2 Additional Journalists of Color Take Buyouts
At least two more journalists of color, including an assistant managing editor, are leaving Newsday as Tribune Co. newspapers implement new owner Sam Zell‘s orders to cut costs.
Genetta M. Adams, the assistant managing editor for features, confirmed to Journal-isms that she was taking the buyout. Another black journalist, Stacie Walker, a deputy national editor, also accepted the buyout, according to Keith J. Kelly, reporting Friday in the New York Post. Walker was off on Friday and could not be reached.
“Zell yesterday struck Newsday with a vengeance, whacking 120 jobs, including 25 unionized editorial people in the newsroom and about 10 top editors, including the paper’s entire national desk,” Kelly wrote.
“The cost-cutting moves are at least the sixth major downsizing at the paper since it closed its New York Newsday edition in 1995.
“The four-person national desk was brought into the office of Managing Editor Debbie Henley on Tuesday was told that the desk was being abolished and that they had until noon on Wednesday to a accept a ‘voluntary’ buyout or be faced with a potential axing.
“The two-person Albany bureau and the three-person Washington bureau weren’t affected by the cuts.
“However, Zell has said that the current set up in Washington for all the Tribune-owned papers is ‘unsustainable,’ so no one there is resting easy, either — even if they did escape yesterday’s axing.
“National Editor Calvin Lawrence left several weeks ago for ABCnews.com, and his position was not filled.”
Adams told Journal-isms, “I have no definite plans at the moment. Taking the buyout was an opportunity for me to travel down some different avenues. I have a wide range of interests and I’m eager to explore some of them.”
Adams came to the paper as deputy features editor in 1998. In 2000, she was named pop music/popular culture editor. She became deputy entertainment editor in 2002 and arts and entertainment editor in 2003. Before arriving at Newsday, she was lifestyles editor at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. In 2005, Adams edited a multipart series on the history of hip-hop that became a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“There’s a lot of anxiety in here,” Zachary Dowdy told Journal-isms. He is vice president/editorial of Local 406 of the Graphic Communications Conference/International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “People want to know where they stand. We don’t know how many are coming forward yet.” They are asking questions ranging from the tax implications of taking a lump-sum settlement to what would happen to their accrued vacation days, he said.
Seniority guidelines will be followed with any layoffs, Dowdy said, putting some recently arrived journalists of color at risk, including at least one who had previously been laid off elsewhere.
As Keiko Morris reported in Newsday on Feb. 13, “Publishers at The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant and the Chicago Tribune Media Group sent out memos outlining the estimated number of positions to be eliminated by the end of March. The Los Angeles Times also confirmed it had set an approximate number of positions it is seeking to drop from its workforce.”
Sam Davis, an assistant managing editor at the Sun, told Journal-isms on Friday, “We’re looking at a very small number in the newsroom, and we don’t have any journalists of color on our list.”
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel also trimmed its staff, but the cuts apparently did not affect the newsroom. There was also no indication that they affected newsroom employees at the Orlando Sentinel, another Tribune Co. paper.
Tribune Co. is not the only media company in the midst of cutbacks.
“At the San Jose Mercury News, reporters have been instructed to wait at home on the morning of March 7. If they don’t get a phone call by 10 a.m. telling them that they’ve lost their jobs, they should head to work,” Thomas S. Mulligan and James Rainey wrote Friday in the Los Angeles Times.
“Today, the Los Angeles Daily News will say goodbye to 22 more editors and reporters, paring its newsroom to 100 people from nearly twice that many a few years ago. Editor Ron Kaye gave the news in a tearful address to his staff Wednesday.
“Employees at The Times have until 3 p.m. Monday to respond to a voluntary buyout offer aimed at eliminating 100 to 150 jobs, 40 to 50 of them in the newsroom. If not enough people volunteer, layoffs will make up the balance.
They continued: “If Zell’s point is that the real money is in local news, the recent experience of the Daily News, the Orange County Register and the regional dailies ringing the Bay Area — all more locally oriented than The Times — has been a discouraging counter example. Their inability to keep ad revenue from falling at double-digit percentages year over year has led to staff reductions that further hobble local news coverage.”
Newsday’s story quoted Dennis Grabhorn, president of Local 406, saying he did not agree with the constant cuts at the Long Island, N.Y., paper, noting that it had been only a year and a half since the last contract was signed and a substantial job reduction made. “Really, all . . . this paper is doing now is getting rid of more Indians and keeping the chiefs,” Grabhorn said.
” ‘I just don’t understand how a newspaper being the only daily newspaper on an island with more than 3 million people can have a circulation of less than 400,000 readers,’ Grabhorn later added. ‘I find that hard to accept. I don’t understand why Newsday cannot sell on this island and that just tells me that Newsday is not putting effort into growing circulation.'”
Boston Globe: Globe offers voluntary buyouts to employees
Michael Calderone, Politico.com: D.C. bureaus cut costs, coverage
Kevin Roderick, LA Observed: ‘Worst day ever. . . heartbreaking’ at Daily News
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
NBC News Future Said to Be Online, on Cable
“The future of NBC News is not on the broadcast network, but at MSNBC and online, said Jeff Zucker, president of CEO of NBC Universal,” Marisa Guthrie reported Thursday for Broadcasting & Cable.
” ‘We are just living in an incredibly different world,’ Zucker said during a question-and-answer session at Harvard Business School’s 2008 Entertainment and Media Conference Wednesday.
“Pointing out that few people in the audience of students, faculty and media gathered there likely watch the 6:30 p.m. newscast, Zucker said NBC News is lucky to have a cable-news outlet in MSNBC, adding that more and more content will continue to migrate there and to MSNBC.com.
” ‘The definition of NBC News is really changing,’ he added, ‘and it’s becoming more MSNBC and MSNBC.com.'”
David Bauder, Associated Press: NBC: Bush kept off network to promote MSNBC
Reuters: More Americans turning to Web for news
Rasmussen Reports: 24% Have Favorable Opinion of New York Times
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Reporter Remembers Covering Obama in Illinois
Did Sen. Barack Obama rise in Illinois politics by having a patron who put his name on high-profile bills for which other legislators had done the groundwork? Did he ignore key issues important to his black community constituents? And did he win election by hiring a fellow Harvard alum to find flaws in the petitions of his opponents, knocking them off the ballot?
Yes, writes Todd Spivak, who in “Barack Obama and me,” appearing in the Feb. 28 issue of the alternative paper the Houston Press, recounts his days at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers in Chicago, covering the “young hungry state legislator.”
“As a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South Siders,” Spivak wrote.
“When the City of Chicago seized the 70-year-old Gerri’s Palm Tavern by eminent domain in 2001, sparking citywide protests, Obama was silent. And he offered no public comments when the 30-year owner of the Checkerboard Lounge was forced to relocate a couple years later.
“Even in Hyde Park, Obama declined to take a position on a years-long battle waged by hundreds of local community activists fighting against the city’s plan to replace the historic limestone seawall along Lake Michigan — a popular spot to sunbathe and swim — with concrete steps.
Spivak says in the piece, “I admired the guy — and still do.” But he begins his story indicating he is on the outs: “It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.”
He continues, “Obama’s aloofness on key community issues for years frustrated” Harold Lucas, a veteran South Side community organizer, “and many other South Siders. Now they believe he was just afraid of making political enemies or being pigeonholed as a black candidate. Lucas says he has since become an ardent Obama supporter,” Spivak continues.
“Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.
“Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets — to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district — to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.”
In addition, Obama’s patron, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, “appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“‘I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,’ State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. ‘Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Us Weekly Readers Want to Know: Boxers or Briefs?
“Reading about Sen. Barack Obama’s undergarment preferences seems to be of more interest to Us Weekly’s readers than Britney Spears’ custody battles,” Women’s Wear Daily reported on Friday. “The magazine posted a[n] excerpt on its Web site from its three-page feature on the presidential candidate late Wednesday night, slugged ‘Barack Obama Refuses Boxers or Briefs Question.’ The story generated the second-highest traffic ever for a single article on the site, second only to the news on Heath Ledger’s death. In just 12 hours, the Obama story got 434,002 unique visitors and more than 3.6 million page views.”
For the record, Obama’s answer to the underwear query, to which Bill Clinton did respond in a 1992 interview with MTV: “I don’t answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in ’em!”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Dallas Paper’s Staffers Can’t Vote in Caucuses
“The question has arisen: Can employees or spouses attend party caucuses on Tuesday, as well as voting?” Managing Editor George Rodrigue wrote Wednesday to staffers at the Dallas Morning News.
“Company policy is that newsroom employees can and should exercise their right to vote, but should not participate as activists, organizers, etc. So this is a tough call.
“The ruling from the chair is, it’s OK for spouses to attend caucuses, but not for newsroom employees. The caucus just might be seen as a step into activism, and we don’t want to create false impressions that way.”
Journalists at the Denver Post, living in a state that held presidential party caucuses Feb.5 and a city that is to play host to the Democratic National Convention in August, were not barred from participating in the caucuses, but “Honestly, I would prefer you didn’t,” Editor Gregory Moore told staffers in January.
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Remember, Richardson’s No Longer Clean-Shaven
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson started growing a beard once he dropped out of the presidential race in January. Sometimes cartoonist John Trever of the Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal drew him with whiskers; sometimes without. On Sunday (bottom panel), Trever forgot them. He teased his editor for not catching it, and together they came up with a jokey correction (top panel).
Amy Alexander, thedailyvoice.com: What the candidates forgot to debate
Nayaba Arinde, New York Amsterdam News: Farrakhan Praises Obama, Draws Denouncement
Betty Bayé, Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal: Maybe John McCain should visit Greensboro’s Woolworth
Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America: The press will torment Obama, too
Sylvester Brown, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Clinton, Obama shouldn’t have to also battle stereotypes
Juan Cole, Salon.com: Obama should be proud to be named Hussein
Wayne Dawkins, freelance: Yes, Obama’s positions are more than just talk
Michael Dawson, theRoot.com: He’s Black and We’re Proud
Merlene Davis, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader: This election season can’t be beat
Ralph De La Cruz, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Our delegate condition
Shanna Flowers, Roanoke (Va.) Times: Clinton is down but not yet out
Sam Fulwood III, theRoot.com: Comfort Level Rising
Megan Garber, Columbia Journalism Review: Shrill-ary: Is Clinton’s problem as basic as her voice?
Arnold Garcia Jr., Austin (Texas) American-Statesman: Big primary turnout could brighten future for Democrats
Carlos Guerra, San Antonio Express-News: Texas Democrats’ political action born of economic discontent
Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times: See Obama for who he is
Errol Louis, New York Daily News: Tuning out the demagogues
Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, Washington Informer: Trying a Marion Barry on Obama?
Phillip Morris, Cleveland Plain Dealer: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama ignore city, deliver snow jobs
Linda Moss, Multichannel News: Hillary Clinton Visits Jon Stewart On Monday
Askia Muhammad, Washington Informer: What’s Ralph Nader Been Smoking?
Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune: Democrats run from free trade
David Person, Huntsville (Ala.) Times: Lewis’ appropriate change of heart
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Personality Matters
George Rodrigue, Dallas Morning News: Readers wonder why we haven’t covered various allegations against Obama
Ron Walters, National Newspaper Publishers Association: The State of Black Politics: Confused
Rod Watson, Buffalo News: The one thing Obama doesn’t talk about
Michael Wilbon, Washington Post: Oden Gets a Vote for Standing Up for His Beliefs
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Buckley Said to Have Outgrown Racist Sympathies
Deep inside some of the longer obituaries of polysyllabic conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who died Wednesday at 82, were passages such as this from the New York Times:
“In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for ‘the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order,’ with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication ‘stands athwart history yelling Stop.’
“It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.”
Two black Republicans, commentator Armstrong Williams and onetime Richard Nixon White House aide Robert J. Brown, told Journal-isms on Friday that Buckley ended up on the right side of history.
“He was a racist at one time,” said Williams, but once he saw how “vile” were the actions of opponents of the civil rights movement, “he came to realize the immorality of this. I respected him,” Williams said. The native South Carolinian recalled appearing on Buckley’s television show, “Firing Line,” taped in that state. The host told him, “your voice is important. Conservatives need to see you.” “He always wanted to improve upon himself,” Williams said.
Brown, who continues to run a consulting business from High Point, N.C., said Buckley “was conservative yet he was fair. Many blacks equate conservatism with being segregationist or being unfair. But Bill Buckley was not that kind of guy. He was straightforward in his beliefs” that “everybody ought to have a fair chance at a job or whatever he wanted to do. That should be the dream and aspiration of every American. . . . He had no use for segregation.”
But in a 1989 interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” rebroadcast on Thursday, host Terri Gross read Buckley words he had written during the civil rights movement:
“The central question that emerges is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail politically and culturally in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is yes. The white community is so entitled because for the time being it is the advanced race. The question, as far as the white community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct.”
Buckley told Gross, “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct. That is to say, if you believe, as we have traditionally believed up until about 12 years ago, that you shouldn’t vote unless you’re literate, and if you are prepared to admit that the South was very heavily neglecting the education of black people, then under the circumstances, you would have a much higher incidence of white people than of black people voting.”
He continued, “We lived then in an age in which people, including myself, contributed to something called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Well, if you acknowledge that you want to advance colored people, you acknowledge that they weren’t at that point as advanced as other people. And under the circumstances they suffered certain disqualifications which we all deplore but which we can’t assume were not so.”
Gross said, “So you still don’t believe in universal suffrage.”
Buckley replied, “I don’t believe in universal suffrage if it’s defined as anybody who is biologically 18 years old is entitled to vote. Absolutely not. I believe there ought to be certain minimal reservations, which is what was also believed by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson and [John] Adams and anybody you can think of.”
Buckley had other opinions that did not sit well with those outside the Establishment. The group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting complained that in the Associated Press obituary, “There is no mention, for instance, that Buckley once penned a New York Times op-ed in which he called for special quarantine camps for people with HIV.”
On his Nation magazine blog, Richard Kim also blasted Buckley for his ideas on dealing with people with HIV. Kim wrote, “tell me how such Neanderthal views on public health pass for brilliance or wit? Is anyone laughing? Maybe Norman Mailer said it best when he called Buckley a ‘second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row.'”
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Gannett Execs Not Challenging “Poopgate” Story
“I couldn’t make this up if I tried,” Jim Hopkins wrote Feb. 15 on his blog about Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper company.
“A reliable Gannett Blog tipster says Corporate sent a human resources representative to the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., yesterday after the Big Cheeses in McLean, Va., got a letter describing a serious state of low morale in the newsroom,” he wrote. “OK: We all know newsrooms are hothouses of unhappy journalists, so what could possibly have happened to raise such alarm bells?
“In an earlier note, my tipster gives the backstory: ‘Two months back, it was discovered that someone defecated on the floor of the editorial men’s restroom. It went 13 hours before being cleaned up, I might add. 13 hours. The ‘evidence’ was nowhere near any of the toilets, so one of the operations folks designated it an act of vandalism. — The event was christened ‘Poopgate.’ Fast forward to today when the same thing happened in the editorial women’s restroom.'”
On Friday, Ailene Yasmin, a former Gannett employee who blogs under the name Lois Lane, gleefully picked up the item and expanded on it, noting that her former editor at the Nashville Tennessean, E.J. Mitchell, is at the Courier-Post, where morale is said to be . . . in the toilet.
Repeated requests for comment made Friday to Gannett executives, including Courier-Post Managing Editor Joyce Gabriel and corporate spokeswoman Tara Connell, uncharacteristically went unanswered.
MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to send an e-mail about this column.
Short Takes
Emil Wilbekin, onetime editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine, on Friday was named editor-in-chief of Giant magazine, an urban entertainment lifestyle publication owned by Radio One, Inc. that publishes every other month. He succeeds Smokey D. Fontaine, who was promoted to chief content officer, overseeing content for Radio One’s new digital and cross-platform initiatives. Wilbekin spent 12 years at Vibe, building circulation to 825,000. Giant’s circulation was 313,624 for the six months ending Dec. 31, down from 339,115 for the six-month period a year earlier.
USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham and other black journalists have produced a report on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on the urban uprisings of the 1960s, which called the journalism profession “shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes.” Wickham told Journal-isms, “What is significant about our report is that it is largely the work of journalists. We set out to do what the Kerner Commission was asked to do. We tried to answer the questions: What happened; why did it happen, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again? We complimented this effort with op-ed articles and the roundtable discussions with journalists and academics which offered a variety of conclusions that reflect their judgment.” Wickham heads the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T State University.
Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. of the San Diego Union-Tribune is scheduled as featured speaker at the 13th annual Minority Writers Seminar, May 1-4 in Nashville. “Sponsored by the National Conference of Editorial Writers Foundation in partnership with the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University, the seminar provides an opportunity for 20 experienced minority journalists to explore the nuts-and-bolts of the profession of opinion writing,” the foundation says. Seminar director is Douglas C. Lyons of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The application deadline is March 10.
The District Attorney’s Office filed a criminal complaint Tuesday against longtime business reporter Gilbert Chan, 52, of the Sacramento Bee, the Bee reported on Friday. The complaint alleges a single felony count of possessing obscene matter depicting sexual conduct of a person under 18, the story said.
Vidaafrolatina, a Web site dedicated to black Latin Americans, went
online this week. “I designed the site, recruited writers, searched links to articles published elsewhere, identified related events, everything,” Lori Robinson, formerly of the late Emerge magazine, now editor of African American Family, a lifestyle magazine for Detroiters, told Journal-isms. “My goal is to grow into a company that can pay writers. Another goal is to have both Spanish and Portuguese versions of the site. Learning about Black Latin Americans and connecting them with African Americans is my passion. I grew up not knowing that there were any Black people in Latin America,” she said. After study, “I began to think of Black people throughout the hemisphere as one people separated by language and geography.”
The Center for American Progress produced on Thursday an interactive map that tells the viewer how Latinos are faring in each state. According to the Center, “Latino Voters Gain Voting Power, But Still Lack Economic Opportunity.”
Chronicleworld Weblog, a black British online journal of which sociology professor Thomas L. Blair is editor and publisher, is urging Sen. Barack Obama to champion the causes of people of color worldwide. But Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, “claimed that the Democratic front-runner would ultimately disappoint the African-American community and dismissed the notion that he would be ‘the harbinger of a post-racial America’ if he becomes the country’s first black President,” according to Hannah Strange, writing in the Times of London.
After National Public Radio apologized for using the term “Dark Continent” to refer to Africa, “some listeners were infuriated, thinking it unnecessary, claiming that NPR had succumbed to political correctness,” NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepherd wrote on the NPR Web site.
“As journalism reckons with an uncertain future, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced today a partnership with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, the world’s largest community of leading social entrepreneurs, to create a new cadre of Ashoka Journalism Fellows,” the foundation said Thursday. “These Fellows will receive three-year stipends allowing them to focus full-time on their efforts to provide lasting, visible, systemic change in the way journalism works or the way society sees journalism.”
“The Cuban government should release 22 imprisoned independent journalists in keeping with an international accord protecting free expression that was signed today by Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, the Committee to Protect Journalists said,” according to the organization.
“A rapid increase in the number of radio and TV channels in Africa over the last three years has piqued interest in the continent by international media players. A recent report, African Broadcast and Film Markets, published jointly by Balancing Act and InterMedia, has documented this growth,” Biz-Community in Cape Town, South Africa, reported on Friday.
