Tom Joyner Show Has Waiting List for Advertisers
Rather than scaring off advertisers, the activism of syndicated radio host Tom Joyner is attracting them, reports Media Week.
Media Week calls Joyner the preeminent African American in the radio business – and the first successful national black host on the air, with more than 6 million listeners a week.
He reaches 21 percent of all African Americans 25-54. In the top markets in which his show runs — New York, Chicago, Atlanta, D.C., Detroit — Joyner is ranked either No. 1 or 2 in his time period. He brings in more than $33 million annually for ABC Radio Networks. Ad rates on his show command the second highest cost per point, next to radio legend Paul Harvey. He’s also the cornerstone for ABC’s Urban Advantage Network, launched in October 2000.
Today, there’s a waiting list to advertise on Joyner’s show and associate with his events.
With his campaigns against advertisers who won’t spent money in black venues, “Joyner has shown a flashlight on some of the ugly little secrets in our business,” explains Deborah Gray-Young, vp and director of media and strategic services for E. Morris Communications, which currently buys Joyner’s show for Wal-Mart. “He has pulled the cover back. There are still marketers that don’t understand the unique proposition of this segment and are always going to think that they can use mass media to capture the African American consumer.”
Phillip Dixon to Chair Howard U. Journalism Department
Phillip Dixon, who quit in January as managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, starts today as chair of the department of journalism in Howard University’s School of Communications. Dixon is also a former city editor of the town’s dominant news medium, the Washington Post.
Historically black colleges don’t often name journalism professionals from the mainstream media to chair their journalism departments. In 2000, Hampton University picked Charlotte Grimes, who worked as a reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as its the new Scripps Howard Professor of Journalism and chair of the mass media arts department. However, Grimes had already taught at Harvard, Princeton and Syracuse.
Dixon, the first African American managing editor at the Inquirer, quit Jan. 7 after only six months in the job. Scuttlebutt was that Dixon wanted to slow down after turning 50, or that he didn’t want to be the hatchet man for more Knight Ridder budget cuts, but Dixon said in a note to the Inquirer staff that, “the decision to leave now, as it was when I wandered off (from the Inquirer the first time) in 1986, is mine alone. My plan is to leave this business, for now at least, so I can immerse myself in civilian life freed from fretting about conflicts of interest and freed to entertain a broader array of options.”
Dixon began at the Inquirer in 1979 and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. He was assistant metro editor at the Los Angeles Times before joining the Washington Post in 1989. He returned to the Inquirer in 1995, becoming managing editor in June 2001.
Black Entertainment Television, finally responding to viewer and affiliate complaints, is getting rid of infomercials, starting today.
Friday’s announcement also promised additional airings of several BET news and public affairs programs, including “Lead Story,” BET’s weekly roundtable discussion between African American journalists and the week’s newsmakers, and “BET Nightly News.” Spokesman Michael Lewellen said today that effective immediately, “BET Nightly News,” which airs at 11 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time, will be rebroadcast at 5 a.m. the next morning and that “Lead Story,” which airs at 11 a.m. Sunday, will be rebroadcast at 11:30 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
BET has been running about 50 hours of infomercials per week, though never in prime time, a network rep told the Washington Post.
“We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time,” BET president and COO Debra Lee said. “We just decided now was a good time. Some of our cable affiliates were preempting (the infomercials) so we were losing some of our universe.” Plus, she acknowledged, viewers were complaining. “It’s one of the things we heard complaints about from focus groups.
Greg Moore Reverses Decision on Denver Stadium Name
The Denver Post’s new editor, Gregory Moore, wasted no time in reversing a highly publicized decision of his predecessor, Glenn Guzzo, not to use the corporate name of Denver’s new football stadium, reports the Denver Business Journal.
Henceforth, “Invesco Field at Mile High” again will be the official Denver Post usage for the football stadium, which was financed mostly through public tax dollars and a hefty naming-rights payment offered up by Denver-based Invesco Funds Group.
The Post refused to use the paid-for “Invesco” name, instead ordering writers to refer to the Broncos edifice as “new Mile High” stadium, which it said was a reflection of common usage in the community.
Not according to Moore, who took over from Guzzo June 10. “We should call things what they’re formally known as,” Moore said. Adds the Business Journal: “Moore is catching on fast, however. In this town, money talks.”
Meanwhile, Editor & Publisher reports that Moore, the first African American in the editor’s job, had a baptism by fire: On his first day, Moore would lead the Post’s newsroom in coverage of a wildfire the likes no one in Colorado had ever seen. Moore was about to become a “Western” editor.
News Media Discovering Milwaukee Missing-Child Case
The debate over whether the case of the missing Elizabeth Smart is receiving disproportionate media coverage has finally brought the media spotlight to the case of Alexis Patterson, the missing African American girl in Milwaukee, reports the San Jose Mercury News.
Last week, CNN, National Public Radio, “The Today Show,” ABC, CBS, NBC and a number of major newspapers all did stories on the missing Milwaukee girl — almost two months after she never got to school.
David Yarnold, executive editor of the Mercury News, says that “history has proven that white-dominated media unconsciously relate to stories like the Elizabeth Smart and JonBenet Ramsey cases. There’s always the excuse that it’s unusual to see crime in upscale white neighborhoods, but I don’t have any doubt that, had JonBenet or Elizabeth been children of color, that there would have been far less coverage. . . .
“It’s the most horrible kind of tragedy any time any child is abused or abducted, and it’s simply wrong to give any of them short shrift — no matter their ethnic or socioeconomic background,” Yarnold said in the Mercury News.
And the Other Missing Kids . . .
Columnist Cary Clack writes in the San Antonio Express-News that, “In the past 15 months in San Antonio alone, the abduction of a 9-year-old African American girl for five days and a 12-year-old Mexican American girl for six weeks weren’t cause for CNN, MSNBC or Fox to nightly ask where they were or to interview family, friends and experts.”
And on June 9, Newsday became one of the few out-of-town papers to write about Precious Doe in Kansas City: “More than a year after police and a woman searching for another missing person happened upon her naked, headless body in a wooded lot in east Kansas City, the murder of Precious Doe remains unsolved and her identity unknown.
“By far, the most promising lead was the discovery, last month, that a 5-year-old girl from Florida, Rilya Wilson, had been missing for 15 months, her absence undetected because of an egregious oversight by the state agency responsible for her welfare. The girls, both black, looked similar, based on a forensic artist’s three-dimensional rendering of Precious Doe.
“But handprint and DNA tests confirmed Precious Doe was not Rilya Wilson.”
Clarence Smith, Co-Founder of Essence, Resigns
Clarence O. Smith, co-founder and president of Essence Communications Partners, has resigned, reports Target Market News. The action caught many in the industry by surprise and is the latest in a series of changes over the past two years at the company that is the leader in targeting African American women.
Smith’s decision follows a vote by the company’s board asking that he step down. There are no plans to name a successor to the president’s post.
New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams wrote last week that “Bad blood is coagulating at Essence” and that Smith had been “beheaded.” The tabloid also said the two-year-old partnership between AOL Time Warner and Essence “may have been the spark, but the triggerman was Essence CEO Ed Lewis.”
Unions Fight For “Contraceptive Equity”
Spurred on by national leaders — and many angry rank-and-file women — editorial and production unions are adopting a new cause: “contraceptive equity” in health-insurance plans, reports Editor & Publisher. In other words, if a newspaper’s plan covers the impotence drug Viagra for males, it had better cover prescription contraceptives for females.
