Black Reporter Saw “Raceless Society” in Iraq
The Washington Post’s Theola Labbé, just back from a three-month stint as the only African American print reporter covering the war in Iraq (not counting news services), says “it was like being in a raceless society,” although in some dangerous situations, “I felt like being African American was a protection. I could be Sudanese or South African and very quickly that would be accepted,” she told Journal-isms.
“You always want to be up front, but you also want to be safe,” she continued. “There are some parts of the country that are very hostile to Americans, period.”
Labbé, 29, graduated from the University of California Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley in 1999. She came to the Post in November 2001, and went to Iraq from her beat covering southern Maryland. She says she will return to the Metro staff.
Perhaps Labbé’s most noteworthy piece was “Facing the Horrific Every Day,” a description of life in the largest U.S. Army hospital in the country. “Nearly all U.S. casualties have passed through its first-floor emergency room. Some come already dead. Some arrive with one arm instead of two, a shattered leg or a face wiped away by an explosion,” she wrote in the Nov. 29 piece.
Overall, “it was like being in a raceless society, because there, it’s not about race or color, it’s about religion,” Labbé recalled. “Either you’re a Sunni Muslim or a Shiite Muslim, or from the north of the country or the south. The concept of race is not the same,” she said. “There were some Iraqis darker that I was. I really identified with the people. As African Americans or Americans, we tend to see color and notice color. I certainly noticed, and when I saw them, I said, ‘they look like me.'”
Labbé continued, “I never felt hindered by anything. I was a reporter like everyone else.” As a woman, “I dressed modestly, because that’s what people did in the country. It’s the same reason why you don’t wear pajamas to work. There, you don’t walk around with a miniskirt or a tank top.”
Blacks at Newsday Meeting With Management
A loosely organized group of African Americans in the newsrooms at Newsday, which boasts one of the nation’s most diverse newspapers, plans to meet with new editor Howard Schneider Monday to discuss their dissatisfaction under Schneider’s leadership.
Schneider, a 34-year veteran of the Long Island paper who had been one of the paper’s three managing editors, became editor in August upon the retirement of Anthony Marro.
“Howard plans to meet with reporters and editors who have sent him a note that they’re concerned,” Bob Keane, managing editor for operations, told Journal-isms.
The Village Voice this week outlined some of the dissatisfaction, focusing on the case of foreign editor Dele Olojede, who was offered the job of assistant managing editor for Long Island ? “a promotion that would have put him in line to take over the paper one day,” as Cynthia Cotts wrote. “But the decision seemed to already have been made without consulting Olojede, who felt utterly disrespected.”
Cotts also reported that “Schneider has a history of favoring his cronies, most of whom happen to be white, middle-aged, Jewish men. His perceived slight to Olojede may have been purely unintentional, but colleagues feel his failure to make amends has left him vulnerable. . . .
“In recent weeks, many African Americans in the newsroom have scrutinized the ‘Dele situation’ and their own prospects for advancement,” she continued. Black editors have met with publisher Raymond Jansen, “while other staffers have sought help from Newsday’s City Hall reporter Curtis Taylor, a past president of the New York Association of Black Journalists. . .
“Last week, Jansen called the diversity concerns ‘unfounded,’ given that ‘one of the top jobs was offered to an African American and he chose not to take it.’ Schneider said, ‘We remain very committed to diversity and will continue to build on that strength,’ Cotts reported.
One veteran black journalist at the paper, who asked not to be named, told Journal-isms that the group at bottom wanted to be reassured that diversity efforts would continue, given whom Schneider has associated with at the paper. But another, who also spoke privately, wondered whether colleagues were placing too much focus on Olojede’s situation.
NABJ Condemns Naples, Fla., Hip-Hop Column
A white columnist’s attempt at communicating in “hip-hop” language — “written for fans of the genre. (As a public service, the English translation is provided),” he wrote — has been denounced by the National Association of Black Journalists as a “sloppy attempt at satire” that “insulted thousands of readers,” many of whom “may or may not speak with an urban dialect,” but most of whom “probably don?t look like or sound like” the columnist, Brent Batten.
“We thought this kind of parody went the way of blackface, big lips and Step-n-Fetchit routines decades ago,” reads a statement by Bryan Monroe, NABJ’s vice president/print.
In his Dec. 2 column in Florida’s Naples Daily News, Batten wrote about a failed concert that, the paper reported, drew only about 700 people when 7,000 to 10,000 were expected. The rapper Ludacris was to be one of the headliners.
“Yo, dis here be the fo’-one-one on the show y’all, from the home boy dat was pimpin’ it,” Batten wrote.
“(Attention, here is the latest information on the show, as provided by the concert organizer.)
“See, da brotha had some phat new school playaz lined up. Cris was in da house but 5-0 came down hard, wit Macs an’ dogs sniffin fo’ bud so da peeps all bailed,” he wrote.
The Naples paper, located in an affluent area with a concentration of retirees, reported having 1.2 percent people of color on its news staff for the annual census of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Owned by Scripps Howard, it is participating in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ “Parity Project,” described as “the centerpiece of NAHJ?s five-year strategic plan to double the percentage of Latinos in the nation?s newsrooms by 2008.”
NAHJ also plans to write a letter of protest, said spokesman Joseph Torres.
Neither Batten nor editor Phil Lewis returned phone calls from Journal-isms today.
A “Black English” Expert: Here We Go Again
The last time Journal-isms contacted Geneva Smitherman, an expert on “Black English” and author of “Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner” (Houghton Mifflin), it was 1998, and the Newspaper Association of America had honored a public-service ad called “I Has a Dream” that urged people to “Speak Out Against Ebonics.” Only the language in the ad wasn’t really Ebonics, just bad English, Smitherman contended.
So we were curious as to what Smitherman, director of the African American Language and Literacy Program at Michigan State University, thought of the Naples Daily News hip-hop column.
“Tired as I am (last week of the semester, exams, papers, you know the usual drill), reading this perked me right up!,” she wrote back.
“Well, here we go again, huh? This column reminds me of several media pieces — including that way-past-wrong ‘I Has a Dream’ ad — that circulated during the Ebonics controversy a few years back. A number of folks tried to ridicule the Oakland [School] Board by writing in what they THOUGHT was Ebonics, but, lacking native speaker competence, they couldn’t get it right, coming up with all kinds of wild-ass linguistic patterns and distortions, like in this article, ‘And he be gone kickin rhymes again.’ (By the way, somebody needs to tell this dude it’s ‘Luda,’)” a reference to the columnist’s calling Ludacris “Cris” on second reference.
“My other reaction is that I can’t figure out why his editor allowed this pitiful piece to run. Aren’t editors supposed to monitor their journalists so they don’t make fools of themselves?”
Africana Could Be Moving from Cambridge to D.C.
Two years after its sale to Time Warner, which subsequently merged with AOL, the africana.com Web site founded by Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah has moved africana’s CEO from Cambridge, Mass., to AOL’s headquarters outside Washington, D.C.
AOL spokeswoman Tracy Williams told Journal-isms it was “too soon to say” whether Africana’s 16 employees would also move to the AOL headquarters in Dulles, Va., quickly adding that “we remain very committed to africana.com.”
Despite its 2000 sale to Time Warner, africana.com retained a distinctive voice in part because of its base in Cambridge, where few other national African American publications are based.
Williams said that the mega-company had promoted africana CEO Kenn Turner to senior vice president and general manager for key audiences for AOL; those audiences being African Americans, Latinos and small businesses.
According to Turner’s bio, he worked at Hallmark Cards as a product developer and marketing manager and was instrumental in developing Hallmark’s black-oriented Mahogany line of greeting cards. He also worked for Hasbro, Inc., as senior director of trade marketing.
In 2000, Time wrote of Africana: “Launched in January 1999 to promote Encarta Africana and host corrections and revisions to the encyclopedia, the site became so popular that Gates brought in an editor in chief to beef it up with original and occasionally provocative content: feature stories on black gays and lesbians, columnists like Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka on his visit with Mumia Abu-Jamal, multimedia galleries of long-hidden African-American art works, radio streamed by stations from Martinique to Morocco.”
“For Gates and his academic partner, Ghanaian-born professor Kwame Anthony Appiah,” who has since left for Princeton, “Africana represents an opportunity to do good and do well simultaneously.”
Terms of the sale to Time Warner weren’t revealed then, but the Wall Street Journal put the sale price at more than $10 million, with Gates receiving up to $1 million.
Blair’s Publisher Promises “Fair and Balanced” Book
“The publisher bringing out Jayson Blair’s Burning Down My Masters’ House in March says that the book will be ‘full of surprises’ and include ‘everything that he’s wanted to say but never said — and more,'” Steven Zeitchik reported yesterday in PW Daily, a publication of Publishers Weekly.
“New Millennium publisher Michael Viner says that the title, which clocks in at 120,000 words and is already completed, will cover a lot more than just Blair’s career at the Gray Lady. Nor will even his sections about his career be a rant, Viner says. ‘People expect this to be a black and white book and a very anti-Times book. It’s not. This phrase is no longer in the lexicon because of what Fox has done to it, but the book really is fair and balanced.’
“Viner, of course, has had some well-publicized struggles of his own; this past summer he filed for bankruptcy after losing a $2.8 million lawsuit to Otto Penzler. Viner no doubt sees this book as at least a partial salve for his financial problems; he has ordered a 200,000-copy first-printing and, contrary to a report noting the book’s low Amazon ranking, says that it has sold nearly 500 copies via Amazon last week alone.
“Blair, who at the moment is in Viner’s southern California office recording the audio version, does not plan on media appearances before the book’s one-day laydown but will eventually do a variety of TV interviews, including Dateline (which tapes tomorrow) as well as Larry King and Today. Viner said he’s been approached by several national publications about a serial but at the moment only plans on running ‘an editorial companion’ piece in Variety. ‘There’s enough hostility for the book that whatever the reaction is, I don’t want people to base it on one chapter.” Asked about a publicity tour, Viner said that his author “will do a lot in the inner city.’
“Viner says that bookstores have been receptive to the idea of a Blair book even if some in the media have not. ‘It amazes me that there’s this resentment of him. Not that he didn’t make a serious mistake. But the bookstores are full of books by people who make mistakes and go past them,'” Zeitchik wrote.
Ted Koppel’s Questions Are Questioned
“How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into this thing?” ABC’s Ted Koppel asked Tuesday night at the nine-candidate Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire. “Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination.”
Provocative? Out of line?
“Ten ABC News staffers had gathered to prepare questions for yet another presidential debate, and a consensus emerged that more queries about health care or Iraq would simply produce the same scripted sound bites that had bored viewers to tears in the previous debates,” explains Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.
“That two-hour meeting virtually ensured that the nine-candidate face-off here Tuesday night would be not only about [Howard] Dean but about Koppel, and the approach would prove highly controversial.”
Tampa Reporter Frank Ruiz Found Dead
“Frank Ruiz, an 18-year Tampa Tribune employee who wrote columns and covered business news, was found dead Friday inside his New Tampa apartment,” the Tribune reports. He was 57.
“He came to the Tribune in 1982 and wrote a technology column. He covered the personal computer and software industries, the Internet, networking, communications, electric utilities, and general business news for 18 years.
“He left the paper in 2000 and went to work as the managing editor of the Maddux Report, a monthly Bay area-based magazine that covers technology, business, finance, banking and real estate. In 2003, he left that magazine and began working as an independent freelance writer and contractor, doing media and public relations work,” wrote Jill King Greenwood.
Howard Communications School Weighs Dress Code
“Students wearing spaghetti straps, halter tops and miniskirts have Howard University’s School of Communications calling for a student dress code,” Candace Jones writes on the Black College Wire.
“‘If our students want to be taken seriously, they need to present themselves in a professional manner at all times. I don’t want to see your navel and belly jewelry,’ said Dean Jannette L. Dates. Dates said a dress code would be an asset to the students whether they realize it or not.
“Phillip Dixon, Journalism Department chair, spoke similarly. ‘Journalists should be ready to do their jobs in a moment’s notice,’ he said. ‘You can’t walk into H. Patrick Swygert’s office with your stomach out. Students need to get into the habit of being professional,’ Dixon said, referring to the university president.” Dixon is former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a former city editor at the Washington Post.
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