Maynard Institute archives

It’s the Content, Editors

by richard0448

ASNE Hears Stories Found Through Diversity

Nobody actually said, “it’s the content, stupid,” but winners of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ new “Diversity Pacesetters” awards pointed Wednesday to the most practical of reasons for having a diverse staff:

 

 

Stories they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

The occasion was a panel discussion in Washington at the ASNE convention, a day after the annual newsroom census showed that the percentage of journalists of color in daily newsrooms declined slightly, to 13.62 percent, far below the goal of parity with the percentage of the nation’s population that is of color, now 33 percent.

Only one speaker mentioned “diversity fatigue,” but with a $3,000 cash award to the top winner in each of three categories, provided by the Gannett Foundation, it was clear that someone thought a new approach might jump-start diversity efforts. Progress has disappointed advocates for decades.

Some of the winning examples are packaged in a 30-page booklet, “Diversity Pacesetter Awards: How the Winners Achieved Success in Building Diverse Staffs and Content.”

They include the story of Patricio Balona, a bilingual cops and courts reporter for the Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, who found out that Juan Ramon Alfonzo, a Spanish-speaker assigned a court-appointed interpreter, accepted a plea deal from prosecutors. Alfonzo thought he was pleading to a misdemeanor for stealing a toolbox, but in fact was pleading guilty to a felony. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

“Our coverage prompted a national expert to write in a report to the judge that the court interpreter was not fluent in Spanish and her translation was incomprehensible. That led the judge to throw out the man’s plea and sentence. The case helped spur enactment of a new state law last year requiring minimum standards for certification, discipline and training of court interpreters. Reporter Balona’s fluency in Spanish not only helped him get the initial tip but also allowed him to interview the man in jail, evaluate the interpretation for himself, and follow the proceedings,” according to the News-Journal.

The Laredo (Texas) Morning Times wrote about a poor colonia — a community where residents often lack basic services — whose Mexican immigrant population had a high rate of tax nonpayment. A reporter who grew up in Mexico dismissed conventional explanations that the residents were just too poor or didn’t care, recalling that in Mexico, residents did not have to pay taxes. When they were presented with fees for trash collection, they thought the city was trying to take advantage of them. After the reporter’s story explained the cultural difference, Editor Diana Fuentes told the audience, the city changed the way it communicated its fee structure, successfully telling residents, “This is how they do it in the United States.” “They sold it as part of the American dream. It couldn’t have happened if my reporter hadn’t mentioned it,” Fuentes said.

At the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, a reporter who had never been to an African American funeral service came back with a wide-eyed story about how emotional the mourners were, leaping out of chairs.

“We had to do some serious editing,” explained Executive Editor Ronnie Agnew, who is African American and knew that the experience was not as unique as the reporter thought. He also said Jackson had changed from 60 to 70 percent white in the 1960s and 1970s to 70 percent black now, and said, “we need people in a position to understand the sensitivity of those changes and guide the conversation. We have to have people who can bring stories to the table that ordinarily would be missed,” he said. Jackson residents are still talking about the four-part “Changing Face of Jackson” series the paper did in 2003, which required both black and white reporters, he said

Bob Mong, editor of the Dallas Morning News, said Dallas is becoming an immigration mecca, and that without sufficient diversity at the newspaper, “you become a 2-D person in a 3-D world.” He noted that the staff of Al Dia, the paper’s Spanish-language offshoot, last year detected how large the pro-immigration marches would become, far exceeding what police were telling reporters. Because of its Spanish-speaking journalists, “We were convinced this was going to be huge,” he said, and arranged for the Web site to feature audio and video clips, and for blogs in real time. In the end, 500,000 people showed up. “We were prepared because of Al Dia, and the coverage the next day was much superior to anything I had experienced in a breaking news story.”

With Al Dia, “we’re building a serious franchise” with an audience “that the Dallas Morning News could never reach.” He said expertise of the Al Dia reporters “is seeping into the Dallas Morning News.”

Mong also recalled that the African American editor of the paper’s weekend guide mentioned in the elevator that Dallas had become the third “hottest city” for black middle class visitors, after metro Washington and metro Atlanta. “Her idea became a Page 1 story. It probably got more response than anything we had done in years,” Mong said.

There were also stories volunteered from the audience: An education reporter in Austin who noticed that there were few school superintendents who were women or of color, and was ultimately invited to Harvard to speak on the topic; the discovery in Seattle of a newspaper war among five Korean-American publications; a persistent reporter took to editors complaints by Chinese Americans in San Francisco that a promised building was never constructed, which resulted in uncovering a scandal in which the secretary of state resigned.

A reporter for the Hispanic Link News Service got mixed reactions when she asked whether panelists believed the newspaper industry would reach its goal of parity.

“Our feeling is that it’s very important to have the goal and to try to help advance that,” said Phil Currie, outgoing chair of the ASNE Diversity Committee, moderator of the panel and senior vice president/news of the Gannett Co.

“Panels like this make a difference. Most of the people I talk to are interested. There are more people of color on these panels than there would have been 20 years ago,” Fuentes said.

But Jeannine Guttman, editor of the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, was pessimistic. “This is my 30th year” in the business, she said. “I thought I’d see more women in newsrooms, and I haven’t seen that either. If you look at the whole landscape, it doesn’t look very good.”

Agnew uttered the “df” phrase. “Don’t suffer from diversity fatigue,” he cautioned. “It saddens me if I see that newspapers are not making the effort. Our communities expect more from us than they ever have — just look at your Web site” traffic, he said.

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ASNE Candidate Urges “Robert C. Maynard Rule”

M. David Goodwin, managing editor for presentation for Cox Ohio Publishing in Dayton, Ohio, is urging what he calls “the Robert C. Maynard Rule” in his campaign for a seat on the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

 

 

“My proposal, though it might be viewed in some corners as invasively controversial, is similar to what the National Football League has made as a requirement for interviewing prospective head coaches: the Rooney rule. Named for Pittsburgh Steelers chairman Dan Rooney, the history-making rule requires all NFL teams to interview minority candidates for coaching jobs before they hire their choices,” Goodwin writes in the American Editor, the society’s publication.

“There is no denying the awesome fact that ASNE has led the charge to make America’s newspapers reflect the beautiful, racial diversity of our country. Perhaps it’s time for us to take a more bold and uncomfortable step to require our media owners to practice the same standards we write and opine daily about [in] other glass-ceiling industries. I propose we call it the Robert C. Maynard Rule. It would be named for the journalist who successfully lobbied in the 1970s for ASNE to adopt the goal of diversifying America’s newsrooms by 2000.

“The goal is not to horseshoe in diversity for the sake of diversity, but to make it a foundation of our industry’s baseline practices. I know it can work, because I’m a beneficiary. I was once a city editor who became an editor of a newspaper. It was the relentless commitment of Edwina Blackwell Clark, then publisher of The Middletown Journal and the Journal-News in Hamilton, Ohio, to find the most qualified candidates that included a strong diversity pool,” Goodwin wrote.

Six board members are to be elected on Thursday.

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Kim Godwin Named Domestic Producer for Couric

Kim Godwin, who returned to daily journalism in 2005 after a stint as acting director of the division of journalism at Florida A&M University, has been named a senior producer for the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,” in charge of all domestic coverage for the broadcast, CBS announced on Wednesday. The appointment is effective April 16.

Godwin was assistant news director for WCBS-TV, the CBS-owned station in New York, where she oversaw all day-to-day editorial direction and newscast production, as well as special projects. She joined WCBS after teaching at FAMU in 2004. In 2003, she left KNBC-TV Los Angeles, where she was vice president and news director and one of the few African American women to hold such a position.

The competition for viewers among evening news shows last week continued to be a horse race between ”World News With Charles Gibson” on ABC and ”NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams,” according to figures from Nielsen Media Research released Tuesday, the New York Times reported. The “CBS Evening News” was third.

Among African Americans, CBS was second place in “sweeps” period ratings in November, but in third place with Latinos. Leaders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have complained about the absence of middle-class, nonstereotypical Latinos on all the network newscasts. CBS just lost two of its Latino correspondents, Jim Acosta and Vince Gonzales.

However, Russ Mitchell, who is African American, has been a substitute anchor for Couric, and in a survey of the evening news shows during 2006 released last week by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, CBS correspondent Byron Pitts was the most visible journalist of color, ranking 20th of all reporters, with 76 stories reported.

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Unprecedented Reaction to Texas Girl’s Story

“I’ve written thousands of stories for the Tribune over the last 25 years, from around the nation and across the world, and I’ve never seen a reaction like this before,” Howard Witt wrote Sunday in the Chicago Tribune.

Witt’s story was “about a 14-year-old black girl from the small Texas town of Paris, who was sent to a youth prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. A 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, was sentenced by the same Paris judge to probation.

“If you had Googled the black girl’s name, Shaquanda Cotton, the day before the story was published on the front page of the March 12 edition of the Tribune, you would have gotten zero results. On Monday afternoon, there were more than 35,000 hits.

“The story has been picked up on more than 300 blogs around the country, many of them concerned with African-American affairs. It has generated thousands of postings to Internet message boards.

“It was the top story on digg.com, a site that ranks Internet pages by user popularity and recommendations. It became the most-viewed and most-e-mailed story on chicagotribune.com more than a week after it was originally published, which is particularly remarkable because most news stories on the site automatically expire after just a few days.

“And now the story has jumped across the ethernet into the physical world: Dozens of talk-radio stations across the nation were buzzing about Shaquanda last week, protests on her behalf were held in Paris, a petition- and letter-drive aimed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the judge in the case, Chuck Superville, is under way, and civil rights leaders from the NAACP and the ACLU to the Rev. Al Sharpton are weighing whether to get involved.”

“What’s driving the attention to this story is outrage” at what some believe is the excessive sentence, but also, as “a number of residents of Paris have contended, in e-mails and articles in the local Paris newspaper, that the Tribune story unfairly portrayed their town as racist.”

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Web Site Complains TV Ignored Obama Story

The Chicago Tribune published a long investigative story on Sunday about Sen. Barack Obama’s youth, “discovering that the story of his own life that Obama presented in his memoir is sometimes at odds with the facts,” the Web site Newsbusters.com wrote on Monday. But on television, the piece was largely ignored, the site laments.

 

 

“‘Several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them,’ the Tribune’s Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker reported in Sunday’s article, ‘The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama’s youth.’

“The Tribune reporters retraced the years young ‘Barry Obama’ spent in Hawaii and Indonesia, and found several discrepancies in Obama’s autobiographical accounts. But Sunday’s ‘World News’ on ABC never mentioned the Tribune’s discoveries (the ‘CBS Evening News’ was pre-empted by college basketball, while east coast editions of ‘NBC Nightly News’ were pre-empted by golf), nor were they mentioned on Monday’s ABC, CBS or NBC morning shows.

“On the networks’ Sunday morning chat shows, the only mention of Obama came from NBC’s Tim Russert, who asked ex-Senator Bill Bradley, ‘Do you think Barack Obama is someone who has tapped into idealism in our country?’

“Would the networks’ similarly skip over such detailed reporting if it cast doubts on a Republican candidate’s credibility?” the Web site asked.

A Google search found that the story was picked up by such papers as the Kansas City Star, the State in Columbia, S.C., the Biloxi (Miss.) Sun-Herald and the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported Tuesday that Obama has picked up the endorsement of Sheila C. Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television with her ex-husband, Robert Johnson. He is backing rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid.

And at the Politico newspaper and Web site, Mike Allen reported on Tuesday, “Obama’s gift with language — his powerful speaking style and the graceful prose and compelling story of his best-selling memoir — has been an engine of his dramatic, high-velocity rise in presidential politics. But he has also shown a tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips that serve as reminders that he is still a newcomer to national politics.”

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Gays to Debate Accreditation Panel Membership

Two former presidents of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association are challenging the organization’s decision to pull out of the major accrediting council for college journalism programs. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association have left the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. AAJA, like the lesbian and gay journalists, said it could no longer afford the $5,000-a-year dues; NAHJ left “in protest over their failure to vigorously apply the standards that would have been required for significant diversity gains in the 10 years of our membership.”

 

 

In advance of the NLGJA board’s meeting this weekend in San Francisco, former presidents Robert Dodge and Steven Petrow are invoking the efforts of Leroy Aarons, founder of NLGJA and a co-founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

“During the final years of his life, Roy worked hard to obtain a seat for NLGJA alongside the other minority journalism organizations,” the two wrote to “Board Members and NLGJA Friends.” “And his efforts came at a critical time: ACEJMC was in the process of adopting new accreditation standards that for the first time would require colleges and universities to address sexual orientation in fulfilling the council’s diversity requirements.

“This attempt will do great harm to NLGJA’s mission and could permanently undermine a unique opportunity to establish sexual orientation as a priority in the curricula of journalism and communications schools nationwide,” Dodge and Petrow argued.

“. . . if we are not at the table starting with ACEJMC’s spring meeting, there will be no voice to advocate for lower dues when the council considers proposals to reform the dues structure. And worse, if NLGJA is absent from the room, no one will be there to demand that the next generation of journalists is adequately prepared to cover the important issues facing the LGBT community.”

Eric Hegadus, the current NLGJA president, told Journal-isms, “Obviously, I am concerned about our non-participation in ACEJMC. With Robert Dodge’s help especially, we made strides in the years we have been involved with the organization; the work done on behalf of NLGJA is important, and we should be proud of it.

“But unfortunately we, like other journalism organizations that pulled out of ACEJMC, are faced with economic realities and have to make difficult decisions. Ongoing consolidation and challenging times in the media industry affect us, so it makes sense for NLGJA to examine its budgetary priorities to make sure we are doing the best job we can to support our members.

“. . . My hope is that either the decision to cut our membership from the budget a year ago will be only a temporary one — or ACEJMC will reduce the membership fee to a more reasonable one that has less impact on organizations like ours.”

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Paper Gives Malveaux Benefit of the Doubt

Commentator Julianne Malveaux received the benefit of the doubt from the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record on Tuesday as the newspaper evaluated Malveaux’s appointment as president of Bennett College, a small historically black college for women, located in Greensboro.

 

 

 

“Sheer watt for megawatt, new Bennett College President Julianne Malveaux does not match the star power of the woman she succeeds, Johnnetta Cole. Who could?” it said in an editorial.

“. . . where Malveaux may be tested most is in her lack of experience as a college administrator. Remember, even as commanding a figure as Cole had a brief run-in with Bennett’s faculty, threatening two years ago to resign in the face of faculty opposition to her presidency. “‘It was a daunting task to lead this college through revitalization and not have everyone aboard,’ Cole said, looking back.”

However, the paper noted that “Erskine Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system, and Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, have brought private-sector savvy into higher-education settings with dramatic results.” Neither had been a college president.

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Media Freedom Called Fragile in Afghanistan

“Hailed as a major success of five years of democracy-building, media freedom in Afghanistan is under increasing pressures. Those include a proposed law that would cripple media rights, and threats and physical abuse of journalists by government and military officials,” Alisa Tang wrote Wednesday for the Associated Press.

“‘Effectively we’ve moved from an open media environment to a state-controlled media environment, which is a considerable turnaround from the direction media was heading in Afghanistan up until 2005-06,’ said Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

“The Afghan media has changed radically since Taliban times, when there were no television stations and only a handful of newspapers that were completely state-controlled. There was just one Taliban radio station — broadcasting news and religious poetry but no music.

“Now there are more than 40 private radio stations, seven TV networks, and more than 350 newspapers and magazines registered with the information ministry. Afghan TV broadcasts everything from breaking news to cooking shows and the local version of ‘American Idol.’

“But critics say the new legislation, expected to be debated in Parliament within weeks, is an ominous sign that Afghanistan’s experiment with open media is on borrowed time.”

Elsewhere in the region, “Pakistan’s largest independent English-language media group, the Dawn Group of Newspapers, distributed a letter on Friday from Publisher Haroon Hamid, who said President Pervez Musharraf ‘has become increasingly intolerant toward criticism in the press and toward the publishing of news that reflects poorly on the performance of his government on security matters,'” the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Tuesday.

On Monday, the Committee called for the immediate release of reporter E.A.M. Asaduzzaman Tipu of the Daily Star in Bangladesh. He suffered a severe asthma attack two days after being arrested for his reporting on official mismanagement, the Committee said, citing the Dhaka-based daily.

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Short Takes

  • “The Federal Communications Commission Tuesday officially approved the sale of Univision Communications to Broadcasting Media Partners, a group of private equity companies, with certain conditions,” Katy Bachman reported on Tuesday for Mediaweek. “Under a consent decree, Univision has agreed to pay a $24 million fine for violating children’s programming regulations. Univision has also agreed to a detailed plan that will ensure its future compliance with the Children’s Television Act and other rules.”
  • “CBS News anchor Russ Mitchell is on vacation this week. He’s taking a preemptive restorative,” Marisa Guthrie wrote Wednesday in the New York Daily News. “He’ll need it. Next week, Mitchell — who anchors the Sunday edition of the ‘CBS Evening News,’ is news anchor for ‘The Early Show’ and a correspondent on ‘Sunday Morning’ — is going to get even less sleep than usual. While he works his regular weekend and morning shifts, beginning Monday he’ll also be anchoring the ‘Evening News,’ filling in for Katie Couric, who will be on vacation.”
  • “Nuestra Familia, Our Family,” a “stunning television documentary” by Oriana Zill de Granados, Julia Reynolds and George Sanchez of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, won a medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors in its annual awards. The documentary “provides an unprecedented look inside the world of Latino gangs, largely through the experiences of a man in Salinas, Calif., who raised his son to become a gang member. The program provides shockingly raw scenes of the Nuestra Familia gang in action, intricately detailing how it grew from a political movement among Mexican-American farm workers into a violent force that rules both the streets of California agricultural cities and the halls of the California prison system,” IRE said.
  • Former ABC News medical reporter George A. Strait Jr. will be the new director of communications at the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., the agency announced on Wednesday. Strait, who was a correspondent at ABC for 22 years, left the network in 1999. He has been vice president of content and media at the Dr. Spock Co., among other roles.
  • “The Los Angeles Times has decided to discontinue a program in which prominent guest editors would have overseen the Sunday opinion and editorial section after a controversy over the selection of the first editor,” James Rainey reported in the Times on Tuesday. “The actions stem from the revelation last week that the Hollywood producer designated as the first guest editor, Brian Grazer, had a business relationship that might have suggested he had received favored treatment in landing the assignment. Grazer was represented by publicist Kelly Mullens, who dated Times Editorial Page Editor Andres Martinez,” who has resigned.
  • Filling 18% of the overall newshole, the controversy over the firings of U.S. attorneys that threatens the tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is the second-biggest story of the year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The only one to receive more coverage was the debate over the Iraq war, which filled 34% of the newshole the week in January when President Bush announced his troop ‘surge’ plan,” the group said.
  • The Federal Communications Commission has scheduled its fourth public hearing on media ownership issues for the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., area for April 30.

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