Despite the largest single-year percentage increase in minority journalists in five years, first-time minority hiring has decreased since 1994 in the nation's newsrooms, according to the annual ASNE Newspaper Diversity Survey released today.

Twenty-two years after ASNE officials declared that minority employment percentages should match those for minorities in the general population, the current figure is 11.85 percent, ASNE reported. The U.S. minority population is 28.4 percent.

The report comes seven months after the ASNE board voted to change the effective date of the organization's goal for parity from 2000 to 2025. The estimated minority population then will be 38.2 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections.

The ASNE survey, to which 953 of 1,451 daily newspapers responded, showed that 368 papers, or 39 percent, employed no minorities. The figure for 1998 was 40 percent.

Wanda S. Lloyd, who chairs the ASNE Diversity Committee, cited retention as a problem for newsrooms. Although the number of minorities in the newsroom continues to climb, many are leaving, stifling growth.

"We need to have a quantitative and qualitative analysis of why people are leaving the business," said Lloyd, managing editor of The Greenville (S.C.) News, in an interview Tuesday.

Catalina Camia, president of the Asian American Journalists Association and a correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, said the industry "must be more aggressive in recruitment, especially now that the new media is challenging newspapers."

Alone among the four major ethnic groups, black representation in newsrooms decreased for the third consecutive year, from 5.38 percent in 1997 to 5.31 percent last year.

In that period, only 38 black journalists entered the work force, bringing the national total to 2,984, according to the survey.

The numbers "show a crisis in confidence in the newspaper industry, particularly at a time when we are trying to boost the number of African-Americans in journalism," said Will Sutton, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a deputy managing editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing minority population, represented the largest increase in newsrooms.

"The stagnant growth [overall] is something we need to work on, but I wouldn't do this kind of work if we didn't have hope for change," said Nancy Baca, outgoing president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and special sections editor at the Albuquerque Journal.

Lori Edmo-Suppah, president of the Native American Journalists Association and editor of the Sho-Ban News in Fort Hall, Idaho, said, "If there were more people of color in the newsroom, they would stay longer." In a mainstream newsroom, she added, "I felt like no one was listening, no one had lived how I had lived."

To boost minority representation, Sutton and Baca cited the need for more training of high school journalists. "We have to start recruiting [minority] students at an earlier age," Baca said.

Last September, the ASNE board approved benchmarks for measuring minority hiring and promotion every three years, starting in 2001:

The goals are: overall employment, 13.5 percent; interns 36.5 percent; supervisors 11 percent; number of papers with no minorities, 350; and number of papers achieving parity with their community, 58.

Among the figures reported Tuesday , the survey for 1999 showed 31.42 percent for interns and 9 percent for supervisors.