A year in the quest for a news media that looks like America:
1. Whiplash
The turmoil in the news business prompted by new technologies, changing news consumption habits and Wall Street demands ricocheted in newsrooms with a flurry of buyouts, layoffs and changes of ownership that left journalists feeling like whiplash victims.
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And while the changes affected people of all races, diversity often became a casualty to other priorities. Moreover, in the high-stakes game of buying and selling newspapers, people of color largely were spectators.
When the McClatchy Co. announced in March it had acquired the Knight Ridder Co., and immediately said it would divest 12 Knight Ridder papers, including some in increasingly multicultural circulation areas, no investors of color stepped up to buy them. (The new owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News do include one African American, Leslie A. Brun, chairman and CEO of Sarr Group, LLC, a diversified holding company.)
Reuters reported Friday on the place where the top-level newspaper decisions seem to be made: “Even though Wall Street investment banks have made diversity a top priority for the past decade, it may take several more years before women and minorities gain a foothold in the ranks of senior management,” the story said.
In the fallout from this year’s turmoil, Dean Baquet of the Los Angeles Times, who was editor of the largest-circulation newspaper edited by a black journalist, was finally dismissed on Election Day after resisting the parent Tribune Co.’s budget-cutting demands.
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Other cuts claimed Debra Adams Simmons, editor of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, who had had to cut 40 full-time newsroom staffers in August; Beacon Journal publisher James Crutchfield, who resigned after the paper was sold; and five journalists of color who took a buyout at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Ten to 12 percent of the 100 people offered buyouts at the Dallas Morning News were of color, including Esther Wu, president of the Asian American Journalists Association. Veronica Villafañe , immediate past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, was among 10 laid off in December at the San Jose Mercury News, where she was a “convergence” anchor-reporter.
On the broadcast side, NBC Universal announced in October it would trim 700 jobs. Casualties included
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Susan Kidd, anchor for 23 years at WRC-TV in Washington.
Also as part of those cuts, NBC planned to move coverage from local news offices of its Spanish-language Telemundo network in San Jose, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Denver and Dallas to a “Telemundo Production Center” in Dallas. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists protested.
Bob Butler, former reporter at KCBS radio in San Francisco and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association, was laid off as director of diversity for the Viacom Television Stations Group and Infinity Radio, and was not replaced.
2. Growth of New Media
The growth of new media was one of the factors causing cutbacks in so-called “old media,” but while the world’s estimated 100 million bloggers included some of color, the journalism side of new media did not appear very diverse.
When the Online News Association met in October in Washington, attracting 524 participants, journalists of color were few and far between. No one appears to be tracking the diversity numbers, but Ju-Don Roberts, managing editor of washingtonpost.com, an African American who is next year’s conference chair, said, “We need to improve the representation of minorities in the Online News Association.”
Newsweek magazine announced in September that Mark Whitaker, editor of the magazine for the past eight years and the first African American in such a role at any of the major newsweeklies, would become vice president and editor-in-chief of new ventures of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, digital division of the Washington Post Co.
3. Deaths of Giants
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The deaths of such journalistic giants as CBS News correspondent Ed Bradley, former New York Times managing editor Gerald M. Boyd, journalist-author Bebe Moore Campbell, Renaissance man Gordon Parks and William F. Woo, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made it clear that, in institutional settings such as CBS and the Times, no heirs apparent of color had been groomed to fill their shoes.
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Yet the stories of many of them — including freelance writer Valerie Burgher; Indianapolis Star photographer Mpozi Mshale Tolbert; Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reporter Julie R. Bailey; former Houston television anchor Cheryle Keck; Columbus (Ohio) television reporter Lauren Crowner; St. Petersburg Times reporter Paul de la Garza; Columbia Journalism School professor Phyl Garland and pioneer Vietnamese publisher Yen Ngoc Do — were inspirational because of the lives they touched and the examples they set.
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On Memorial Day, veteran cameraman Paul Douglas, a Briton, became the first black journalist to die in Iraq. He and soundman James Brolan, 42, were killed when the U.S. Army unit in which they were embedded was attacked. Correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously injured.
Martín Barreto, a former board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, died in a grisly New York apartment killing.
4. Changing Demographics
The nation’s changing demographics seemed to be making the case for more, not less newsroom diversity.
The Washington Post reported in March that, “The minority population in the Washington region will become the majority in well under a decade,” joining “a handful of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, among them Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The New York City region will soon be among them.”
Nationally, the non-Hispanic white population was projected to make up just 50.1 percent of the total population in 2050, compared with 69.4 percent in 2000.
Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said of the “majority-minority” projection, “Our goal has always been to reflect the community as much as we can. This doesn’t change it.”
However, Sharon Rosenhause, who chaired the Diversity Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said, “It would seem to make the goal that much harder to reach.”
Pro-immigration marches during the first part of the year made immigration one of the most written-about topics for columnists, and fueled a debate over word choices.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, backed by the other journalist-of-color organizations, called in March for an end to the use of “illegals” as a noun and for curbing the phrase “illegal alien.”
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5. Apologies on Race
More newspapers made attempts to atone for their hostility to African American aspirations in previous generations.
In February, the Birmingham (Ala.) News published a special section of “lost, sold, stolen or stored” photographs from the civil rights era that some editors initially were lukewarm about making public.
In May, the Tallahassee Democrat commemorated the 50th anniversary of a 1956 bus boycott in the Florida capital with a special 20-page section that included an apology.
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That same month, the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald apologized for the role that journalists played in the brutal 1916 lynching of a 17-year-old African American, Jesse Washington, in which his fingers were amputated for souvenirs and his fingernails taken for keepsakes.
In June, a 600-page report on anti-black riots in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 recommended that newspapers — particularly the News & Observer in Raleigh, the Charlotte Observer and the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News — help make amends for their roles in inciting the violence. In November, the News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer unveiled a 16-page special section intended to do that.
Elliot Jaspin of the Cox News Service Washington bureau began a four-part series in July on an American “racial cleansing,” in which, over 60 years, “whites across the United States . . . drove thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.”
6. Sports “Report Card” and Other Numbers
The “2006 Racial and Gender Report Card” of the Associated Press Sports Editors, the first of its kind, showed that 94.7 percent of newspaper sports editors, 86.7 percent of assistant sports editors, 89.9 percent of columnists, 87.4 percent of reporters and 89.7 percent of copy editors/designers were white, and those same positions were 95, 87, 93, 90 and 87 percent male.
The figures provided ammunition for filmmaker Spike Lee, who raised $721,000 to begin a sports journalism program at historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta.
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In other reports, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported in March that “the industry is falling further behind benchmark targets set by ASNE six years ago to chart performance toward a goal of newsroom parity with the U.S. minority population by 2025.
But the Radio-Television News Directors Association said in July that the percentage of minorities working in local television news last year was at the second-highest level ever recorded in its RTNDA/Ball State University Annual Survey.
It was different in the front offices. Despite gains that people of color have made in other industries, their ownership of broadcast stations remains woefully low, a study by a nonprofit group called Free Press, based in Northampton, Mass., showed.
A disturbing survey from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication showed a gap persisting between white and nonwhite holders of bachelor’s degrees when they sought jobs in communications. “In both of the last two years, the gap was 10 percentage points — larger than it has been at any point since 1988,” the authors said.
In October, the Gannett Co., the newspaper company judged to have the best overall record on diversity, reported that a record 19.5 percent of journalists in Gannett newsrooms were people of color, up one-tenth of 1 percent from last year.
7. Anchors Away
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In 2005, Elizabeth Vargas was named to co-anchor ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight” after the death of Peter Jennings. She has a Puerto Rican father and was quickly claimed by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists as the first Latina to regularly anchor the weeknight network evening news.
But in May of this year, ABC announced she would be leaving the anchor seat for maternity leave. It followed her co-anchor Bob Woodruff suffering serious head wounds in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq, removing him from the show.
Meanwhile, Katie Couric’s Sept. 5 debut on CBS as the first woman to be solo anchor of a weeknight newscast on a broadcast network was accompanied by a tidal wave of publicity and hype. But ratings showed blacks and Latinos did not join the bandwagon.
Lawrence Aaron wrote in the Record of Hackensack, N.J.: “Couric’s staking her claim to the legacy of Edward R. Murrow was an anticlimactic reminder that the network evening news is a closed club. While it represents a coup for professional women in broadcasting, network TV evening news anchor jobs are almost exclusively white.”
8. Ed Gordon Ousted at NPR’s “News & Notes”
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Ed Gordon criticized National Public Radio in August for what he said was its failure to take responsibility for problems with its “News & Notes With Ed Gordon” show, and was replaced in September by substitute host Farai Chideya.
“News & Notes” had been rushed on the air in January 2005 after activist and media personality Tavis Smiley suddenly left “The Tavis Smiley Show,” criticizing NPR for its lack of promotion and questioning its commitment to a multicultural audience.
Staffers were relieved that NPR did not pull the plug on “News & Notes,” which had lost 17 percent of its original audience. It remains the only National Public Radio newsmagazine geared toward African Americans.
9. Miami Herald Scandals
In 2005, former Miami City Commissioner Arthur Teele walked into the lobby of the Miami Herald, put a semi-automatic pistol to the right side of his head and pulled the trigger. Jim DeFede, a columnist who secretly taped a phone conversation with Teele before Teele committed suicide, was fired. Other journalists rallied to DeFede’s defense. What could top that for drama?
In 2006, a frenzy in South Florida over the illness of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was a contender.
But that paled next to a report by the Herald’s Oscar Corral that at least 10 South Florida journalists, including three from El Nuevo Herald, received regular payments from the U.S. government for programs on Radio Martí and TV Martí, two broadcasters stations aimed at undermining the communist government of Fidel Castro.
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The scandal led to the resignation of Jesús Díaz Jr., publisher for both the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald.
According to Christina Hoag, writing in the Miami Herald, the events illustrated “differing roles of journalism in Latin America and the United States — and how that divide plays out in South Florida. American journalism today, unlike decades ago, prizes objectivity, while Latin American journalism may advocate for change.”
If all that wasn’t enough drama, an editorial cartoonist dressed in an FBI T-shirt, carrying a weapon that turned out to be fake, barricaded himself in the office of the top editor of El Nuevo Herald in November. He was arrested and the incident ended without violence.
10. New Faces at Johnson Publishing Co.
Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, became vice president and editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, bringing someone from the mainstream media to Johnson Publishing Co.’s highest reaches for what is likely the first time since the company was founded in 1942.
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Monroe had been assistant vice president for news at Knight Ridder Inc., the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, when it was bought by the McClatchy Co. in July.
Monroe was recruited for the new position by Linda Johnson Rice, the president and CEO who is the daughter of company founder John H. Johnson, who died in August 2005.
Monroe hired Sylvester Monroe, longtime Time magazine correspondent, as senior editor of Ebony magazine in June.
In November, the company announced the appointment of Eric Easter, formerly of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, to direct its new-media efforts as chief of digital strategy. In addition, Terry Glover, who had been managing editor of Savoy magazine and was an online editor at Playboy.com, was named senior editor/online, in charge of digital content.
The hiring of Monroe was preceded by that of Wil LaVeist, who had been a columnist for the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., and executive producer of BlackVoices.com, as director of Web development. LaVeist is a graduate of the Maynard Institute editing program and its inaugural cross-media journalism program.
