Berkeley as the Summer Program for Minority Journalists. It later became MIJE, a model program in training and supporting minority journalists. At the Tribune, Aarons rose to executive editor and then to senior vice president for news, where he worked for greater staff diversity. He led his team to a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The following year he retired from journalism. Activism In 1989 the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) asked Aarons to coordinate a survey of gay and lesbian journalists. Responses from 250 print journalists revealed that most were closeted in their newsrooms. An overwhelming majority said coverage of gay issues was "at best mediocre." Fewer than 60 percent had told colleagues about their sexual orientation; fewer than 7 percent said their work environments were good for gays. At ASNE's national convention in 1990, Aarons presented the results and closed his speech by coming out. Four months after his speech, Aarons convened six journalists in his California dining room to launch the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). He was its president until 1997, and remained on the board until his death. After working for over a year, in Fall 2003, Aarons, Dane S. Claussen, Amy Falkner, Rhonda Gibson, and others relaunched the then-GLBT Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC). Aarons asked Claussen to serve as the first Head, but he could not because he already was to be 2003-4 Head of AEJMC's Mass Communication & Society Division. David Adams and Sue Lafky served as the first Co-Heads, with Claussen as Vice-Head/Program Chair, and Aarons as Secretary. Aarons, then teaching at the University of Southern California, followed that up by persuading the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) to add sexual orientation content in its curriculum diversity standard. On its 15th anniversary in 2006, NLGJA established the annual Leroy F. Aarons Scholarship Award for a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender student pursuing a journalism career. CNN provided $100,000 to fund the scholarship. The AEJMC LGBTQ Interest Group's Teaching Committee also awards, generally every two years, its Leroy F. Aarons Award for lifetime contributions to university teaching and/or research related to the LGBTQ communities. Influence in journalism In the 1970s, Aarons collaborated with Robert Maynard in starting programs to train people of color for journalism careers, then switching