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Journalisms 4/11

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Unity Agreed to Grant NABJ Veto Power on Decisions


Susan L. Taylor Column Appears in — Ebony


Time Reporter Recounts Surviving Ivory Coast Violence


Libya’s Lies to Journalists Don’t Try to Be Convincing


Short Takes


Unity Agreed to Grant NABJ Veto Power on Decisions


At its last meeting, the board of Unity: Journalists of Color responded to a key complaint of the National Association of Black Journalists by deciding to grant each group veto power over Unity decisions, according to board members.


Neither that response nor others were enough to stave off a vote Sunday by the NABJ board of directors to pull out of Unity, and some continued to maintain that Unity had not made significant concessions. It was not clear that most members of the NABJ board knew about the veto proposal.


Except for the NABJ president, NABJ board members are not part of the Unity deliberations, and the movement on the veto was made in a session where no onlookers were permitted.


With the recession forcing reexaminations of bottom lines, NABJ had submitted several proposals to reorder the way the Unity convention proceeds are divided, and in the end, cited finances as its reason for pulling out. It had been outvoted at a conference-call meeting March 12, with none of the other partners — the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association — supporting NABJ’s financial proposals.


Under the proposal discussed at the Unity meeting, such a measure could not pass without NABJ’s approval.


Robin Washington, an NABJ representative on the Unity board, referred allegorically to the Unity dispute in his March 13 column in the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune.


Without mentioning Unity by name, he suggested that coalition groups could demonstrate respect for all of constituent member organizations by requiring not only a majority vote, but at least one vote in the affirmative by each coalition group.


Nearly two weeks later, he presented that idea to the Unity board, members confirmed privately. After discussion, a system was proposed in which the president of each organization could veto controversial issues. It became part of the governance changes the presidents of each organization were to work on.


A conference call between the Unity representatives from NABJ and the NABJ board took place during an executive session of an NABJ board meeting on March 30.


NABJ’s representatives on the Unity board viewed things differently from the NABJ board. Journal-isms was told that two wanted NABJ to stay through 2012, one would not give an opinion and one wanted to “explore every option.” Other versions vary slightly, but all agree that no NABJ representative on the Unity board urged a pullout.


However, the NABJ board voted 12-1 to leave Unity, with Times, as president, having no vote.


Meanwhile, members of the constituent groups reacted to the NABJ decision.


“NABJ’s withdrawal puts UNITY in an extremely difficult position,” Veronica Villafane, a former NAHJ president, wrote in her Media Moves column. “The minority journalist coalition, which is scheduled to meet in Las Vegas in 2012, would face its own financial crisis, given that all of its contracts — hotel, food and beverage — for the event are based on the combined attendance of members from the 4 groups. If they don’t meet the stipulated numbers in the hotel contract, for example, UNITY would have to pick up the expense.”


Doris Truong, national president of AAJA, told members she would be available to answer questions directly at 1 p.m. Eastern time in a Wednesday conference call, though the call is not necessarily about Unity.



Susan L. Taylor Column Appears in — Ebony


Readers might be excused for double takes in reading the April issue of Ebony magazine. Susan L. Taylor, for years the face of Essence magazine — her column on spirituality a front-of-the-book staple — wrote “One Love: The Journey Home” in what some might view as Essence’s competition.


“Susan is a longtime mentor of mine,” Amy DuBois Barnett, Ebony’s editor-in-chief, told Journal-isms. “The first national magazine I worked for was Essence. She was friends with my mother.”


The April issue was the first under a redesign of the venerable Johnson Publishing Co. monthly, which though family oriented, nonetheless has black women as its primary customers, just as Essence does.


One of Ebony’s new sections is “Elevate: Wellness and Spirituality,” and no one was as equipped to write on the topic as Taylor, Barnett said. “A devoted spirit finds the path to eternal internal peace,” the headline continued, in what seemed like an echo of Taylor’s Essence days.


Taylor ended her Essence career in 2007 after nearly 17 years. She left as editorial director, and went on to found the National CARES Mentoring Movement, of which she is CEO.


With the “cover-to-cover, page by page” redesign of Ebony, Johnson Publishing hopes to reverse circulation and advertising losses. The April issue features such non-staff contributors as Toure, Roland S. Martin, Taylor and filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, who co-authored “You can’t Handle the Truth,” a graphic novel in serial form produced with Denys Cowan.


The May issue, on sale this week, includes a 12-page package on multiracial relationships, Barnett said. Taylor might be back on future issues.


Barnett, hired last June, offered this advice for potential Ebony writers:


“Pleaase be sure you’ve read the magazine. Nothing is more annoying” than demonstrating that you haven’t.


In making a pitch, say “why the story is important, why it is important to Ebony readers, and why you are the writer who can bring the story home. People should absolutely pitch,” she said, but “you’re not going to have something in the book if you haven’t had publishing experience.” However, beginners might be included on the Ebony website, which Barnett also supervises.


 



BBC footage taken last week in the Ivory Coast. Major fighting had torn apart the city of Abidjan before incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo was arrested on Monday. (Credit: BBC) (Video)


Time Reporter Recounts Surviving Ivory Coast Violence


“The French Embassy in Ivory Coast announced on Monday that Ivory Coast security forces had arrested incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, after major fighting that had torn apart the city of Abidjan since March 31,” Time magazine wrote over a story headlined, “Surviving Gbagbo: Escape from Ivory Coast.”


“TIME reporter Monica Mark was caught up in the chaos. This is her report of a week of surviving the siege.


“I should really have known better. But I’d lived in Ivory Coast for two years, working as a journalist out of Abidjan, as has my boyfriend Tim Cocks, a reporter for Reuters, and we were comfortable and perhaps too complacent. We certainly knew there was trouble ahead but we thought the war would be over quickly. But now, after one of the longest weeks of my life, I should have realized the reckoning was going to be bloody. The signs were everywhere.


“. . . Paradise almost immediately became hellish. Hours later Alexandra found herself hiding in a dark cupboard as armed gunmen stormed our hotel looking for hostages. When the invasion took place, Tim and I and the other journalists abandoned a careful worked out emergency plan of proceeding to the roof to await the arrival of Licorne, a word meaning “unicorn,” the name for the French army in Ivory Coast. Instead, we all collected into a room on the top floor. When shots rang out in the corridor, everybody dropped to the floor, crawling behind sofas or under desks. A colleague lifted the bed for his girlfriend to squeeze underneath. A mobile phone rang, piercing our attempt at stillness, the owner’s fingers trembling too much to silence it. Someone crossed themselves three times. Eventually, a flurry of whispered phone calls resulted in the United Nations sending two helicopter gunships to circle overhead. The gunmen fled, taking the hotel manager and four other guests with them.


“. . . .Mass panic threatened to engulf us all. The 25 foreign journalists in the building were at loggerheads with the fervently pro-Gbagbo hotel staff, and the mutual suspicion eventually boiled over into open hostility. After another scare, the acting manager, close to hysteria, yelled, ‘They first time the gunmen came, they took money and rich businessmen. I have no more money or businessmen. Next time they come, I’ll have only journalists to give them, and I will!’ “


 


Libya’s Lies to Journalists Don’t Try to Be Convincing


For the more than 100 international journalists cloistered in Tripoli, Libya, at the invitation of the Gadaffi government, “its management — or, rather, staging — of public relations provided a singular inside view of how this autocracy functions in a crisis,” David D. Kirkpatrick wrote Sunday for the New York Times in a “Memo From Tripoli.”


The Gadaffi government’s “most honest trait might be its lack of pretense to credibility or legitimacy. It lies, but it does not try to be convincing or even consistent.


“. . . While some Libyan officials have publicly promised foreign journalists the freedom to report, others have sought to manipulate them. One Libyan official privately warned a Times reporter last week not to trust information from people speaking over Internet connections from Misurata because some were in fact government agents trying to trap journalists. He even cited a specific casualty count recently attributed to a Misurata resident in the pages of this newspaper.


“Was that new resident of Misurata who recently made contact in fact a double agent? Maria Golovnina, a Reuters correspondent, received an e-mail purportedly from an exiled opposition figure asking for rebel contacts in Misurata. Could that person, too, be a spy? But both proved legitimate after further communications; the Libyan officials were apparently just playing mind games.”


 

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