Journalist-of-Color Groups Offer Assistance
Journalist-of-color organizations expressed their frustration over the lack of progress in diversity at local broadcasting stations after Monday’s release of the Radio-Television News Directors Association/Ball State University annual newsroom survey. They offered to work with broadcasters to increase the numbers.
“The percentage of minorities working in local television news last year was largely unchanged,” RTNDA announced. “The percentage of minorities working in local radio dropped.”
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists noted “a couple of troubling trends:
“Most of the general managers working at Hispanic stations (that responded to the survey) were white.
“Most general managers of color worked at public broadcast stations even though there are significantly more commercial stations.”
For the Asian American Journalists Association, Stanton Tang, AAJA’s vice president for broadcast, noted that the percentage of Asian American news directors has remained at zero since 1995. “These numbers are especially disappointing because the barriers that keep Asian Americans from entering and succeeding in journalism are the same barriers that prevent their rise to high-profile on-air positions and in news management,” he said.
“Asian Americans made up only 1.9 percent of the total television news workforce, down from 2.2 percent last year. ‘There is clearly very little progress, as this year’s number is even lower than the number we had in 1995,’ according to Rene Astudillo, executive director of AAJA,” a news release said.
The survey also found that American Indians made up 0.5 percent of radio news employees and 0.3 percent of television news employees.
Dan Lewerenz, president of the Native American Journalists Association, said in a news release, “If the broadcast news industry takes seriously its commitment to diversity, then we need to see these numbers turn around. That’s going to require outreach to both high school and college students. It’s going to require looking beyond the established journalism schools and finding innovative ways to train journalists outside the curriculum. It’s going to require paid internships, so that students aren’t forced to choose between earning work experience and paying for college.”
Unity: Journalists of Color, the alliance of the journalist-of-color organizations, issued a statement late tonight quoting Herbert Lowe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, as saying, “These numbers are so disheartening that I am almost speechless. They are as astounding as they are disappointing. We call on all broadcast general managers and station owners — and particularly those in radio — to take what ever steps necessary to increase the numbers of black news directors right away.”
Said Unity president Mae Cheng: “From the highest rungs of management to entry-level managers, each needs to take responsibility for ensuring that the number of journalists of color in the newsroom does not continue to decline.”
Ball State professor Bob Papper noted in his report that:
“The minority TV news workforce is down slightly from last year – 21.2 percent this year compared with 21.8 percent the year before. African Americans remained the same, but all other minority groups dropped slightly.
“The percentage of minorities in radio news dropped from last year’s 11.8 percent to this year’s 7.9 percent. That puts the number more in line with past minority percentages since the elimination of the strict EEO guidelines.
“Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans in radio news all rose from last year, while African Americans all but disappeared.
“Unfortunately, even as the number of radio stations that we attempt to survey goes up each year, the number returning the survey continues to fall.”
Two years ago, NABJ tried a different tack in response to similarly disappointing numbers.
At the NABJ convention in Dallas, then-NABJ President Condace Pressley said NABJ and RTNDA would work together to provide news directors with information about interns available through NABJ’s interns program, and make more information available to experienced journalists about broadcast opportunities.
In addition, Barbara Cochran, president of the RTNDA, accepted a challenge from Unity to hold a “diversity summit.”
Pressley had been criticized by some NABJ members for not speaking out immediately when the RTNDA figures were released. But Pressley said that “instead of just shaking a finger, why not extend an olive branch” and work toward “greater cross-pollination of the two membership bodies.”
Barbara Ciara, the current NABJ vice president for broadcast, said tonight that collaboration had produced only “a smattering of succcess.”
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Gannett’s South Asian Publisher Apparently a First
Ketan N. Gandhi, an Indian immigrant, has started work as president and publisher of the Gannett Co.’s Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, N.J., apparently becoming the first South Asian publisher of a U.S. daily newspaper.
The News Tribune, a paper of 59,000 circulation in Middlesex County, announced Gandhi’s appointment in its July 1 editions.
Gandhi, 42, comes from the business side. “He has spent 19 years with Gannett Co., most recently as vice president of finance and controller for Gannett’s Atlantic Group and the head of the Asbury Park Press’s circulation and online divisions,” the story said.
Leaders of the South Asian Journalists Association said they could think of no other South Asian publishers of American dailies. Peter Bhatia, editor of the Oregonian in Portland and past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is considered the highest-ranking journalist of South Asian background.
“Gandhi plans to adapt to the fundamental changes in the news business by supplementing printed pages with extra Web content and enhancing nondaily products,” the newspaper story said. “Local coverage will be intensified as the newspaper reaches deeper to every segment of every community in the greater Middlesex County area, Gandhi said,” according to the story.
Executive editor Charles Paolino told Journal-isms that Middlesex County and Edison Township include a substantial population of Indians, including an all-Indian retail center.
[Added July 15: Gandhi told Journal-isms he was “passionate about our business” and that in India, newspaper circulations are increasing, as are English-language newspapers targeting Indian Americans in his circulation area. “If I need to create some non-daily newspapers, I will,” he said, adding that he also wants to make his online presence “as vibrant as possible.”
[Gandhi also said it was important for his paper to have South Asian journalists not only to cover the South Asian communities, but to be part of the daily coverage.]
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Macarena Hernandez Joining Dallas Morning News
In both 1998 and 2003, the New York Times tried and failed to woo Macarena Hernandez, the Rio Grande Valley correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News whose story was plagiarized by Jayson Blair and led to Blair’s downfall at the Times.
But yesterday, the Dallas Morning News announced it had succeeded where the New York Times had not.
“Please join me in welcoming Macarena Hernandez to Editorial. She comes to us from the San Antonio Express News and will be an editorial columnist and member of the editorial board effective Monday, Aug. 22,” Editorial Page Editor Keven Willey wrote the Dallas staff on Tuesday. Willey told Journal-isms that she had sought out Hernandez.
Her note also said: “Her journalism degree is from Baylor, but her master’s is from UC-[Berkeley] in documentary filmmaking. She shoots Beta, Digital and Hi-8 video, and she just this summer reported and co-produced a documentary about the life and accomplishments of world-renowned potter Juan Quezada of Mata Ortiz in Chihuahua, Mexico, for Frontline World/PBS.
“You might remember her as the writer Jayson Blair chose to plagiarize. She’d rather have you remember her for ‘One Family, Two Homelands,’ a 16-page series published last December in the Express-News detailing the death of her family’s Mexican birthplace.
“She’s been at the San Antonio Express News for four years, most recently as the Rio Grande Valley bureau chief. She’s also been a GA [general assignment] reporter on the city desk and a minority affairs reporter covering Latino, African-American, Asian and Arab communities throughout the Valley.”
Hernandez and Blair were interns together at the Times in 1998.
“And just like Blair, she was asked to join the staff of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper after completing the internship there,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Tanya Barrientos, who described herself as Hernandez’ mentor, wrote in 2003.
“She was thrilled, and I was thrilled for her.
“Two days before she was to begin, her father, Gumaro Hernandez, was killed when a truck hit his car. I remember the telephone call and the stunned devastation in Macarena’s voice.
“What now?
“Her mother, Elva, needed her, and she was the only unmarried daughter without other family responsibilities. So instead of taking the best job of her life, she moved back to the tiny town of La Joya, Texas, and accepted a job teaching English to remedial students at her old high school.
‘”I was so angry,’ she told me this week. ‘Because not only was my father taken away, but my career was completely derailed.’
“The editors at the Times told her she could always come back, and she wrestled with the decision daily.
“But she decided to stay close to home, even after her mother got back on her feet, because she’d learned that family was more important to her than a Manhattan byline.
“In April 2001, on her father’s birthday, she began working as a reporter for the San Antonio paper.
“Robert Rivard, the editor of the Express-News, has called her una joya – a jewel – and an example of the sort of talent that a top-notch affirmative-action program can discover.” Rivard wrote that the Times tried to woo her again in 2003.
Willey said in her note Tuesday that she had collected and reviewed clips of more than 38 candidates and interviewed nine people in five cities before deciding on Hernandez.
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Hannah Allam Invites Critic to Spend Time in Iraq
Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder’s Baghdad bureau chief and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year for 2004, responded forcefully to a Tuesday column in Minnesota’s St. Paul Pioneer Press that denounced “the horribly slanted reporting coming out of Iraq.”
“Not much has changed since the mid-1980s,” wrote Mark Yost, an associate editor of the Pioneer Press editorial page. “Substitute ‘insurgent’ for ‘Sandinista,’ ‘Iraq’ for ‘Soviet Union,’ ‘Bush’ for ‘Reagan’ and ‘war on terror’ for ‘Cold War,’ and the stories need little editing. The U.S. is ‘bad,’ our enemies ‘understandable’ if not downright ‘good.'”
In a note that Clark Hoyt, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau chief, told Journal-isms he circulated to all Knight Ridder editors, Hoyt said Allam had read the column and replied, in part:
“It saddens me to read Mark Yost’s editorial in the Pioneer Press, the Knight Ridder paper that hired me as a rookie reporter and taught me valuable lessons in life and journalism during the four years I spent there before heading to Iraq.
“I invite Mr. Yost to spend a week in our Baghdad bureau, where he can see our Iraqi staff members’ toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom because they have no running water at home. . . If Baghdad is too far for Mr. Yost to travel (and I don’t blame him, given the treacherous airport road to reach our fortress-like hotel), why not just head to Oklahoma? There, he can meet my former Iraqi translator, Ban Adil, and her young son. They’re rebuilding their lives under political asylum after insurgents in Baghdad followed Ban’s family home one night and gunned down her 4-year-old daughter, her husband and her elderly mother in law. “Freshly painted schools and a new desalination plant might add up to ‘mission accomplished’ for some people. “Too bad Ban’s daughter never got to enjoy those fruits of her liberation.”
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Janice Min: Free Lunch or Free Agency
“Us Weekly editor Janice Min and Wenner Media agree on what she should be paid: $1.2 million per year, according to a source familiar with Min’s contract negotiations. But they don’t agree about what she can serve for lunch,” Gabriel Sherman wrote Monday in the New York Observer under the headline, “Janice Min: Free Lunch or Free Agency.”
“Owing to an impasse over staff perks–including catered meals–Min’s contract expired last week before a new one could be signed. Though the New York Post reported last month that the two sides had settled on a deal, Min is now a free agent.”
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Short Takes
- Black Entertainment Television, which dropped nearly all of its regular news and public affairs shows, plans a weekend news magazine program this fall. The notice was part of a broader announcement that filmmaker Reginald Hudlin has been named president of entertainment for BET. Spokesman Michael Lewellen told Journal-isms that the weekend news magazine was mentioned in the announcement in March that BET was replacing “BET Nightly News” with hourly updates, but was overlooked. That notice mentioned the “possibility” of such a show.
- Jamal Watson, executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News, is writing a weekly column on Wednesdays for the New York Sun in addition to his Amsterdam News duties. His first piece, on the Millions More Movement, appeared today.
- The San Francisco version of “Street Sheet, a no-nonsense tabloid focusing on the 15,000 homeless people scratching out existences in one of the nation’s wealthiest cities,” published by the city’s Coalition on Homelessness, “is the longest-running paper of its kind in North America, having not missed an issue since cranking up its presses in 1989,” John M. Glionna wrote Tuesday in a Los Angeles Times feature on the street paper.
- “The Spanish translation of KMAX Channel 31’s ‘Good Day Sacramento’ attracted lots of viewers but didn’t hold them, according to new numbers from Nielsen’s Hispanic Station Index. The ratings, which were strong in February, slipped precipitously in May,” Mark Larson wrote Monday in California’s Sacramento Business Journal.
- “The Committee to Protect Journalists is very concerned about the deteriorating health of several imprisoned Cuban journalists who have been jailed for more than two years, and it renews its call for the immediate and unconditional release of the 23 writers and editors unjustly jailed for reporting and commenting on the news,” the group said Monday.
- The National Association of Hispanic Publications, Inc. added its voice to those opposing court decisions that obligate journalists “to reveal their information sources, even after confidentiality is promised.” Meanwhile, in the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., columnist Wil LaVeist recounted Sunday the story of Earl Caldwell, the onetime New York Times reporter whose court case over protecting his sources went to the Supreme Court in 1972. LaVeist said he “was, in a sense, a Caldwell student years ago. I grew up in Brooklyn, reading his column, never realizing I would be inspired to the same special calling.”
- “The Herndon Davis Reports is the world’s first black gay/lesbian focused, weekly TV news talk show. It begins airing nationally in 16 million households on cable/satellite television beginning Sunday July 17,” according to Davis’ Web site. He told Journal-isms that the show would bring in experts to discuss current events from a black gay perspective.
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