The Detroit Free Press announced on May 3 that it appointed Nicole Avery Nichols as executive editor, making the HBCU graduate the first Black woman to lead the newspaper.

“I firmly believe in centering people and their experiences within the heart of journalism, and I am thrilled to be leading one of America’s most powerful newsrooms as we tell the stories that matter most. I look forward to engaging new audiences amid our ever-changing and diversifying media landscape,” said Nichols, a seasoned journalist and newsroom executive.

Nichols, 53, returns to The Free Press from her most recent job as editor-in-chief at Chalkbeat, a nonprofit education news organization. She began her journalism career in 1993 as a weekend reporter at The Utica Observer-Dispatch in upstate New York and has held various newsroom positions at multiple outlets, including the former The Syracuse Newspapers and The Detroit News.

In 2000, The Free Press recruited Nichols away from the Detroit News to be a features writer. Three years later, she became an editor and rose to the senior news director post.

Kristin Roberts, chief content officer at Gannett and the USA TODAY Network, praised Nichols for her in-depth knowledge of issues in the Detroit area and for her “fearless and unflinching commitment to journalism.”

“I am confident that under Nicole’s leadership, the Free Press will deliver exclusive and solutions-focused journalism that our readers, viewers and listeners want,” Roberts added.

The first issue of The Free Press was published on May 5, 1831. The late Bob McGruder became the first Black top editor at the newspaper in 1996. Nearly three decades later, Nichols’ appointment shines a light on the news industry’s long standing diversity problem.

According to The Associated Press, the Kerner Commission report in 1968 said the absence of Black journalists was “shockingly backward.” The federal landmark government commission explored the roots of Black protests and riots in the 1960s over racial discrimination and concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one White, separate and unequal.”

Since the mid-1970s, the News Leaders Association, a nonprofit journalism trade group, has surveyed newsroom diversity. Even in recent years, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder that prompted corporate vows to increase diversity, few news outlets are willing to reveal diversity data, according to the AP.

Newsroom diversity is still a work in progress, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey of almost 12,000 journalists.

“Journalists give their news organizations the most negative ratings in the area of racial and ethnic diversity,” Pew’s report said. “By a considerable margin, more journalists say their organization does not have enough racial and ethnic diversity (52 percent) than say it does (32 percent).”

Nichols, a Long Island, N.Y., native, earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the HBCU Tuskegee University, where she played trombone in the school’s marching band. She went on to earn a master’s degree in newspaper journalism from Syracuse University.