Savoy to Pay Its Writers

Contributors to Get Checks After Year’s Wait

The Chicago-based incarnation of Savoy magazine, which went on “hiatus” after its June/July 2005 issue, publishing for less than six months, is paying the writers who were left in the lurch, publisher Hermene Hartman told Journal-isms today.

“I have paid the writers. I have started that process as of this week,” Hartman said. “By the end of August, I’ll have everyone paid.” She said she did not recall how many there were.

The delay took place because “I did not have the dollars. When I got the dollars, I kept my word,” she said.

One of those writers, Lawrence Ross, made his anger public on the Journal-isms message boards in several missives. A parallel discussion soon began on the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists, with other freelance writers sharing horror stories about publications failing to honor their commitments.

“When the marketplace has so few freelance writing opportunities for African American writers, I find it disturbing that a black publication would basically decide that they have no responsibility to its black writers,” Ross wrote. “As a black writer, this puts me in a bad position. Do I make an issue of this in the mainstream media in order to hold her accountable? Or do I continue to have faith, after a year of empty promises, in a black publisher who obviously doesn’t care about those who’ve contributed to her publication.”

Ross said today, “Hermene made a promise that she would send out my check by Wednesday. She apologized and I told her I forgave her. But I still expect my check within the week.”

Another contributor, Jawn Murray, who wrote the last issue’s cover story on filmmaker John Singleton, told Journal-isms, “After being misled and receiving false payment dates for months, I hired an attorney, Marcia O. Wright of Bynum & Jenkins, Esq., to make sure I got paid. After some crazy phone calls and then Hermeneâ??s staff treating my attorney like I was wrong for wanting my money, I finally received my check this past January.”

A third writer, Linda Mahdesian, said she, too, had finally been paid for a cover story for the never-published August 2005 issue “after more than ONE YEAR of calling, threatening, blood, sweat and tears, and writing letters . . . What do I think now? I am in a mixed state of anger and outrage and beaten-downness and concern for the other writers/photographers/and others who have not gotten paid yet,” she told Journal-isms by e-mail.

Hartman told Journal-isms she raised the money from the advertising revenue on the Savoy Web site.

She also publishes N’Digo, a black Chicago weekly, and rejected Ross’ arguments that she could have used revenue from N’Digo to settle her Savoy debts.

“They are two separate businesses that do not mingle,” Hartman said. “They’ll never be mingled.”

Savoy, which aspired to be a “black Vanity Fair,” was the flagship publication of Vanguarde Media, whose publications were auctioned in bankruptcy proceedings in 2004. Others in the Vanguarde stable were Heart & Soul, a health and fitness magazine, and Honey, which described itself as “a fashion and entertainment magazine aimed at stylish urban women.”

Hartman bought Savoy for $600,000 from the Jungle Media Group, a small New York publishing house that won the magazine at auction in 2004 for $375,000 plus the assumption of consumer liabilities. Hartman hired as editor Monroe Anderson, a Chicago-based veteran journalist who had worked at Ebony, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago’s WBBM-TV, and N’Digo.

Anderson told Journal-isms he went off the payroll at N’Digo in November and now writes a column on Sundays for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Hartman said Savoy remains on “hiatus.”

Whether the same writers would return is an open question.

“I have no respect for Ms. Hartman, she has done a disservice to her publication, the industry, and the small circle of black publishers in America,” Mahdesian said. “Her Board of Directors should vote her out immediately and she should write an apology letter to every subscriber and every writer/photographer/whomever whom she disrespected so blatantly (and with a haughty, diva attitude I might add).”

“Clearly Savoy was a financial undertaking that she wasnâ??t equipped to handle,” Murray said, also via e-mail. “They didnâ??t want to admit it, but she was in over her head from the very beginning. Itâ??s unfortunate that in these situations, the writers are the ones who suffer and had to wait â??- and some still waiting â??- more than a year to get paid. Savoy could have been a viable brand again, but thatâ??ll likely never happen now.”

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Mexico Drops Investigation of Murdered Women

Two years ago, the Orange County (Calif.) Register published an eight-part series, “The Women of Juárez.” “Hundreds of women have been killed in Juárez in more than a decade. Authorities link 90 of them to serial killings, but activists say the number is higher,” it said.

Last September, co-writer Yvette Cabrera accepted an award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists on behalf of herself and her colleague, Minerva Canto. She asked “every journalist out there to cover this story. As long as women continue to die in Juarez, our work is not done,” she told the assemblage at the Washington awards banquet.

This week, investigation of the cases suffered a major setback. As Louie Gilot reported Wednesday in the El Paso Times, Mexican federal officials have “quietly closed their inquiry without making any arrests, and they gave the 14 cases they had investigated back to state authorities, leaving relatives with little hope the killings will ever be solved.

“The victims’ families weren’t even told the federal investigation had been closed; they read about it in the local newspaper,” Gilot wrote.

Where does that leave Cabrera’s and Canto’s hard work? “It’s disheartening, but not really surprising,” Cabrera, now a local columnist at the Register, said. The series “was definitely worth it. When our project was published, we got over 1,000 responses. The awareness is our ultimate goal. The issue is an ongoing problem which needs sustained attention,” she told Journal-isms.

Cabrera added, “It was great the Associated Press and the other newspapers and media organizations continue to cover it, because that’s what it’s going to take.” She is also statewide president of the California Chicano News Media Association.

Rebecca Allen, the editor of the series, told Journal-isms, “the explanation that we have had is that the police seemed to be implicated in these killings. They just had very different standards than we do in terms of investigating something. People would move evidence around, evidence would suddenly disappear. There was so much politics involved, I wasn’t very hopeful. I just don’t think women are valued as much as they should be. When women are out walking in the dark, it’s their fault.”

Allen said Register editors have not yet discussed whether the paper would undertake any follow-ups.

In an El Paso Times follow-up today, Gilot wrote, “The Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has accepted looking into five Juárez cases, which where submitted to them in 2002 and 2003. Officials at the commission said they did not know how many years would pass before the families can see results.”

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Sylvester Monroe Editing Atlanta-Based Magazine

Sylvester Monroe, longtime Time magazine correspondent who most recently was Sunday editor for the National/Foreign Desk of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has left the paper to become editor of a new Atlanta-based magazine.

“I left the AJC on June 9th, a few weeks after the paper ceased publication of Atlanta & the World, the award-winning section I edited on the National Desk for more than 2 years,” Monroe told Journal-isms by e-mail.

“I was not fired or even pushed. I jumped when the opportunity came to do what I have long wanted to do – return to magazines, my first best love, and have the chance to lead one. The decision to leave the AJC was much easier than leaving the San Jose Mercury News because not only did the paper close a very popular section, they also started dismantling the national desk. Like other papers, the new mantra is local, local, local. I have spent my entire journalistic career in national and international news, and I saw no future in staying at the AJC.

“On June 12th, I started as Editor-in-Chief of MECCA magazine, an Atlanta-based super regional business, lifestyles and entertainment magazine scheduled to debut in September,” Monroe continued.

He said the publication is seeking a national sales director, a managing editor and freelance writers.

Monroe took a buyout in 2001 from California’s San Jose Mercury News, where he was assistant managing editor national/foreign and business.

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Warplanes Said to Shut Down Live TV Coverage

“The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern today over allegations by several television crews that Israeli warplanes had attacked them, effectively shutting down live television coverage from southeast Lebanon,” the organization said Thursday.

“Crews from four Arab television stations told CPJ that Israeli aircraft fired missiles within 80 yards (75 meters) of them on July 22 to prevent them from covering the effects of Israel’s bombardment of the area around the town of Khiam, in the eastern sector of the Israel-Lebanon border.

“‘Israeli aircraft targeted in an air raid TV crews, especially Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Manar,’ said Ghassan Benjeddou, Al-Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief. ‘It’s a miracle that our crew survived the attack,’ he told CPJ.

“An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman denied that Israel was targeting journalists. ‘We are targeting the roads because Hezbollah uses those roads; under no circumstances do we target civilians, including the media,’ Capt. Jacob Dallal told CPJ. ‘Journalists working in those areas are knowingly taking a risk,’ he added.”

• Iman Azzi, Nieman Watchdog: Who speaks for the innocent Lebanese?
• John Burke, Editors Weblog: Lebanese, other Arab papers focus on the U.S.
• Helene Cooper, New York Times: 2 Steps Back: Rice’s Careful Diplomacy Falters Under Renewed Assertiveness by the U.S.
• Editorial, Lebanon Daily Star: Banks and media have key roles to play in war – and its aftermath
• Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated: Middle East Fighting Dumps Sec. Rice Back on Bush’s Foreign Policy Hot Seat
• Paul McLeary, CJR Daily: Lifting the Cover of the Hezbollah PR Effort
• The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: Media Coverage of Israel-Hezbollah Fighting Shapes Perceptions
• Anshel Pfeffer, Jerusalem Post: Behind the Lines: Fighting under the media glare
• Reporters Without Borders in Beirut to express solidarity with Lebanese media (Reporters Without Borders)

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Black Anchor Called France’s New Heartthrob

“France is just wild about Harry. Since Harry Roselmack took over reading France’s most-watched TV news bulletin a week ago, he has been a runaway success. So much so that viewers are already beginning to forget that he is black,” John Lichfield reported Thursday from Paris for the London Independent.

“Roselmack’s presence on the screen – the first non-white to present a French mainstream TV news bulletin in prime time – was originally news in itself.

“His professionalism and refreshingly snappy style of presentation has since won him praise for his journalistic ability. TF1, the most popular French TV channel, says that it has received a few vicious messages from racist die-hards. Otherwise, the reaction from viewers has been positive.

“. . . He says that he is not interested in succeeding as a ‘black journalist’, only as a journalist. On his first night, however, he made a telling point. His bulletin included an item on a black woman who had been refused a job as a hairdresser because of the colour of her skin. This was a relatively banal, local newspaper story which would not normally have made the national TV news,” Lichfield wrote.

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South Asian Journalists “A Networking Dynamo”

“The word, ‘desi’ may not be in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, but it is very much on the way there to describe the South Asian Americans,” T P Sreenivasan wrote Monday for Rediff.com, based in Mumbai, India.

“The Federation of Kerala Associations of North America (FOKANA) is one of the largest desi organisations and the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) is one of the most effective on account of its impact on mainstream journalism in the United States.

“I was witness to the birth of the two organisations, the first in 1983 and the second, ten years later. . . . SAJA is more a networking dynamo right across the generation gap. Some of the grey members looked not only as fashionable as their spaghetti-thin younger colleagues, but also as keen to learn and to instruct. The sessions were vibrant in both, but in FOKANA the focus was on a heady cocktail of nostalgia, pride, money and anxiety about the future, while in SAJA it was on professionalism, career advancement, relevance to the American milieu, the image of South Asia and confidence about the future.”

The SAJA stylebook defines “desi” as, “A colloquial name for South Asians, people who trace their ancestry to South Asia, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Pronounced ‘THEY-see,’ it is the Hindi word for ‘from my country’ (from the word ‘desh,’ which means ‘country’).”

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300 Expected at Native Americans’ Convention

“The 22nd annual convention of the Native American Journalists Association comes at a time when native journalists continue to develop and native publications are flourishing, President Mike Kellogg said. The association expects about 300 to attend the convention, Aug. 9-12, Kellogg said,” Shaun Schafer reported from Tulsa, Okla., for the Associated Press.

“‘I think more Indian Nations realize an open and fair press benefits citizens and the government,’ Kellogg said. ‘Native journalists are not living under the old yoke of lack of press freedoms and they are doing better journalism.'”

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Hispanics Prefer News and Political Shows

“While telenovelas are certainly popular, Hispanics, like television viewers in general, are more inclined to watch news and political shows than any other format, and by a substantial margin,” Samantha Melamed reported today in Media Life magazine.

“Moreover, Hispanics are hardly wed solely to Spanish-language TV. They spend a surprising amount of time watching the English-language networks.

“Those are two conclusions of a new study by Encuesta, a Hispanic market research firm in Miami, based on a telephone survey of 335 respondents.”

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“Washington Week” Viewer Sees No Minorities

Gwen Ifill, moderator of “Washington Week in Review” on PBS, responded in an online chat Thursday to a viewer who said, “I stopped watching your show because I don’t see any minorities on your show”:

“We select our guest panels from the best reporters available covering the biggest stories of the week. One of the critical shortcomings in the news industry is that there are not enough folks of color working in those roles. I find that to be a hiring failure on the part of news organizations,” replied Ifill, who is African American.

“That said, it takes more than merely being a good beat reporter to get on the show. A panelist also has to be able to tell the story to a television audience in a way that is clear, engaging and accessible.

“But have no fear. We are always on the prowl for better ways, and better voices, to tell the stories.”

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Publisher Virgil Smith Wins Ida B. Wells Award

“Virgil L. Smith, president and publisher of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, is the 2006 recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award, presented annually by The National Conference of Editorial Writers and The National Association of Black Journalists to media executives who have demonstrated a commitment to diversifying the nationâ??s newsrooms,” the organizations announced (PDF) on Friday.

“In selecting Mr. Smith, the seven members of the Wells jury noted the efforts he has made to recruit, retain and promote women and people of color at his 59,000- circulation daily. Since he became publisher of the paper in 1996, the number of employees of color at the Citizen-Times has more than tripled â?? growing from fewer than 10 to nearly 40, representing close to 19 percent of the paperâ??s editorial workforce. Women and people of color represent about more than 10 percent of paperâ??s managers.”

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Short Takes

• El Nuevo Herald issued a “clarification” about a manipulated five-column color photo that implied that Cuban policemen were ignoring prostitution, calling the image “an artistic photomontage.” The paper had been criticized for not so labeling it by Chuck Stouse, writing this week in Miami New Times.
• “The tortured tale of The Source, the embattled hip-hop magazine, wound its way into bankruptcy court yesterday. Three disgruntled creditors filed an involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition against the Source Enterprises Inc. which could force a liquidation sale,” Keith J. Kelly reported today in the New York Post.
• Under the headline “Black and Blue,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Monday that “African-Americans distrust Mr. Bush’s party – with good reason.” In defending his piece Monday on his Times blog, he noted, “my wife is African-American, which gives me at least a bit of a personal connection to race issues. . . . Last week we had my mother-in-law’s pastor, a black South African woman who grew up under apartheid, over for dinner.”
• Eric Deggans, media writer for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, is returning to his old job as television critic. “I missed writing about pop culture and writing columns, and I’ll still be able to do much of what I do now. I’m very excited about the prospect of the change and initiated the transition myself,” he told Journal-isms today.
• “WBBM-Channel 2 news anchor Diann Burns is publicly backing away from claims that a contractor did lousy work on her $3 million home because she is black,” Steve Patterson reported today in the Chicago Sun-Times. “But she’s not backing away from those claims in court.”
• Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications displayed a banner saying, “We Won Full ACEJMC Accreditation,” as WAVY-TV in Portsmouth, Va., reported today. However, an appeals panel made only a recommendation, which must be approved by the full Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. The accreditation would be subject to a revisit by the accrediting council before May, as reported here on Tuesday.
• “A study released by Arbitron yesterday finds that most of the nation’s 26 million public radio listeners are over age 35 and a good percentage are liberal. Forty-four percent of those who listen to public talk radio are Democrats or Independents who lean toward Democrats, while just 36 percent are Republicans or Republican-leaning Independents. That’s the exact opposite of how commercial talk radio listeners identify themselves,” Media Life Magazine reported today.
• “Hoy, Tribune Co.’s free Spanish-language daily, said Thursday its nationwide average distribution had been audited at 185,245 copies by Wayne, N.J.-based Certified Audit of Circulations,” Editor & Publisher reported on Thursday. “Hoy distributes the Monday-through-Friday in the New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles markets.”
• The Society of Professional Journalists has awarded Andrea Lewis, co-host and producer of the “Morning Show” at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, Calif., and George Daniels, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, Diversity Outreach Leadership Grants for the 2006-07 year, the organization announced Thursday. Six people were selected. “The grants aim to strengthen diversity within the Society leadership and to build its ongoing efforts in this area internally. Participants expand their leadership skills through a training session followed by a year-long mentoring relationship with top national leaders in SPJ.”
• The Virginia-based National Association of Minority Media Executives is relocating, “thanks to the generosity of the Gannett Company.” NAMME expects to be headquartered in the McLean, Va., offices of Gannett Co. on Monday. Unity: Journalists of Color is also located at Gannett headquarters.
• Peggy Chang, congressional reporter for the Voice of America, made The Hill newspaper’s list of “The 50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill.”
• Bill Nunn Sr., 81, former Pittsburgh Courier sports editor and longtime Pittsburgh Steelers scout, was the subject of a q-and-a Monday with Chuck Finder of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Nunn’s father, William G. Nunn, “oversaw the news operation of The Pittsburgh Courier at a time when it was arguably the most influential black publication in America.” His son, Bill Nunn, has performed in 45-plus movies.
• BBC investigative reporter Mark Daley spent more than a year investigating the murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence, a black man who was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths at a bus stop in 1993. The case caused an uproar in Britain. Daley’s “investigation has uncovered damning evidence that suggests that an alleged corrupt police officer, former Detective Sergeant John Davidson, shielded the five suspects helping them to evade justice,” the Bexley Times reported on Thursday.
• In China, “A journalist has died after being beaten by a police chief in Guizhou province, one of his colleagues and a human rights group said yesterday,” the South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday. “Xiao Guopeng, an editor at the Anshun Daily newspaper, was punched and knocked to the ground by police official Pan Dengfeng, another editor said.”
• In Brazil, “Reporters Without Borders voiced horror today on learning that Ajuricaba Monassa de Paula, a 73-year-old freelance journalist and member of the local opposition, was beaten to death in public in Guapirimim (in Rio de Janeiro state) on 24 July by a municipal councillor he had criticised. Monassa was affiliated to the Brazilian Press Association,” the organization said on Thursday.
• Zambia’s media “will not be able to publish speculative analysis, unsourced opinion polls or predict the result before the official announcement, unless they are willing to risk a five-year jail sentence or US$2,500 fine” under a new electoral act,” UN Integrated Regional Information Networks reported on Monday.