Articles Feature

5 Black Journalists in N.Y. Daily News Cuts

by richard03219

Parent Company Tronc Slashes Half the Newsroom

‘Stand Your Ground’ Law Permits ‘Vigilante Justice’

Success and Fear of Scandal at NAHJ:

Balta Is First to Have a 2nd Term as President

. . . 22% in Survey Consider Leaving Profession

. . . NPR Finds It Does Poorly in Citing Latinos

Native American Journalists Reelect Bryan Pollard

Ta-Nehisi Coates Leaving the Atlantic

Kalita Adds News, Opinion to CNN Digital Portfolio

Short Takes

Support Journal-isms

Carla Roman and Reggie Lewis leave the Daily News building in New York on Monday. (Credit: Think Institute)
Carla Roman and Reggie Lewis leave the Daily News building in New York on Monday. (Credit: ThinkInstitute)

 

Parent Company Tronc Slashes Half the Newsroom

At least five black journalists, a Latina and two Asian Americans were laid off from the Daily News in New York as the tabloid cut half of its newsroom staff Monday, including Jim Rich, the paper’s editor in chief.

The five included Christina Carrega, Brooklyn courts reporter; Reggie Lewis, photo assignment editor; and Candace Amos, Virginia Lowman and Ashley Smalls, all part of the social media team, which was disbanded.

Sports editor Eric Barrow, reporter and columnist Leonard Greene, sports columnist Carron Phillips, editorial writer Robert George and Jared McCallister, senior production editor/Caribbeat columnist, told Journal-isms that they escaped the cuts.

“I did. But don’t have much of [a] staff to speak of, ” Barrow said. His staff, once 34, is now eight.

Photographer Enid Alvarez, who is Latina, was identified as among the casualties, as were Rob Ng, a sports copy editor, and Daniel Johnson-Kim, audience engagement editor, who are Asian American.

[July 25 update: Derek Reed, a photo editor who is African American, photographers Marcos Santos, who is Hispanic, and James Keivom, who is Asian American, were also affected. So was Michael Cruz Espinal, a librarian who is Latino, and Michael Nam, home page editor, who is Asian American.  “[A]ll of the staff photographers were dismissed,” reported Clodagh McGowan of NY1.

[“Grew up reading the Daily News and honored to have worked at this great NYC institution. Onward and upward,” the librarian tweeted. “The Daily News Library is officially closed.”

[Nam messaged, “As for the future, who knows. I’ll probably keep looking in the journalism field for the time being.”]

Overall, the News in 1998 employed 400 journalists, Paul Farhi reported for the Washington Post. Now it will have about 45.

Carrega tweeted a photo of a News front page featuring a story she wrote and added, “Sat in a room with legends and incredible journalists to be told it’s over at the Daily News. Welp! Clearly my lay off was not based on my work. Got the wood twice in three days. So, so proud.”

“The meeting lasted less than a minute” Jaclyn Peiser wrote for the New York Times. “By the time it was over, reporters and editors at The Daily News, the brawny New York tabloid that was once the largest-circulation paper in the country, learned that the newsroom staff would be cut in half and that its editor in chief was out of a job.

“In the hours that followed, journalists in various departments, from sports to metro, received formal notification that they had been laid off by Tronc, the media company based in Chicago that bought the paper last year.”

The layoffs will affect more than New York. “The newspaper publisher is laying off staffers at some of its other papers ‘today and tomorrow,‘ according to a Monday afternoon memo from Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn,” Brian Stelter reported for CNNMoney.

“The announcement immediately spooked staffers at papers like The Baltimore Sun and The Chicago Tribune.

“Dearborn said the cuts will not be as severe as in New York. . . .”

At the News, the Times story continued, “ ‘People were crying and hugging each other,’ said Scott Widener, a researcher who had worked at The News since 1990. ‘I’ve dodged a lot bullets over the years, and I just couldn’t dodge this one.’

“In its heyday, The News was a staple publication of the city’s working class, an elbows-out tabloid that thrived when it dug into crime and corruption. It served as a model for The Daily Planet, the paper that counted Clark Kent and Lois Lane among its reporters, and for the scrappy tabloid depicted in the 1994 movie ‘The Paper.’

“With Tronc’s firing of more than 40 newsroom employees — including 25 of 34 sports journalists and most of the photo department — The News joins the ranks of walking-wounded papers at a time when readers have gravitated toward the quick-hit convenience of digital media. . . .”

Damian J. Troise added for the Associated Press, “The paper was sold to Tronc Inc. last year for $1, with the owner of the Chicago Tribune assuming liabilities and debt.

“In an email sent to staff Monday, Tronc said the remaining staff at the Daily News will focus on breaking news involving ‘crime, civil justice and public responsibility.’ . . .”

For the annual newsroom survey of the American Society of News Editors, the News reported last year a newsroom that was 73.2 percent white, 10.1 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic, 6.7 percent Asian and 0.6 percent Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. [PDF]

The News earned a place in the annals of newsroom diversity battles in 1987 when, as the late Les Payne of Newsday would write, the News became “the only major American newspaper convicted of racism in a court of law.” Journalists David W. Hardy, Steve Duncan, Joan Shepard and Causewell Vaughan won a jury verdict against the newspaper. The News settled with the four for a reported $3.1 million.

Family and friends of Markeis McGlockton, the 28-year-old man that was shot and killed during a parking lot altercation in front of his children last week, gather in Pasco County, Fla., at the location where he was shot. (Credit: Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times)
Family and friends of Markeis McGlockton, the 28-year-old man who was shot and killed during a parking lot altercation in front of his children last week, gather in Pasco County, Fla., at the location where he was shot. (Credit: Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times)

‘Stand Your Ground’ Law Permits ‘Vigilante Justice’

“It’s been used to defend a neighborhood crime watch volunteer’s fatal confrontation with a black teenager in Central Florida, a shooting inside a Pasco County movie theater and a shooting outside a Miami nightclub,” the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times editorialized on Monday.

“Now Florida’s indefensible ‘stand your ground’ law is being cited by Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri as the reason he can’t arrest a man for shooting and killing another man over parking in a handicap parking space. Blame the Florida Legislature and the National Rifle Association for legalizing vigilante justice.

“No one did the right thing in the latest ‘stand your ground’ case that occurred Thursday in a convenience store parking lot in North Pinellas. Britany Jacobs should not have parked without a permit in a handicap parking space, even if her three young kids were in the car and her boyfriend was just running into the store to buy chips and drinks. Michael Drejka should not have been so aggressive in confronting Jacobs about parking illegally. And Jacobs’ boyfriend, Markeis McGlockton, should not have come out of the store and shoved Drejka to the ground.

“But why should it be legal for Drejka to respond by pulling out a handgun, shooting McGlockton in the chest and keeping the gun aimed at the 28-year-old as he staggered into the store? The ‘stand your ground’ law has transformed Florida into the Wild West, and it has escalated common disputes into deadly confrontations. . . .”

Success and Fear of Scandal at NAHJ

Hugo Balta begins his second term as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Saturday night in Miami. He is standing in front of the new NAHJ board of directors and Alberto Mendoza, executive director, at right. (Credit: Facebook)
Hugo Balta begins his second term as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Saturday night in Miami. He is standing in front of the new NAHJ board of directors and Alberto Mendoza, executive director, at right. (Credit: Facebook)

Balta Is First to Have a 2nd Term as President

In a discussion of “Latinos & the White House: The Unique Challenge of Covering the Trump Administration,” Cecilia Vega of ABC News recalled Thursday that her mother asked why she would want that assignment: “You’re Mexican, a journalist and a woman, the three things he hates.”

The next day, Venezuelan journalist Laura Weffer told the National Association of Hispanic Journalists that President Trump was “so like” the late authoritarian president Hugo Chavez “in the way he treats media,” that she feared for the result: The media were held in high esteem when Chavez took office, but after years of being bashed as “bandidos,” journalists’ stock plummeted.

The same panel heard shocking first-person stories of unpunished violence against journalists, told by female reporters from Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia. In one case a female journalist was raped by her bodyguard, who had been paid to do so, according to reporting by Claudia Duque of Colombia. Such stories are chronicled regularly by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, whose founder and director, Rosental Alves, moderated the panel.

Those were just two aspects of the NAHJ conference last week in Miami’s skyscraping Intercontinental Hotel on the Miami River waterfront. NAHJ leaders said attendance reached 1,372, that more than 130 hands-on workshops were offered and that the association took in $1 million in revenue.

The conference closed with a new president — Hugo Balta of ABC and ESPN, the first NAHJ leader to serve in the role twice. Balta was president from 2012 to 2014, and ran unopposed this year in a low-turnout election.

While the National Association of Black Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association search for new executive directors, NAHJ retained Alberto Mendoza for another two years.

Below the surface, however, was a nasty contretemps involving an allegation from 2010 of improper conduct between mentor and student that was never resolved.

“The board announced on June 22 that it was opening an investigation into ‘an allegation concerning misconduct by persons associated with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists which occurred a number of years ago,’ ” Alejandro Serrano reported July 18 for the student conference newspaper, the Latino Reporter. “A day earlier, a lifetime NAHJ member had raised similar concerns, and called for an investigation, in a Facebook post.

“Russell Contreras said in the post that there were problems with the 2010 Student Project ‘and beyond.’ ”

Then, on Saturday, Contreras, an NAHJ board member from 2010 to 2012 who ran against Balta for president in 2012, singled out an NAHJ veteran for criticism on the NAHJ Facebook page over the matter. NAHJ, saying it had asked members not to discuss the situation publicly until the investigation was complete, took down the posting, but Contreras reposted it on his own page.

“To the members of NAHJ and the victims before 2010 and after, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have never run for president and I should have done more to address these allegations back then. I should have asked more questions and spoken publicly then. I left the NAHJ board and became disgusted that nothing was addressed. I will always feel I should have done, and could have done, more. I will continue to speak out now and look forward to working with this NAHJ investigatory committee so that student journalists have a harassment-free, nurturing space to grow. After all, I, too, am a [product] of NAHJ student programs. #metoo.”

In a message to Journal-isms, the target of Contreras’ comments, obviously upset, called his allegations slanderous.

Three members of the board of directors are on the investigating committee, which some members consider inappropriate.

Spokeswoman BA Snyder told Journal-isms on Monday that “we are looking into” whether Vicki Adame, elected vice president for print, is violating eligibility rules because she works for a state-run news organization, China’s Xinhua agency, in Mexico City.

Incumbent Maria Peña, a Washington-based correspondent for ImpreMedia who waged an unsuccessful write-in campaign to retain her seat, wrote the board late Monday, “ [S]he should resign or the NAHJ board needs to take the necessary steps to remove her from it.”

However, Adame messaged Journal-isms on Tuesday, “The bulk of my income is from freelancing. The work with Xinhua is a contractor position; the contract is for 3 months. And the elections committee vetted me and found me eligible, and even after I was on the ballot asked for additional documentation because individuals were questioning my eligibility. They found everything to be in order. I am also a lifetime member, a category that is not listed.”

Among the more eyebrow-raising sessions was one featuring victims of the shooting in a Parkland, Fla., high school in February that killed 17 people.

“The shooting changed many things about their lives,” Isabella Paoletto wrote July 19 for the Latino Reporter, the student-staffed conference news outlet. “It also introduced journalists and the media in a way none of the teenagers had experienced them before — in their homes and schools and communities clamoring for interviews and photos.

“It has pushed several to say they want to be journalists themselves, to right the wrongs they said they saw in the aftermath of the shooting.

“For Carlitos Rodríguez, 17, this revelation came after he and other students saw the same handful of their classmates on television, in the newspaper and all over coverage of the shooting.

“Those students, he said, were among the few willing to speak openly to journalists in the moments immediately after.

“Others, like him, were still working out how to describe the horror that they had just lived.

“But by the time they found their voice, he said, the media had moved on.

“ ‘It’s a school in South Florida that’s full of diversity, and you guys decided to pick the white bunch,’ Rodríguez said. ‘My friend Anthony got shot five times and he got no media coverage. Multiple of my friends, who are minorities, they were inside the building, they deserve to be heard.’

“Rodríguez helped found a social media campaign called ‘Stories Untold’ that highlights the experiences of students at Stoneman Douglas who have gone mostly unnoticed.

“In a video posted online featuring the voices of several shooting survivors whose names would be unfamiliar to most Americans, a message fills the screen: ‘What you missed from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.’

“The ‘Stories Untold’ campaign has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter and videos with as many as roughly 400,000 views. . . .”

The panel on Latino journalists covering the White House reached a consensus that they are not called on as often as others because the White House fears that immigration is all they want to discuss. They acknowledged that they feel personally Trump’s attacks on immigrants and Mexicans — and journalists. Vega said ABC now assigns security to be with her at Trump rallies, where “an entire crowd of people turn around and jeer you.”

But they said they have jobs to do. Ed O’Keefe, who now reports for CBS News, said that when he was at the Washington Post he asked a black editor for advice, since he had no Latino peers there. “All you can do is do what you do — tell stories; just keep telling the truth,” O’Keefe said he was told. “. . . just take it and channel it into your work.”

Regarding her mom’s fears about Vega covering the Trump White House as a Latina journalist, Vega said she replied, “What better place to be than sitting in that front row?”

. . . 22% in Survey Consider Leaving Profession

“Latino journalists are dissatisfied with their current salaries, limited options to increase them and a lack of opportunities for training and promotion in the nation’s newsrooms, according to a study conducted by University of Texas at El Paso researchers and NAHJ,” Borderzine reported Wednesday.

“As a result, 22 percent of the respondents said they are considering leaving the journalism profession because of their dissatisfaction, the survey showed. While more than 40 percent of the respondents said they intend to remain in the profession, another 32 percent are not sure.

“ ‘The results reinforce our suspicion that Latino journalists are frustrated and stymied by the lack of opportunities for professional growth,’ said Zita Arocha, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor of practice at the University of Texas at El Paso. ‘It’s alarming that so many say they plan to leave the profession in five years when the industry is in dire need of more Latinos in leadership and editorial positions to ensure proper coverage of Hispanic issues, especially politics and immigration.’. . . ”

The story also said, “The national survey, released today at the Knight Foundation, also showed 61 percent of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with their white non-Latino supervisors’ contributions to achieving better coverage of the Latino Community.

“More than 230 Latino journalists responded to the online survey voluntarily and anonymously between Sept. 1, 2017 and Jan. 15, 2018. Fifty seven percent of respondents were women; 61 percent work for legacy media and 33 percent work for Latino-oriented media. . . .”

. . . NPR Finds It Does Poorly in Citing Latinos

“Late in 2015, this office released the third-year results of an internal NPR study examining the diversity of the outside sources heard on NPR’s weekday radio newsmagazines,” ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen wrote July 17 for NPR.

“(Outside sources are the people interviewed and quoted by NPR; they do not include NPR’s own reporters and hosts.) Now we have a fourth year of that analysis, this time looking at the makeup of the sources that NPR used in five online blogs during the 2016 fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2015, through Sept. 30, 2016).

“The sourcing project, as it is known internally, is designed to give NPR’s newsroom employees a baseline understanding of the gender, geographic and racial and ethnic diversity of its sources — and ultimately push the newsroom to ‘better reflect the diversity of America.’ It is overseen by Keith Woods, NPR’s vice president for newsroom training and diversity. . . .”

Jensen also wrote that “The race and ethnicity of the cited sources varied . . . widely by blog, from 85 percent white for The Salt and 82 percent white for The Two-Way to 39 percent white for Code Switch. There was one constant, though: The share of Latino sources was low across all the blogs, varying from 5 percent for The Two-Way and Goats and Soda to 9 percent for NPR Ed and Code Switch.

“(The study did not tabulate a combined result for all the blogs, unlike for the last year of the study of on-air sources. In that survey of the on-air work, 73 percent of all sources for the radio newsmagazines where white, while the share of black sources was 11 percent, the share of Asian sources was 8 percent and the share of Latino sources was also low, at 6 percent.)

“One other finding jumped out from the online sources study: Overall, 44 percent of the sources were white men.

“The study merely collected numbers and was not designed to examine why the numbers are not more reflective of the country. But Woods said that NPR knows from the earlier study that there’s a correlation between the diversity of the newsroom and those who are quoted. ‘It matters who’s telling the story when it comes to gender balance and race/ethnicity,’ he said. The latest newsroom diversity figures are here.

“In particular, the earlier study showed that ‘Latinos were the only journalists who could be counted on to cover Latinos,’ Woods said. He added: ‘We have to do better at hiring,’ particularly when it comes to Latinos, and ‘We have to raise the level of awareness across the newsroom that we are still doing poorly’ when it comes to quoting Latino sources. . . .”

Native American Journalists Reelect Bryan Pollard

Bryan Pollard
Bryan Pollard

Bryan Pollard, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and director of communications at the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, Ark., was reelected president of the Native American Journalists Association Saturday as the NAJA board met at the group’s annual conference.

“NAJA’s in the best financial condition it’s been in years,” Pollard told the membership at a Friday awards luncheon. NAJA met as part of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference, an arrangement that enabled NAHJ to meet its commitment for hotel rooms and food orders more easily, Alberto Mendoza, NAHJ’s executive director, told the Hispanic group’s membership meeting.

NAJA registered 150 people in Miami, NAHJ President Brandon Benavides told the Latino Reporter, NAHJ’s student-written conference news organ. NAJA has 510 members, Executive Director Rebecca Landsberry said at the awards luncheon.

Elected to three-year terms on the NAJA board were Tristan Ahtone, Kiawa, associate editor for tribal affairs at High Country News, 63 votes; Pollard, 59 votes; Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, Cherokee, a Tulsa, Okla.-based freelance writer, 43 votes; and Sterling Cosper, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Mvskoke media manager, 34 votes.

The board re-elected its officers unanimously: Pollard as president, Victoria LaPoe, Cherokee, assistant professor at Ohio University, vice president; Jennifer Bell, Citizen Potawatomi Nation/Cherokee, director of public information, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, treasurer; and Krehbiel-Burton, secretary.

Pollard said his goals included responding to concerns expressed in a membership survey, expanding freedom of the press in Indian Country, relaunching the NAJA website, increasing membership by 10 percent and convening tribal media annually, beginning in 2020.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Leaving the Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is leaving his position as a national correspondent for the Atlantic, a publication where he has emerged as one of the country’s top reporters and thinkers,” Erik Wemple reported Friday for the Washington Post. “He has not signed on with a competing publication. ‘It was this or nothing,’ the 42-year-old Coates told the Erik Wemple Blog. ‘I didn’t have anything else.’

“In a note to staff, top Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in part, ‘Our colleague, and dear friend, Ta-Nehisi Coates is stepping down as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. As he has explained to me — and as he’s written in the recent past — the last few years for him have been years of significant changes. He’s told me that he would like to take some time to reflect on these changes, and to figure out the best path forward, both as a person and as a writer.’

“For the past several years, the path has been all forward for Coates. So forward, indeed, that it’s easy to forget that a decade ago, he had been laid off by Time magazine and was looking a place to land. With some assistance from David Carr, Coates did some blogging work for the Atlantic and was hired by James Bennet in 2008. ‘Saved my life,’ said Coates. . . . ”

Kalita Adds News, Opinion to CNN Digital Portfolio

S. Mitra Kalita
S. Mitra Kalita

S. Mitra Kalita, vice president for programming at CNN Digital and diversity advocate, has been promoted to senior vice president of programming, national news and opinion, Meredith Artley, editor in chief + SVP, @CNN Digital Worldwide, announced Tuesday.

“Mitra has been a champion of making our headlines, alerts and homepages engaging and packed with sharp stories in all formats. She has inspired and directed her team — and the organization at large — in the art of audience-centric storytelling across platforms. She has shared her process and passion for finding the language and imagery that resonates with millions of people every day. . . .,” Artley wrote to the staff.

“Mitra has hired and grown an outstanding and diverse team, adding richness and breadth to our conversations about what stories we do and who we do them for.”

Kalita joined CNN in June 2016 after a year at the Los Angeles Times. “She had set a fast pace for newsroom innovation, early on at the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press, and then as executive editor-at-large and ideas editor at Quartz,” Ken Doctor reported at the time for Politico Media.

Artley wrote in her memo, “This promotion expands Mitra’s scope to include two key parts of the digital portfolio:

“The digital news team which focuses primarily on national news, led by Cathy Straight, will now report to Mitra. In connecting this team to Mitra’s proven programming prowess, we are uniting the act of programming with the assignment, reporting, writing and editing processes on some of our biggest stories.

“The opinion team, led by Rich Galant, will now report into Mitra. This mighty group commissions on-the-news op-eds and essays. It’s worth noting here that our 10-year-old opinion team gets more digital audience than our competitive set, many of whom have been in the opinion game for decades.”

Short Takes

Alison Stewart
Alison Stewart

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