Changes Mind, Baltimore Businessman New Owner
After winning the bidding for Heart & Soul, the black women’s health and fitness magazine auctioned off as part of the bankrupt Vanguarde Media, Black Enterprise publisher Earl Graves’ company has changed its mind and let the rights to publish the magazine go to a Baltimore businessman.
“The value isn’t there,” Derrick Godfrey, vice president for business ventures of Graves Ventures, told Journal-isms. “Too much time had lapsed, and the price to launch was in the millions.”
“Edwin V. Avent, part-owner of the small publishing and advertising firm Twenty First Century Group, said yesterday that he bought the 400,000-circulation magazine, which is aimed at African-American women, in bankruptcy proceedings for $60,000 plus $450,000 in assumed subscriber debt,” Andrea K. Walker reported in the Baltimore Sun Thursday.
“Avent said he plans to resume production of the magazine, which hasn’t published since February, in the first quarter of next year,” Walker wrote.
Godfrey said Graves Ventures had bid $80,000 for the publication in May, then changed its mind and, as a result, had to pay a fee of 10 percent, or $8,000, for not following through.
The magazine then went to the second-highest bidder, Avent, and the closing took place Sept. 1, said Ira A. Reid of the Baker & McKenzie law firm, which represented Vanguarde.
The publication would have been the first magazine other than Black Enterprise that Graves’ firm published since BE was founded in 1970. Its purchase was part of an expansion strategy that includes a television show and radio report, Godfrey had said.
The expansion strategy still stands, Godfrey told Journal-isms this week, but he said Graves’ company will stick closer to business-oriented media. It is also looking for a new syndication partner for the Black Enterprise radio show, since the previous partner “decided to put its resources elsewhere.”
Avent told the Sun that he planned to extend coverage of the magazine to men’s health issues as a way to boost subscriptions. “He also said he hopes to revive a Heart & Soul television show that once aired on BET,” the story said.
“Avent said his background in publishing will help him in running the venture. While a student at Cornell University in the 1980s, he started Equity, a campus magazine for minorities. He was also an advertising sales manager at the Ithaca Times newspaper in New York and held various sales and marketing positions at Baltimore-based Career Communications, which publishes U.S. Black Engineer Magazine and Hispanic Engineer Magazine,” the story continued.
“Avent will run the editorial side of the magazine from the offices of Twenty First Century Group on North Charles Street. He will keep sales offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.”
“When you look at our competition when it comes to health and fitness, you’re looking at Men’s Health, or Shape for women,” Avent said in the story. “There’s not one that really targets the African-American market that talks about the minority health disparities.”
Yanick Rice Lamb, a former Heart & Soul editor now teaching at Howard University, told Journal-isms that, “Since its inception, H&S has been a solid magazine with a loyal audience. I know that readers will be happy to see it return, especially if it has a strong health focus, given all the conditions that disproportionately affect African Americans.
“The idea of targeting both men and women has surfaced before, but some felt that a narrower focus on women would be more effective in terms of content and advertising. One premise was that women are the gatekeepers of the family when it comes to health and other subjects and that you needed only to reach them to reach the rest of the family. In addition, some women wanted a magazine that focused exclusively on them. But based on feedback that I received from men when I was editor of Heart & Soul, I believe that there’s a market for health information targeted to men. The interest exists, and the need is certainly there. While women have a lot of health issues, it’s even worse for men.
“It will also be good to have a national consumer magazine return to the Washington-Baltimore area. The region welcomed H&S, BET Weekend, Emerge and YSB with open arms, and people here still miss them.”
Sports Figures Buy Vanguarde’s Marketing Retreat
The focus on the sale of Vanguarde Media’s assets has been on its publications — Savoy, Honey, Heart & Soul and Savoy Professional — but in August, Vanguarde’s Impact Marketing Retreat, which brought marketing executives together, was quietly sold to a firm that includes NBA figures Shawn Bryant and Chris Webber.
Bryant, an NBA player-marketing executive until he left the league in 1998, told Journal-isms today that his GFV, LLC, based in New York, had bought the retreat, and that Webber, the NBA superstar forward, was “part of the process.”
Bryant is CEO of both the GFV firm and Game Face Ventures, which defines itself as “a full service athlete representation and sports marketing firm.” He compared the potential of Impact Marketing to that of Herb Allen’s marketing retreats in Sun Valley, Idaho — except “younger, blacker and hipper.”
The Hoover’s business database firm says of Allen’s company: “Viewed as something of a secret society, the firm has had a quiet hand in such hookups as Seagram (now part of Vivendi Universal) and Universal Studios, Hasbro and Galoob Toys, and Disney and Capital Cities/ABC. In 2003, the company handled the (still pending) sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers to real estate developer Frank McCourt. The firm’s famous annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, attracts more moguls than a double-black ski run (Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey have attended).”
Bryant said he views the Impact retreats as “an opportunity to help those companies to access urban markets” and to bring together figures from “all forms of entertainment, . . . music, film, television and sports.”
“I’ve been seeing the convergence of sports and entertainment,” he said.
The purchase price in bankruptcy court was $2,500, said Ira A. Reid of the Baker & McKenzie law firm, which represents Vanguarde.
Teen Arrested in Slaying of Dayton Reporter
Police arrested a 16-year-old Dayton boy at his home Thursday in the slaying of Dayton Daily News reporter Derek Ali, the Dayton Daily News reports.
Meanwhile, friends have established a college fund for Leah and Zuri Ali, Ali’s two daughters, the paper reported separately.
In addition, the Greater Dayton Association of Black Journalists is partnering with the seedling Foundation, the not-for-profit fundraising auxiliary to Stivers High School, a public magnet school in Dayton, to create a Derek Ali memorial scholarship, board member Mara Lee told Journal-isms.
Ali taught the journalism class there, and his daughter Leah attends the school. The black journalists chapter and Stivers teachers will cooperate each year to select a graduate who is interested in a journalism career, said Lee, a reporter at the News. She added that donations are tax-deductible.
Ali, 47, a past president of the Dayton Association of Black Journalists, was shot and killed early Sunday after police say he pushed a woman out of the line of fire. He had been working that night as a disc jockey.
“Angela Cathy Williams, Ali’s former wife and the mother of his two younger daughters, said, ‘I hope this is the person. The sad thing is that this is just one teenager with a weapon out there. How many more are out there?'” read the story by Angelle Haney and Lou Grieco.
“Ali’s oldest daughter, Dawn Collins of New Jersey, wept at word of the arrest. She said she was ‘relieved that someone gets to pay for my father’s life being taken away before his time.’
“The tragedy is that if Derek had met this young man, he would have helped this young man,” Steve Sidlo, the newspaper’s managing editor, said in the story.
Sgt. Gary White said that police believe the juvenile in custody is the only shooter, the story continued. “White said police do not believe Ali was targeted; the suspect and others had been denied entrance to the party earlier in the night, and the shooting may have been in retaliation.”
The boy was part of “a group of guys who wanted to crash a party,” White said in the story.
Funeral services are Saturday.
MBC Network CEO: Rick Newberger, Not Bob Reid
The Major Broadcasting Cable Network, the black network that is changing its name next month to the Black Family Channel, has chosen an industry veteran, Rick Newberger, as its president and chief executive officer — a post board chairman Willie E. Gary had said he intended for Bob Reid, formerly executive vice president and general manager of the Discovery Health Network.
Reid, an early president of the National Association of Black Journalists, had been serving as an “unofficial consultant” to trial lawyer Gary in the venture. While Gary had said he wanted Reid for the job, Reid had insisted at the same time that, “we don’t have a deal.”
In an Aug. 30 news release, Gary said, ?We have been on the air for nearly five years now and have made remarkable progress in building distribution, reaching an underserved audience and carving out a unique programming niche. Now we have one of the cable/satellite industry?s most experienced advisors stepping into the top management job to help us swiftly get to the next level.?
?Black Family Channel is on the cusp of a major breakthrough,” said Newberger in the release. “We are reaching 24 of the top 25 black markets through agreements with all of the major cable MSOs. This fall we will debut several new prime time shows plus a kids block from famed Hollywood producer Robert Townsend, who joined the network as President and CEO of Production earlier this year. Our Urban News and Black College Sports programs are being retooled and will come back bigger and better than ever.?
For the past 17 years, Newberger has been managing director of Vanguard Media Corp., a prominent media advisory firm based in Westlake Village, Calif., that aided in the start-ups of such networks as the Sci-Fi Channel, the Golf Channel, ZDTV (now G4TechTV) and SíTV, among others. Newberger will continue his work with Vanguard?s other clients, the release said.
Book Compiles 90 Frank Del Olmo Columns
“In a tribute commemorating the 33-year career of the late Los Angeles Times associate editor Frank del Olmo, The Times has published ‘Frank del Olmo: Commentaries on His Times,’ a compilation of 90 columns by del Olmo offering a historical sweep of some of the most important issues of the last quarter century,” the newspaper announces.
“Del Olmo spent nearly his entire journalism career with The Times and was 55 when he died from a heart attack Feb. 19, 2004. He had served as associate editor of The Times since 1998 and was the first Latino promoted to The Times’ masthead of top editors.
“He played key roles in the formation of the California Chicano News Media Assn. and the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists, and was widely recognized for his efforts to improve news coverage of the nation’s Latino community and bringing more Latinos and other underrepresented groups into journalism. He also worked on international journalism issues as a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists and his columns often appeared in Mexican and Latin American newspapers.”
Hardback copies are $26.95; paperbacks, $16.95.
Robbie Morganfield Gets Freedom Forum Post
Robbie Morganfield, who has directed operations of the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute in Nashville since June, when former executive director Wanda Lloyd became editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, has been named executive director. He has been training editor/instructor at the institute since it opened in 2002.
The institute is described as “a program to develop a new pool of journalists of color . . . The institute trains non-traditional students to work at their local daily newspaper in the United States. Most students are making a career transition into journalism.”
Morganfield, who turns 44 on Sept. 17, told Journal-isms that he is looking at making copy editing “a potential niche area for us” — training people from other fields to become copy editors; most are trained to be reporters — and perhaps using his master of divinity degree to help provide a way for journalists “to understand different religious perspectives.”
Morganfield is a 1984 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists and a 2000 alumnus of its Management Training Center. Lloyd is a 1987 graduate of the Management Training Center.
In his announcement, Freedom Forum Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Charles L. Overby also said that Gene Policinski would become executive director of the First Amendment Center. Policinski has been acting director since April, when former executive director Ken Paulson was named editor of USA Today, and had been deputy director of the center since 2000.
“Morganfield is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years of newsroom and classroom experience. He joined the Diversity Institute in 2002,” Overby’s announcement says. “He has worked as an editor and reporter at the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, The Detroit News, the Houston Chronicle, the Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune and the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel.
“Morganfield also has taught journalism at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where he was named outstanding faculty member; and at St. Augustine?s College in Raleigh, N.C., the University of Texas-Arlington, and at Texas Christian University-Fort Worth. He holds a master of divinity degree with special emphasis in practical theology and ethics from Texas Christian University; a master of arts in public affairs journalism, with minor studies in educational policy and leadership, from the Ohio State University -Columbus; and is a graduate of the University of Mississippi.”
CNN Closes Its Spanish News Site
“CNN has closed its Spanish-language news Web site because it wasn’t making money. CNNenEspañol.com has re-launched as an information site, focusing on scheduling, programming and anchors,” Caroline Wilbert reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Like many companies, business conditions have forced us to rethink our interactive strategy, resulting in the streamlining or closing of services that are not viable financially,” the company said in a statement.
Latino Lawmakers Hear of Low Media Numbers
“In front of the camera or working behind the scenes, Hispanics are woefully underrepresented in the television and film industries, a panel of media experts and others told a group of Hispanic lawmakers on Wednesday,” Sergio Bustos reports in the Arizona Republic.
Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif., who chaired the Capitol Hill forum, said, “Hispanics represent 13 percent of the population in the United States but only 6 percent of the acting roles right now,” according to the story.
“A spokesman for the Screen Actors Guild, which represents nearly 120,000 actors who perform in movies, commercials, music videos and on television, said Hispanics appeared in fewer roles in 2003 than the previous year.
“Of the 44,282 roles available in 2003, Hispanics were cast in 2,402 roles, or about 5.4 percent, Angel Rivera, the guild’s national director of affirmative action and diversity, told lawmakers. They got 283 fewer roles in 2003 than the previous year.”
Patti Miller of Oakland, Calif.-based Children NOW, a group that measures the impact of television programming on children, said that Hispanics often are cast in low-status occupations. The study found that 37 percent of Asian actors, 32 percent of white actors and 26 percent of black actors were cast as professionals compared with 11 percent of Hispanic actors, the story said.
Journalists of Color in Iraq: Hannah, Rajiv and . . .
“In six months, I’ve run into hundreds of journalists in various cities in Northern Iraq. I don?t recall ever meeting any journalists of color. I’m beginning to wonder if there are any here,” Ismail Turay Jr., a Dayton Daily News reporter who is stationed in Iraq with the Ohio Army National Guard, messaged Journal-isms earlier this week.
At the time, we could think only of The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, whose American parents were born in India, as a remaining correspondent of color. We’ve since been reminded of Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder?s new Baghdad bureau chief, who was honored just last month as Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.
Could those be the only two?
South Bend TV Writer Also Switching to Editorial
Last week, we reported that Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times was moving from television critic to editorial writer, diminishing the number of TV critics of color.
This week, Indiana’s South Bend Tribune named Alesia Redding, a general assignment features reporter whose beat includes reporting and critiquing television, to its editorial page staff.
Redding, a South Bend native who has been at the paper 17 years, including six in the features job, told Journal-isms she’ll be moving to the editorial-page department in the next few weeks.
Journalists Covering Debates Asked Their Race
“Journalists requesting credentials for the presidential debate scheduled for Oct. 8 at Washington University are being asked to disclose their race on the media application,” Eun-Kyung Kim reports in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“The question surprised several local editors and news directors, eliciting prickly responses from some and recalling for others a flare-up over the race of an Arizona photographer scheduled to cover a visit by the vice president,” the story continued.
“Requests for racial information have not been part of the standard questions posed to media covering the dozens of campaign visits President George W. Bush or his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, have made to Missouri recently.
“John Butler, news director at KMOX (1120 AM), said he found the question offensive.
“‘Here’s the deal: It’s not their damn business,’ he said. ‘We’re journalists, period. We’re not white, black, green, purple, male or female. End of story.’
“Alvin Reid, city editor at the St. Louis American, said he had no problem being asked racial information, in light of all the additional security measures law enforcement has taken after Sept. 11. ‘I kind of understand that the face has to match the media credential, has to match the race, and I’m sure, while they didn’t ask for your height and weight, that things like that are being screened a lot closer than two or three years ago,’ he said.”
Cops Search for Driver Who Hit N.Y. Anchor
Sade Baderinwa, an anchor at WABC-TV New York, was struck by a hit-and-run driver while covering a story two weeks ago but the driver remains at large, Michelle Charlesworth of WABC reports on the station’s Web site.
“Sade is now at home, recovering from her injuries. As for the police investigation, authorities continue to search for the driver.
“Crimestoppers has just set aside $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the hit and run driver.”
Top Gay Journalists’ Honor Goes to Fla. Reporter
Jane Daugherty of Florida’s Palm Beach Post has been chosen Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.
All awards are to be presented in Los Angeles on Monday evening, Oct. 4.
“The first-ever NLGJA Journalist of the Year Award recognizes the outstanding professional achievements of an LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered] journalist and member of NLGJA. A four-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Nieman Fellow, Jane Daugherty has devoted her three-decade career to covering the disadvantaged and disenfranchised,” a news release says.
“The NLGJA Excellence in Journalism Awards include $500 first prizes in eight separate categories (as well as a $1,000 first prize presented in the category of LGBT Media).” The awards are listed in the news release.
Black Anchor Team at 6 in New York
“Maurice DuBois couldn’t have imagined of a better day to start his new job at WCBS/Ch. 2,” writes Richard Huff in the New York Daily News.
“Indeed, the focus was on the news, rather than on how the new anchor did. And, based on his first couple of newscasts yesterday, DuBois did just fine.
“DuBois left WNBC/ Ch.4 earlier this summer after seven years co-anchoring the station’s early morning newscast. At Ch. 2 he’ll anchor the noon and 6 p.m. newscasts.
“At 6 p.m., teamed with Dana Tyler, DuBois appeared comfortable, if not a tad stiff, but that could be tossed off as first-night jitters.
“The Tyler-DuBois pairing marks the first time in many years that two African-American anchors have been teamed in New York on a TV station’s regular weekday newscast,” Huff wrote.
Glossies Seek to Score With Chinese Men
“It’s almost impossible to find a bottle of men’s deodorant in most Chinese cities. Chinese men are not renowned as Metrosexuals. But several publishing houses are banking on their ability to turn local men into sophisticates in shopping, and sex,” reports China Today.
“Up to 1995 post office subscriptions were the only way in China of obtaining magazines. Today a flood of titles, many of them short-lived, has appeared but the market remains fragmented compared to the sophisticated newsagent distribution system of Europe and the U.S.”
In another development, Kenneth Li of Reuters reports that “Vogue magazine, the venerable 112-year-old fashion bible, will launch a Chinese edition by next September, keeping pace with an expanding base of wealthy Chinese with an insatiable demand for Armani, Prada and Bulgari.”
