Asian Journalists Get $100,000, Largest-Ever Gift
A longtime Dallas civil-rights activist gave $100,000 to the Asian American Journalists Association, the largest-ever gift from an individual in the organization’s history, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Dr. Suzanne Ahn, a Dallas neurologist who recently received a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, has worked on national and area civil-rights issues and is a longtime supporter of Asian Americans and AAJA’s Texas Chapter.
“This is to be a prize to be given to someone who has either covered a story or has been part of a fight against injustice,” Dr. Ahn said.
Rene Astudillo, the association’s executive director, said that before Dr. Ahn’s donation, the largest gift from an individual to AAJA was about $ 50,000.
Also at the AAJA convention, which concluded in Dallas:
— AAJA posthumously awarded Riley Allen, former longtime editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, with its Special Recognition Award. The award honors a person or persons — regardless of ethnicity, race or profession — who has helped to advance AAJA’s goals.
Decades before other newspapers, the Star-Bulletin, under Allen and the Farrington family — the paper’s publisher, was building ties to the Asian communities it covered. At a time when other papers across the country were campaigning against the “Yellow Peril,” the Star-Bulletin editorialized against the internment of Japanese Americans, campaigned for public education for nonwhite children, refused to let the racial slur “Jap” in its pages during World War II, and covered the accomplishments of the Nisei 100th Battalion in Europe, AAJA said. Allen also hired women, Asian Americans and other people of color long before other editors and publishers came to the realization that newspapers should reflect the communities they cover.
— AAJA presented its Leadership in Diversity Award to Time Inc. for its commitment to diversity not only on its staff but also to AAJA and the industry as a whole.
Asian Americans at the helms of the company include Jeannie Park, executive editor of People magazine; Howard-Chua Eoan, assistant managing editor and news director of Time magazine; Albert Kim, assistant managing editor at People magazine; Bob Der, assistant managing editor of Sports Illustrated for Kids and Miriam Hsia, photo editor of Parenting magazine.
— Mae Cheng, the sole candidate for president, assumed the post. Cheng covers the immigration and demographics beat for the New York City edition of Newsday, where she has been since 1994. She was previously AAJA’s vice president for print and has served on the AAJA national board of directors since 2000.
She said in the July 15 Journal-isms: “The next term is a crucial one because whoever is at the helms will take us into Unity in 2004. I am a believer in the concept of strength in numbers, and I think that AAJA’s partnerships with its sister Unity organizations are more important now than ever before.
“There are still too many instances of starting journalists who find themselves the lone person of color in the newsroom. If I win the presidency, I look forward to working with the other journalist groups of color in pushing forward our agenda and to raise our voices in asking the industry to take their commitment to us seriously and to work harder alongside us to make sure that every newsroom in America becomes more diverse.”
Vietnamese Elvises — Who Knew?
It took a Vietnamese-American reporter for the Washington Post, Phuong Ly, to bring us this story:
Friday will mark the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death, and it may come as a surprise to learn that many of those taking note will be Vietnamese immigrants who formed an intense bond with the King long ago in their homeland.
Ever since homesick GIs started bringing over Elvis records in the late 1950s, the Vietnamese have used the King and his music as a gateway to American culture. And when the war was over, many refugees like Henry Newinn found faith in the story of the poor boy from Tupelo, Miss.
Caballero, Smith Honored for Multicultural Advertising
The American Advertising Federation named two individuals and three companies as recipients of this year’s Mosaic Awards for achievement in multicultural advertising and marketing. The individual winners were Eduardo Caballero, founder of Caballero Spanish Media, for promoting Spanish-language broadcast ads; and ‘Essence’ magazine co-founder Clarence Smith, who is credited with almost single-handedly creating an ad market targeted to African American women, reports Broadcasting and Cable.
The corporate winners were Pepsi, McDonald’s and American Family Mutual Insurance. On June 28, Target Market News reported that Smith, co-founder and president of Essence Communications Partners, had resigned his position effective in July.
Union Wants Telemundo Reporters, Anchors Covered
Union leaders pressuring NBC to extend contract coverage to TV anchors and reporters who work for Telemundo, NBC’s recently acquired Spanish-language network, planned to take their campaign to Los Angeles City Hall Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has demanded the right to organize 36 on-air employees of the two Telemundo stations in Los Angeles, KVEA-TV Channel 52 and KWHY-TV Channel 22, since NBC completed its $2.7-billion acquisition of Telemundo in April.
The union alleges that NBC, which is owned by General Electric Co., has rebuffed its efforts.
The network instead has endorsed a two-tiered system of discrimination, the union charges, in which on-air Telemundo reporters and anchors receive substantially lower salaries and benefits than their counterparts at KNBC-TV Channel 4.
AFTRA represents all of KNBC’s nearly 30 on-air employees, and the union is asking that its contract with NBC automatically be extended to include Telemundo journalists.
Columbia U. Editing Its J-School Mission
Lee C. Bollinger, the new president of Columbia University, surprised many last month when he suspended the search to select a dean for Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, announcing instead that before naming a new dean, Columbia would re-evaluate the school’s role at the university.
“Of all the institutions in this field that might be looking at their raison d’être, Columbia isn’t the one you’d suspect. Ever since Joseph Pulitzer established it, it’s had a very strong sense of its mission. And whether you agree with that mission or not, it never seemed to lack confidence in it,” said Thomas Kunkel, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland at College Park.
How J-School Professors Can “Get” Idea of Diversity
In the middle of a meeting with the faculty of a journalism school last fall, a professor teaching a sports literature class helped to underscore the challenge facing those who want diversity taught in journalism schools, recounts Keith Woods, reporting, writing & editing group leader at the Poynter Institute.
“I must tell you,” he said, “that I have never thought about diversity when I teach my class.” The authors whose work the class reads, he said, were all white and included one woman. Challenged by some of his colleagues to expand the reading list or otherwise include the work of people who were not white, he said: “I get it. You want me to choose the best writers out there, then be sure to add some black people, right?”
What is the value of diversity in journalism education? How do you make it top-of-mind without making it mindless exercise? What exactly does it mean to “get it?” And how do you manage a conversation that includes people who get it, those who think they get it and those who don’t think there’s anything to get?
Too many of diversity’s champions have surrendered the intellectual high ground on this issue, joining less thoughtful detractors in a debate that assumes racial and ethnic diversity always means less-than and always comes at the expense of more qualified white men. Thus, an effort that has had a hard time finding its stride is constantly shooting itself in the foot, Woods says.
JournalistExpress Offers Quick Links
On Editor & Publisher Online, columnist Charles Bowen reviews a site with many resources for journalists.
