Desiree Rogers Brings “Rock Star” Persona to Johnson
Blogger Wonders Whether Democrats Are Engaging or Pimping
NBC Networks Lead in Interviews With Obama
NABJ Finds Fewer Black Journalists in Middle Management
Reporter Says Filmmaker in ACORN Case Planned to Seduce Her
Desiree Rogers Brings “Rock Star” Persona to Johnson
“During New York Fashion Week, she watched shows by Jason Wu, Thakoon and Rodarte from front-row seats, blogging about her experience. Since taking over in her new role, she has consulted the Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter for advice on navigating the magazine business. ‘Desirée is a rock star,’ Ms. Wintour said when asked about Ms. Rogers’s prospects as a magazine executive.”
“She has dined and mingled at fashion show after-parties with her good friend Francisco Costa, Calvin Klein’s top designer. In her capacity as Johnson Publishing’s top saleswoman, she has taken meetings with executives at the nation’s leading corporate institutions, part of a new advertising strategy that has brought the likes of Citigroup and J. P. Morgan Chase into the pages of Ebony for the first time. . . .
“Ms. Rogers’s profile and her connections are precisely why Ms. Rice, Johnson Publishing’s chairwoman, hired her despite her lack of experience in publishing,” Peters wrote, referring to Linda Johnson Rice, daughter of company founder John H. Johnson. “Before the White House, Ms. Rogers was director of the Illinois Lottery and president of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, utility companies servicing the Chicago area.
“ ‘It does help to have someone that has a certain presence,’ Ms. Rice said in an interview from her ninth-floor office in the downtown Chicago high-rise that her father built in the early 1970s — at the time one of the city’s only office buildings built by a black man. ‘It takes you up another level. And we’ve got to be out there more.’”
“Ms. Rice said she has no plans to keep Ms. Rogers under tight control. ‘I will let Desirée be Desirée, and all that goes with that,’ she said. ‘The marketing, the leadership skills — all of that, plus the glamour and the style. Come on! We’re in the media business. We’re in the beauty business. This is perfect.’”
Blogger Wonders Whether Democrats Are Engaging or Pimping
“Yes, I understand that ‘CHANGE’ has to be done sometimes incrementally,” Leutisha Stills aka “The Christian Progressive Liberal,” wrote last week for the Jack & Jill Politics blog. “But, why aren’t the Democratic Leadership explaining that the same way leaders like DNC Chair Tim Kaine and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn did in person and on conference calls with Black Bloggers? Why did I feel like I was being chastised for not doing enough?
“Why did I feel like I was being PIMPED, as opposed to being ENGAGED in the process?
“Two weeks ago, I was one of 20 or so bloggers who attended the meeting with DNC Chair Tim Kaine. He didn’t make me feel like I was being disciplined for not getting the word out about what President Obama has managed to accomplish in the first two years of his presidency. In fact, he readily acknowledged the influence of bloggers on the debate of public policy and legislation. I got the sense he wanted to engage us from 2010 and onward. My colleague, Debbie Hines of LegalSpeaks, hit a home run when she advised Gov. Kaine that the problem in getting the voter enthusiasm of two years ago, is that you need to learn how to ‘tell the story.’ ”
Derrick L. Plummer, regional press secretary for African American media for the Democratic National Committee, said the outreach by Kaine and Clyburn demonstrates the importance the Democrats place on the Internet and the blogosphere in getting the Democrats’ message out. An ad from the committee also appears on the website of the Black Snob.
- Cord Jefferson, theRoot.com: The Root Interview: The DNC’s Tim Kaine on the Midterms
- Joy-Ann Reid, theGrio.com: DNC chair Kaine to black voters: Stand with Obama again
NBC Networks Lead in Interviews With Obama
“Earlier this week, President Obama sat down to chat with NBC’s Matt Lauer, marking the president’s 25th interview with a peacock property,” Nikki Schwab and Katy Adams wrote last week for the Washington Examiner.
“We looked at how many interviews the networks have been given since Obama took office and, not surprisingly, Fox came in last. Here’s how they fared:
“25 — NBC (including CNBC, MSNBC)
“16 — ABC
“15 — CBS
“8 — CNN (including CNN Espanol)
4 – Fox
- Megan Cottrell, Chicago Reporter: Since Obama’s election, has racism gotten better or worse?
- Steven Thrasher, Village Voice: White America Has Lost Its Mind
NABJ Finds Fewer Black Journalists in Middle Management
A census of top managers in print-journalism newsrooms by the National Association of Black Journalists “found that there are few black journalists in the middle-management ranks who are being groomed for top jobs because of the recent exodus of journalists of color as documented by NABJ’s studies and the annual report by the American Society of News Editors,” the association reported on its website.
“There are more top editors, but the publisher and managing editor ranks are down from 2004, the last time a count was done on African-American print executives in the newspaper industry,” the notice said.
“There are 17 blacks heading newsrooms around the country, up from 13. Some of those joining the top ranks were Hollis Towns in Asbury Park, N.J., Robin Washington in Duluth, Africa Price in Shreveport, La., Glenn Proctor in Richmond, Va., David Blount in Stockton, Calif., and Martin Reynolds in Oakland, Calif.
“The most significant drop came at managing editor. There are 11 Managing Editors nationally; there were 17 in 2004. There are nine publishers; there were 14 in 2004.
“There are one-two punches (African-American editor-managing editor) in three cities: Oakland, Shreveport and Jackson, Miss.
“The study was compiled by Don Hudson of the Clarion Ledger and Nisa Muhammad of the Final Call under the direction of Vice President-Print Deirdre M. Childress.”
Reporter Says Filmmaker in ACORN Case Planned to Seduce Her
“Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe says that a CNN reporter who exposed his alleged plot to seduce her on a boat ‘was never going to be placed in a threatening situation,’ ” Michael Calderone wrote Monday on his Yahoo News site.
“O’Keefe offered his explanation of events Monday on Big Government and Big Journalism, two right-leaning websites run by publisher and provocateur Andrew Breitbart. . . .
“Last week, CNN investigative correspondent Abbie Boudreau said she learned of the boat plot while working on ‘Right on the Edge,’ a documentary about young conservatives. ‘Recently, I was the target of a failed punk,’ Boudreau wrote. ‘James O’Keefe, the so-called ‘pimp’ in the ACORN exposé videos, was participating in a detailed plan to “faux” seduce me on his boat.’
“Boudreau reported that Izzy Santa, one of O’Keefe’s colleagues, warned her that a scheduled face-to-face meeting with O’Keefe was really a setup for a prank.”
Boudreau aired her documentary, which included a report on the scheme, on Saturday night.
On his “Reliable Sources” media show on CNN Sunday, host Howard Kurtz said of O’Keefe’s intentions, “That is a new low. Even O’Keefe’s biggest backer, conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart, demanding an explanation, calling O’Keefe’s plan patently gross and offensive.”
In September 2009, Breitbart’s website BigGovernment.com posted videos, made by O’Keefe and Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, supposedly showing ACORN employees counseling the pair, ostensibly pretending to be a prostitute and a pimp, on how to avoid paying taxes and other illegal activities. The community organizing group lost its federal funding in the fallout.
Short Takes
- Sheila Brooks, longtime member, supporter and onetime officer of the
National Association of Black Journalists, has donated $10,000 to NABJ in student scholarship money, courtesy of SRB Communications, LLC, where she is founder, president and CEO, the company announced on Monday.
Thea Williams, 45, an executive producer at KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas, died Wednesday after battling breast cancer, Jim McNabb wrote Friday on the Austin Post website. A graduate of The
University of Texas at Austin, Williams joined KVUE 15 years ago as a producer. “Thea was a talented journalist and was widely respected for her high standards and great compassion. She was a leader in the newsroom, a mentor to young journalists, and most of all, a dear friend,” a note on the station’s website said. - Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks attended services last week for fifth-grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas, who committed suicide. “Family members have said he had been upset over his score in a teacher-rating database our newspaper created and posted online, which ranked him slightly below average,” she wrote Saturday. “But just as good teaching can’t be divined solely from a set of test scores, suicide can’t be understood as a single act. We can’t know what was on Ruelas’ mind when he ordered a substitute for his fifth-grade class and headed into the Angeles National Forest. We can turn his death into a teachable moment.”
- Carla Torres, who had been working at the Baytown (Texas) Sun as a
copy editor for about a year, has been named managing editor, the paper announced on Sept. 25. “She began her newspaper career at The (McAllen) Monitor in South Texas and most recently has worked for the Houston Chronicle and The Galveston County Daily News,” the story said. - The caption to Wiley Miller’s single-panel “Non Sequitur” comic for Oct. 3, which depicts a cheery, slightly surreal park scene, says: “Picture book titled voted least likely to ever find a publisher…‘Where’s Muhammad?’” according to the “Comic Riffs” column on the Washington Post website. “The Washington Post chose to run the ‘Where’s Muhammad?’ comic in its online edition but not in its Sunday print funnies, running an ‘Obvious-Man’ replacement. Spokeswoman Kris Coratti said The Post had no comment on that decision.”
- On Monday, Georgia Institute of Technology opened its the first FutureMedia Fest, a four-day “interactive ‘mash-up’ to explore and enable new paradigms in how content is created, distributed and consumed in a converging media world. . . .The four-day event will feature compelling keynote addresses, panel discussions, birds-of-a-feather workshops, demonstrations of the latest new media technologies, and presentations by startup companies, researchers and academics driving innovation.”
- “On Saturday, more than 300 liberal groups representing thousands of people banded together on the National Mall in an effort to outshine August’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally put on by Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck,” Molly Stark Dean wrote Monday for TVNewser. “On his radio show this morning, Beck said he hired his own video crews to cover the rally talking to participants and shooting other video.”
- In Asbury Park, N.J., “A crowd of about 700 people, comprised mostly of Tea Party supporters, gathered at Six Flags Great Adventure on Saturday to help kick off conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring America’ tour,” Keith Ruscitti and Colleen Curry wrote Saturday for the Asbury Park Press. “Spectators paid $50 for a ticket or $125 for special VIP privileges to listen to speeches by various conservative and libertarian activists, radio talk-show hosts and musicians in a six-hour event.”
- “Since 2005 the number of paid-for Indian daily newspaper titles has surged by 44% to 2,700, according to the World Association of Newspapers. That gives India more paid-for newspapers than any other country,” the Economist reported on Sept. 23. “One reason why the internet has not yet started destroying Indian newspapers is that only 7% of Indians surf the web regularly. . . . The headlong growth of Indian newspapers is driven by rising literacy and a booming economy.”
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