New Yorker, not really a clear-cut opinion magazine but the pinnacle of magazine journalism, there were only 11 people of color out of 130 people doing editorial work. Some places seem to do better (like the Prospect), others worse (The New Republic), and still others (National Review, Weekly Standard) probably object to caring on philosophical grounds. And if you poke around at mastheads, you get the sense what women (almost always white, I would bet) fare better. But the state of affairs on both dimensions -- ethnicity and gender -- is nothing for anyone to be proud of.
Incidentally, these aren't altogether distinct issues: the population of opinion writers in newspapers and those in magazines can't be neatly separated. Opinion magazines have always proven to be fertile ground for newspapers looking for op-ed columnists and contributors. So what happens at the magazines will impact what happens at the papers.
