ESPN to Launch 24-Hour Spanish Channel
ESPN plans to expand ESPN Desportes, its Spanish-language sports network, to a 24-hour format in the third quarter of next year, reports Electronic Media.
ESPN Desportes began in 2000, providing ESPN affiliates with the right to carry a limited number of Major League Baseball game telecasts in Spanish, and expanded to a weekly block in April 2001. It currently is distributed to 13 million ESPN subscribers on Sunday nights and offers ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” games and “Sunday Night NFL” telecasts in Spanish.
The new, round-the-clock network will offer domestic and international sports programming currently airing on ESPN, including Major League Baseball, NBA, on a nightly basis, and European soccer. Other sports focuses on Latin America will include Pacific League Baseball and coverage of Copa America Volleyball.
Ida B. Wells Winner Compares Wells, Bob McGruder
The winner of the Ida B. Wells Award, given by the National Conference of Editorial Writers and the National Association of Black Journalists to a news executive who has promoted diversity, accepted his award Saturday by comparing Wells, the legendary anti-lynching crusader, with Bob McGruder , the Detroit Free Press editor and diversity advocate who died in April.
Reid MacCluggage , who retired on Dec. 31 as editor and publisher of The Day in New London, Conn., won the award in 2001, but the NCEW convention at which it was to be presented was canceled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Sam Adams , longtime curator for the award, who is retiring, was awarded the 2002 honor at the NABJ convention in Milwaukee in July.
In accepting his award, MacCluggage criticized as inaccurate a recently publicized study from the anti-prison Justice Policy Institute in Washington that reported that the number of black men in jail or prison had grown fivefold in the past 20 years, to the point where more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges or universities.
MacCluggage said the figures for college enrollment used in the study were incomplete, omitting some college branches, and that more reliable figures from the Census would show that in 2000 there were 815,000 black men in higher education, not 603,000 as the report stated. The study compared that figure with the 791,600 black men in jail or prison.
However, Jason Ziedenberg of the Policy Institute stood by his choice of figures. He told Journal-isms today that the Census’ self-reporting method is not as accurate as the count supplied by colleges to the National Center for Education Statistics, whose figures he used.
In either case, MacCluggage told the Nashville gathering that the fact that black men are filling prison cells at a greater rate than ever is the kind of phenomenon that Wells would be investigating, and that he hoped that newspapers would do more reporting on it. Both Wells and McGruder stood for good journalism and humanistic values, he said: “Each challenged people to think outside of our experiences.”
Medill School of Journalism Joins Wells Jury
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University will join the panel that decides the recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award, said Phil Haslanger, president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers.
Medill Dean Loren Ghiglione won the Wells award himself in 1987 as publisher of The News in Southbridge, Mass. With the retirement of curator Samuel L. Adams, “Loren will make sure it [the award] will go forward,” Haslanger told the NCEW convention.
He told Journal-isms that the Ida B. Wells jury will now consist of two representatives of NCEW, two of NABJ and one each from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., and Medill. The jury is to select a new curator to succeed Adams, who was a faculty member at the University of Kansas.
List of Wells Award winners at the end of this posting.
Hispanic Households Nearly 10 Percent of U.S. Total
A television advertiser could hardly ask for more. Hispanics, says a new report from Initiative Media, account for almost 10 percent of the television households in this country, and that grows by 1 percentage point a year. And that viewing takes place not just in prime time but across all dayparts, says a special report in Broadcasting & Cable.
MTV, Public Enemy at Odds over Mumia Reference
MTV has declined to air a new video by the rap group Public Enemy unless the group agrees to excise a lyric advocating the release of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate and a former president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists whose case has been debated across the globe, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Chuck D, leader of the seminal rap group, said he would never kowtow on political principle in his music.
Arab News Lacking, Journalism Panel Says
Media opinion writers and editors often don’t understand or address the complexity of the Arab world in their coverage of Sept. 11 and its aftermath, a panel of Arab and Arab American journalists said, reports the Nashville Tennessean.
The comments came during the National Conference of Editorial Writers 56th Annual Convention. NCEW President Phil Haslanger, managing editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., told Journal-isms there were 114 NCEW members attending, plus about 50 spouses/partners and a mix of speakers and exhibitors. Opinion writers attended from as far away as Norway, according to the Tennessean.
SPJ Board Reaffirms Commitment to Diversity
The board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists has approved a resolution emphasizing SPJ’s support of diversity in staffing and coverage. The measure, passed at the organization’s recent convention attended by more than 600 people in Dallas/Fort Worth, noted recent studies showing that up to 92 percent of sources on the top three network shows are white and 85 percent are male.
Yet efforts to diversify coverage in newspapers and local television, even if only partially successful, have “helped the news be more representative of the full American voice.” Such efforts should be redoubled, the SPJ board said.
The text of the resolution approved by the SPJ board of directors:
WHEREAS newspapers and broadcast stations are making a concerted effort to improve the accuracy and fairness of the news by diversifying their staffs and content and yet those diversity efforts have only been partially effective and much remains to be done; and
WHEREAS media scholars and the news industry have documented that 45 percent of newspapers still have no minorities at all; and
WHEREAS media analysts have documented that sourcing in news stories remains heavily skewed, with the top three network shows relying last year on sources who were 92 percent white and 85 percent male; and
WHEREAS even the partially successful efforts toward bringing a broader perspective into the news over the past decade have uplifted the quality of journalism and helped the news be more representative of America’s full voice and its races, classes, genders, sexual orientations, generations, geographies, and abilities;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Society of Professional Journalists and its members pledge to reaffirm our commitment to reflect all of America in the news, and to continue striving for more effective methods to improve diversity in staffing and content.
Palestinian American Claims U.S. Downplays Deaths
Despite the evidence, writes Ahmed Bouzid, president of Palestine Media Watch, the simple view that Palestinians slaughter civilians and Israelis at worst unintentionally or mistakenly kill them (with “stray bullets” and “errant shells”) still prevails, unshaken, in the reporting of the conflict by all the major U.S. newspapers.
The result is coverage that reports, as a matter of routine, suicide bombings by Palestinians with blaring headlines and Page One photographs, while the killing of Palestinian civilians (even children) is covered with little fanfare. Bouzid, who also heads the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Arab American Journalists, wrote an opinion piece for Editor & Publisher.
“Real Progress” on Diversity in Cable
Ask Spencer Kaitz, the founding director of the Walter Kaitz Foundation, what the No. 1 diversity issue is today and he will tell you it is the necessity “to break the old hiring patterns. . . . You have to break the pattern of always hiring on recommendations when you’ve got an all-white-male [work]force. That means you have to reach out to other communities,” Electronic Media reports.
The foundation, which bills itself as “the cable/broadband industry’s Diversity Network of resources, tools and exciting opportunities for job seekers, suppliers and grantees” heads is named for Kaitz’s father and is cable TV’s longtime conscience that keeps cable’s old-boy network from forgetting about diversity.
“We’ve made real progress on diversity,” Kaitz said. “The haunting refrain of the late ’90s was, ‘When would an executive of color finally lead a major company?’ Now you have Dick Parsons at AOL Time Warner, and the position doesn’t get any more important or visible than that.”
Kaitz, said that his father, Walter Kaitz, who was also a cable executive, came by his passionate interest in diversity in part because of the lessons he drew from his own background.” The elder Kaitz was a Russian Jewish immigrant. “He saw pogroms,” the organized persecutions of Jews in Czarist Russia. “He fought in World War II. He saw people resolving ethnic differences by killing each other.”
WPIX in N.Y. Increases Bilingual Programming
WPIX-TV New York is tripling the amount of its bilingual programming with the addition of four-and-a-half hours of programming in Spanish and English.
The shows include 10 half-hours worth of off-network strips (Spanish-language versions were supplied by the various distributors) and The WB Television Network’s new series, “Greetings from Tucson.”
The syndicated shows are “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Dharma & Greg,” “Will & Grace”, “Friends,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Suddenly Susan.”
Reporters Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs
Some journalists have already run into trouble with their employers over the contents of their personal sites, with one – a reporter for The Houston Chronicle – having been fired for his efforts, reports the New York Times. And news media companies may be opening themselves to questions of liability when they set up Web logs on their sites.
Ida B. Wells Award Winners
2002: Samuel Adams, Ida B. Wells Award Curator & University of Kansas School of Journalism (retired)
2001: Reid MacCluggage, editor and publisher, The Day, New London, Conn.
2000: Prize Not Awarded
1999: Timothy M. Kelly, editor and publisher, Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky.
1998: Paula Madison, president and general manager, NBC4 (KNBC), Los Angeles.
1997: Frank Blethen, board chair, Seattle Times Co.
1996: Donald E. Graham, publisher, Washington Post.
1995: Shelby Coffey III, editor and executive vice president, Los Angeles Times.
1994: Gerald M. Sass, senior vice president, Freedom Forum.
1993: Wanda Lloyd, USA Today, Freedom Forum.
1992: Jay T. Harris, Knight-Ridder, Inc., publisher, San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
1991: John Quinn, The Freedom Forum
1990: Mervin R. Aubespin, associate editor, The Louisville(Ky.) Courier-Journal.
1989: Albert Fitzpatrick, Knight-Ridder, Inc.
1988: David Lawrence, Jr., Detroit Free Press
1987: Loren Ghiglione, Editor, The News, Southbridge, Mass.
1986: James K. Batten, Knight-Ridder, Inc.
1985: Barry Bingham, Jr., Louisville (Ky.) Journal/Times.
1984: Daniel Burke, Capital Cities.
1983: Allen H. Neuharth, Gannett Co., Inc.