“We pass on information person-to-person in a fashion that sometimes can feel like an elaborate game of telephone,” Lam Thuy Vo, Disha Raychaudhuri, and Moiz Syed write in the introduction to their Journalists of Color Resource Guide, which was released this week by the News Integrity Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. They built the guide based on discussion, research, and more than 260 survey responses.

The 2019 ASNE Newsroom Diversity Survey, released last month, found that journalists of color made up 21.9 percent of the salaried workforce in U.S. newsrooms…that bothered to respond to the survey (428 responded out of 1,883 that were asked). Because of the low response rate, ASNE cautions that “these figures cannot be generalized to interpret the landscape of the U.S. journalism industry as a whole because the survey relies on information collected from a convenience sample of organizations that volunteer to participate”; it’s safe to assume, however, that the total percentage of journalists of color working in U.S. newsrooms is lower because news outlets with particularly abysmal stats may just not respond.

“We repeatedly observed the same needs in our various circles of journalists of color,” Vo (a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News), Raychaudhuri (data and investigations reporter at NJ Advance Media), and Syed (news apps developer at ProPublica) write. One of the goals of this guide is to offer something that’s more efficient and widely available than the “kind of invisible labor done in the background that a lot of underrepresented groups in newsrooms do to improve both their newsrooms and the careers of their peers.”

The guide, which consists of lots of links to outside sources, includes sections on career growth, salary and benefits, accountability, and training. The section on salary, for instance, points to a spreadsheet on salary data from the Journalists of Color Slack and information on negotiating salary and benefits.

But most importantly, thanks to all the journalists of color and allies who quietly do the work — those who write resources like these, who pass them along, who support their peers on a day-to-day. We see you and thank you. ❤️https://t.co/7rkINazGGi

— Lam Thuy Vo (@lamthuyvo) October 14, 2019

And of course this project and efforts like these are all just stop-gaps to the wider problem with the lack of diversity in newsrooms around the country.

The real solutions will come from folks who are in positions of power within our industry and usually don't look like us.

— Moiz Syed (@MoizSyed) October 14, 2019

We acknowledge and applaud the invisible, unpaid labor many of you put in at your workplaces and hope this helps you address at least some of those issues. If you have concerns/questions about anything on the resource guide, please reach out to me/@lamthuyvo/@MoizSyed. (3/n)

— Disha Raychaudhuri (@Disha_RC) October 14, 2019

This is honestly an amazing resource for journalists of color. Congratulations to @Disha_RC, @lamthuyvo and @MoizSyed for handling this project with such care.

Make sure to amplify it! ✨https://t.co/1e7RBrCKGT

— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) October 14, 2019