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Journal-isms 5/16

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Trump Says He’s Not Running for President After All

“I Shot Eight Frames a Second, and I Just Kept Firing”

McClatchy Names Rufus M. Friday Publisher in Lexington

Ricardo Pimentel Starts New Gig as Columnist in San Antonio

K.C. Star Starts Series on Civil War’s “Real Flashpoint”

Miami-Chicago Matchup Draws Record 11.1 Million cable Viewers

Short Takes

Trump Says He’s Not Running for President After All

“One day after NBC said they would fire him if he ran for president, ‘[The] Celebrity Apprentice’ star Donald Trump admitted he liked talking about political issues more than enacting them, telling an audience of advertisers in New York Monday he would not seek the GOP nomination,” Eric Deggans wrote Monday on his St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times media blog.

“It was a predictable end to an unlikely media frenzy, as Trump saw increasingly heated questions about his views on the president’s citizenship and education, along with demands for details on his finances and an announcement by NBC that they would hire a new boss for the Apprentice if he kept flirting with a candidacy.

“. . . The question left for media: Would any of this had consumed so much of the national dialog if reporters had treated Trump like a frizzy haired publicity hound from the beginning?”

Calvin Knight, director of photography at the Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for this photo showing Lakeland police Officer Scott Kercher ordering shooting suspect Derrick D. Robinson to come out of a trash bin.

“I Shot Eight Frames a Second, and I Just Kept Firing”

On the day he shot his winning photo, Calvin Knight, director of photography at the Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., “grabbed a portable scanner and bolted out the door, following bits of information police exchanged on the scanner. A pursuit. A chase. A black Taurus,” the Ledger reported last week.

“He headed west, crisscrossing the streets he’s so familiar with. Before long, he found the spot where the Taurus had flipped. He jumped out of his car and shot a couple of photos with a 300 mm lens. With no police around, he figured they were chasing the suspect on foot. So he headed in the opposite direction from which he came — and found police gathering near railroad tracks. Someone told him one suspect had been arrested, but another was on the loose.

“Ten police cars and several K-9 units were searching the area when one officer ran toward a small trash bin with his gun drawn. ‘He starts yelling, “Get out with your hands up,” and I could see the guy peeking out of it,’ Knight said.

“From about 30 yards away, Knight had hit photographic pay dirt. ‘I hit the motor drive and lined him up. I shot eight frames a second, and I just kept firing,” Knight said. The result: A stunning sequence of photographs depicting a clearly terrified, ready-to-surrender young man as he emerged from his hiding place. The slender 19-year-old didn’t dally when told to get out.

” ‘Some photographers wait their entire lives for opportunities like this, and if it hadn’t been for Calvin’s ability to work and listen to the scanner at the same time, he would have missed his five minutes of fame,’ said Ledger Managing Editor Lenore Devore. . . .

“Knight, 50, joined The Ledger as a staff photographer in 1985, then worked his way up to assistant director before being named director of photography in 2006.”

The suspect was charged with robbery with a firearm, but was released within a month because of an “uncooperative victim,” Chip Thullbery, a spokesman for the State’s Attorney’s Office, told Journal-isms.

“Surrender” won in the breaking news photography category for newspapers with a 50,001-100,000 circulation or online independent publications. Here is the complete list of winners.

McClatchy Names Rufus M. Friday Publisher in Lexington

Rufus M. Friday, president and publisher of the Tri-City Herald in eastern Washington state, has been named publisher and president of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, effective June 6, the McClatchy Co. has announced.

Friday, 50, became president and publisher of McClatchy’s Tri-City Herald in 2005. He arrived there from another McClatchy newspaper, The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where he served two years as vice president of circulation. Friday spent the previous 11 years, from 1992 to 2003, with Gannett Co., Inc., directing circulation for newspapers in Tennessee, Illinois and Alabama.

Friday was born in South Carolina and raised in Gastonia, N.C. He attended North Carolina State University, earning a football scholarship his sophomore year and playing three years as a tight end for the university. He graduated in 1984 with a degree in business management and economics and went to work for The News & Observer’s circulation department, where he spent the next eight years before moving to Gannett.

“Rufus has undertaken many assignments for McClatchy and has been hugely successful in every one,” said Frank Whittaker, McClatchy vice president, operations. “As evidenced by his most recent service as publisher of the Tri-City Herald, Rufus cares deeply about his employees, his paper and the community. We’re confident he’ll be an excellent fit for the Herald-Leader.”

In another business-side promotion for a McClatchy person of color, Kim Woods, advertising director at the Rock Hill (S.C.) Herald since 2007, was named vice president of advertising for the Bradenton (Fla.) Herald.

Ricardo Pimentel Starts New Gig as Columnist in San Antonio

O. Ricardo Pimentel, former editorial page editor and columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Arizona Republic, wrote his first column over the

weekend as a new three-times-a-week columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

In his farewell column in Milwaukee, which ran May 3, Pimentel warned, “Simply, if Wisconsin does not fix its urban areas and particularly its systems for educating the youth living in them, it will cease to be great. It will have no claim to the description at all.

“It will be just another state that has allowed its seed corn to go unplanted and its potential untapped, even if glimmers of progress burst forth from time to time in more affluent parts of the state.”

He told Journal-isms, “In January, at my request, I stepped down as editorial page editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and became a full-time columnist. San Antonio came calling because they wanted another metro columnist. It very much appealed to me. As the column says, it very much feels like home.”

One reason for that, Pimentel told San Antonio readers, is that he is the son of once-illegal immigrants.

“The point isn’t that I will be writing exclusively about immigration or immigrants. I won’t. It is, however, an inescapable part of my voice,” wrote Pimentel, who is also the immediate past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“It can’t be helped and I wouldn’t take the cure even if one were available. I am, of course, more than the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrants — longtime reporter, editor and columnist, author and a military veteran, too. But it is an essential part of who I am.

“This background does different things to different people. In me, it has developed an affinity for folks routinely characterized as victims or suspects. There is often more to that story. In fact, few topics are generally as simple as portrayed.”

He then mentioned immigration reform, as did a number of other columnists last week:

A mural in the Missouri Capitol depicts the Battle of Westport. (Credit: © 2011 Patrick T Fallon, Special to The Kansas City Star)

K.C. Star Starts Series on Civil War’s “Real Flashpoint”

The real flashpoint for the Civil War “burst in a place neither North nor South, but here — where slavery’s western trajectory hit a dead end,” Rick Montgomery wrote for the Kansas City Star, beginning a series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. “On the Missouri-Kansas line.

“The bad blood only started with the question of slaveholding, which had been legal across Missouri since its statehood in 1821. Ultimately the violence would be fueled less by ideals of equality (some ‘free-soilers’ in Kansas, in fact, argued for keeping black people out) than by vengeance and vicious one-upmanship.

“Long before the U.S. wars of the 2000s, boyish-looking irregulars, bushwhackers and Red Legs — today we call them terrorists or death squads — lurked outside Kansas City.

“Missourians, whether hostile or not to the Union that governed them, endured federal occupation and fiery pre-emptive strikes.”

The second of the five-part series promises, “The story of the Missouri slave and Kansas Freeman; the black community’s view of what the Civil War wrought. This area produced the first African-American U.S. fighting units, well before ‘Glory’s’ 54th Massachusetts.”

Meanwhile, columnists tackled related subjects.

In the Austin American-Statesman, Alberta Phillips wrote on April 30: “By any measure, the Texas Juneteenth statue honoring the emancipation of Texas slaves is not a fitting tribute to the traditions and contributions of Texas African Americans. Since 2005, several artists have tried to fashion it into a tribute worthy to be displayed on the Capitol grounds. But no amount of tinkering could fix that monstrosity.”

In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jarvis DeBerry noted May 8 that in Caddo Parish, the Confederate flag “flies outside the courthouse there next to a monument celebrating Caddo Parish as the last stand of Confederate Louisiana.”

“Denise LeBoeuf, a capital defense attorney with the ACLU, said lawyers will argue Monday . . . that the flag’s presence outside the courthouse is problematic in and of itself, that it might subliminally encourage white jurors to think negatively of either black defendants or victims. . . .Another lawyer told The Shreveport Times that Caddo’s one of the few jurisdictions in the country to have sentenced five people to death since 2004 and that the surest way to be sentenced to death there is to be a black person convicted of killing somebody white.”

Miami-Chicago Matchup Draws Record 11.1 Million cable Viewers

“The opening game of the Eastern Conference final between Miami and Chicago dunked the largest basketball audience in cable history — deflating ‘His Airness,’ Michael Jordan, from the record book in the process,” Mike Reynolds wrote Monday for Multichannel News.

“TNT’s coverage of Chicago and MVP Derrick Rose’s 103-82 stomping on Miami and its Big 3 of LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh on Sunday night scored a 6.2 U.S. household rating, translating into 11.1 million viewers on average, according to Nielsen data.

“TNT’s May 15 telecast supplanted the ‘drama’ network’s coverage of the 2003 NBA All-Star Game — Michael Jordan’s last at the event netted 10.8 million watchers — as cable’s best-ever hoops telecast.”

Short Takes

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