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Journal-isms Jan. 12

3 N.J. Gannett Papers to Lay Off Nearly Half Editorial Staff


Native Journalists End Year With Another “Slight Deficit”


Public Was Interested in Haiti Longer Than Media Were


Hispanic Group Wants Study of Hate Speech, Violent Crimes


Boehner Gets Cover Treatment Denied Pelosi


Short Takes 


3 N.J. Gannett Papers to Lay Off Nearly Half Editorial Staff


Gannett Co. will lay off nearly half its editorial staff at three New Jersey community newspapers by next month and will restructure the remaining positions, according to several staffers,” Beth DeFalco reported Tuesday for the Associated Press.


“The affected newspapers are the Courier News of Bridgewater, Daily Record of Parsippany and Home News Tribune of East Brunswick, where a combined 99 staff members will have to apply for 53 remaining positions. Those not kept will be cut loose by Feb. 4.


“The company offered to pay staff the difference between their salary and unemployment insurance, a week for every year of service up to 26 weeks, but no less than four, according to a staff member.


“The staff members spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the layoffs. They said reporters at the community papers will be assigned to teams to focus on particular topics and more content may be used from the Asbury Park Press.


A memo by Thomas M. Donovan, president and publisher of New Jersey Press Media Solutions — a consortium of Gannett’s four northern New Jersey newspapers — was made available to staff Monday explaining the process.


“In an e-mailed statement to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Donovan said the changes would help the company ‘better focus’ its resources on local and breaking news coverage.”


 



In 2009, Rhonda Juanita Levaldo, right, then vice president of the Native American Journalists Association, was interviewed with NAJA Executive Director Jeff Harjo at the Washington-based Newseum on the state of Indian-focused journalism. Levaldo is now NAJA president. (Credit: Courtesy Rhonda Juanita Levaldo)


Native Journalists End Year With Another “Slight Deficit”


The Native American Journalists Association ended the year with “a slight deficit,” Executive Director Jeff Harjo acknowledged, but he would not say how much the deficit was. He said the shortfall was “about the same in 2010 as 2009,” but also would not provide the 2009 figure.


“NAJA did have a slight deficit last year because our normal funders are appropriating less than what they used to send,” he told Journal-isms by e-mail. “We have continued to make profits from our last two conventions and look forward to another profit making convention. Once our registrations, entries for our awards competition and memberships start coming in, we will be in a better financial condition.”


NAJA is the smallest of the journalist-of-color organizations in the umbrella group Unity: Journalists of Color. For most of those organizaitons, the annual conference is the primary revenue raiser.


In 2009, NAJA’s 25th anniversary convention in Albuquerque, N.M., drew 140 registrants, NAJA president Ronnie Washines told Journal-isms at the time. He said then that NAJA membership grew to around 740 members, an increase of over 100 since the previous conference.


The National Association of Black Journalists announced last week it had turned a $338,901 deficit at the end of 2009 to a surplus of more than $191,000, and late last month, AAJA announced that it turned a $207,000 deficit to a $399,000 surplus.


Leaders of the American Society of News Editors, Unity: Journalists of Color, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Conference of Editorial Writers and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association also said they ended the year financially healthy.


However, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has projected a $240,000 deficit for the year, and the National Association of Multicultural Media Executives, dormant for at least a year, now plans to dissolve.



Jeff Johnson of theGrio.com talks with Sam Dixon of the aid group Oxfam International in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for a video posted on theGrio.com.


Public Was Interested in Haiti Longer Than Media Were


In the weeks following three major news events last year — the Haiti earthquake, the passage of health care legislation, and the capping of the Gulf oil spill — “public interest remained high long after the news media’s focus had turned elsewhere. And while public interest in the 2010 midterm elections was on par with press coverage in the final stages of the campaign season, coverage far exceeded public interest earlier in the campaign cycle,” the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported on Tuesday.


The study also showed “how CNN proved to be an ‘outlier’ in the cable news coverage when it came to three major stories: the 2010 midterms, BP oil spill and Haiti earthquake,” Michael Calderone reported for Yahoo News.


CNN’s Anderson Cooper won critical praise for exhaustively covering those two disaster stories, but the network continued losing prime-time viewers. On the other hand, ratings leader Fox News and second-place MSNBC kept turning up the partisan volume this past year, with their stables of conservative and liberal commentators, respectively. That strategy has proven more successful at getting viewers to return nightly rather than only when a major news story, like an earthquake, takes place.’


The reports coincided with Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake, “as well as the anniversary of one of the largest ever humanitarian responses to a natural disaster, with almost $3.8 billion in aid given or pledged for Haiti relief,” as the Knight Foundation noted in a report on lessons learned.


“Three innovative practices in particular, the report says, were put to the test: broadcasting crisis information with SMS, crowdsourcing data into actionable information, and using open mapping tools to meet humanitarian needs,” Michael Morisy reported for Nieman Lab.


“The report found that none of them, however, would have been as effective without one very low-tech tool: radio.”



Hispanic Group Wants Study of Hate Speech, Violent Crimes


Prompted by the shootings in Arizona over the weekends and ensuing national conversation about the role of violent rhetoric in politics and the media, the National Hispanic Media Coalition plans to press the Federal Communications Commission to act on its longstanding petition on hate speech,” John Eggerton reported Monday for Multichannel News.


“That is according to NHMC president Alex Nogales, who said the group would also push the National Telecommunications & Information Administration to update an almost two-decades old its report on the effects of hate speech, and press Congress to make sure NTIA got the money to do so.


“The FCC has not yet acted on the petition, according to an aide to one of the commissioners.”


“. . . NHMC has been urging the FCC to investigate what it sees as the link between extreme rhetoric and hate speech on radio and cable TV and real world violence and hate crimes. Nogales sees the Arizona shootings as an outgrowth of that hateful speech. ‘We can’t stand there with our arms crossed and make like there isn’t a reason why this is happening,’ he told Multichannel News in an interview.


” ‘We started this dialog in the last immigration debate four years ago. We could see that it was just out of control. It started with just an issue of immigration, then every pundit on radio and TV who wanted an audience started talking about it and started using the worst of language, and now it has spilled out into mainstream,’ he said.”



Boehner Gets Cover Treatment Denied Pelosi


“On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi handed over the speaker’s gavel to John Boehner, who is charged with leading the ‘Tea Party Congress’ in their efforts to repeal health care reform, disband the Select Committee on Global Warming, defund Planned Parenthood and do a bunch of other things that people who have never held elected office think are good ideas,” Annie Shields wrote Friday for Ms. magazine.


So it’s no wonder Boehner has gotten so much media attention: Within a few weeks of the midterm elections, Boehner graced the covers of Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and The Economist. Not to mention his mug on the October 30th issue of the National Journal’s cover. Five major magazine covers in less than a month might seem like a lot for an incoming Speaker who hadn’t even been sworn in yet, but hey, being the Speaker of the House, in the words of Joe Biden, is a ‘big fucking deal!’


“. . . And the snubbing doesn’t end with Time‘s postage-stamp Speaker. The New Yorker? Never put Pelosi on the cover. Newsweek? Never. The Economist? Never. Vanity Fair? Never. Harpers? Never. I could go on, but you get the idea.


“So one would assume that she’s been featured on the covers of many a major U.S. magazine. Well, one would be wrong. . . . Time never devoted a single one of the 208 or so covers it put out during her 4-year tenure to the most powerful woman in American history.


“. . . And the snubbing doesn’t end with Time‘s postage-stamp Speaker. The New Yorker? Never put Pelosi on the cover. Newsweek? Never. The Economist? Never. Vanity Fair? Never. Harpers? Never. I could go on, but you get the idea.”


 

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