BET Cancels “BET Tonight,” “Lead Story” in Revamping
Black Entertainment Television is canceling two of its three regular news shows – “Lead Story” and “BET Tonight With Ed Gordon” – effective at the end of the year as it prepares for the acquisition of new programming, spokesman Michael Lewellen told Journal-isms today. The shakeup also means the future of the network’s most well-known news personality, Ed Gordon, “is still to be determined,” Lewellen said.
Effective immediately, approximately 40 positions across a range of company departments will be eliminated, or about 12 percent of the company’s total workforce of 350 people nationwide, according to the network.
Gordon first started with BET in 1988. He is best known for conducting in 1996, for BET, the first one-on-one interview with O.J. Simpson after Simpson’s acquittal on murder charges. Gordon returned to the network in 2000 to host “BET Tonight with Ed Gordon” after a stint with MSNBC.
The news panel show “Lead Story,” which BET founder Bob Johnson has pointed to as “the only show in America where black policymakers confront black journalists . . . on issues important to African Americans,” debuted with Gordon as host on Sept. 28, 1991. This season it has featured interviews with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican national committees. The show was also a showcase for African American columnists and commentators.
Of BET’s three regular news shows, only “BET Nightly News” will remain, Lewellen said. News and public affairs programming will now focus on special shows such as single-topic specials and town hall meetings. The network had to “adjust its programming schedule and the staff that supports them” to make way for recent programming acquisitions that include movies and other entertainment shows, he said.
“When we announce our new direction, all of our programming genres are going to be affected,” Lewellen said.
“Our new focus will strike a better balance between original programming and an increase in acquired shows,” added BET President and Chief Operating Officer Debra Lee in a statement. “This new strategy required us to examine our entire corporate structure and get a better sense of the size and scope of organization we need moving forward. It’s always difficult to lose people as part of a business process, but these changes are our effort to support our new programming direction at BET.”
Owner Robert Johnson sold BET to Viacom — the giant media conglomerate that owns CBS, UPN, MTV, VH1 and more — in 2000 for $1.5 billion. With Viacom ownership, it was said, BET could take advantage of greater news resources and could shake its image as primarily a purveyor of music videos and little original programming.
BET Co-Founder Sheila Johnson Riding High
Sheila Johnson, media mogul turned horse show impresario turned linen designer, is taking yet another turn: innkeeper, reports the Washington Post. The 53-year-old co-founder of Black Entertainment Television – and ex-wife of Bob Johnson – plans to build a 40-room rural resort just outside Middleburg, Va., about 40 miles west of Washington.
Norris: I Chose NPR for Reasons Professional, Personal
When Michele Norris left ABC News to become the first person of color to co-host National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” some observers wondered why she would leave the supposedly more glamorous television news for radio.
“After listening to the show almost all my adult life, realizing I’m going to be part of that daily conversation with 12 million listeners is the most exciting part of my journalism career,” Norris tells the Chicago Tribune.
The Tribune reports that Norris said she was interested in the NPR job because it offered a chance to shape national discussions about issues in a broader way than being a correspondent, while combining the chance to do in-depth writing while building on the broadcasting skills she has developed.
It also helped, Norris said, by making her schedule more predictable so she could spend more time with her attorney husband, Robert Johnson; 3-year-old daughter Aja Johnson (named for a Steely Dan song); and 2-year-old Norris Johnson (after his mother’s maiden name).
Norris, 41, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune, the Washington Post and, most recently, at ABC News. She starts on air at NPR on Monday. (See clarification to this item on Dec. 9)
Muslims Threaten Staff of Nigeria’s ThisDay
A previously unknown Muslim group has threatened 16 Nigerian journalists with having their heads cut off or limbs amputated. The journalists at ThisDay newspaper are “accomplices” to Isioma Daniel, who on Nov. 16 wrote the column that offended many Muslims by suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed might have married a Miss World contestant, the paper’s manager told Agence France-Presse. She has since resigned and fled to the United States.
Mainstream Muslim groups have forgiven the newspaper for the report, which sparked riots that left 220 people dead.
But some fundamentalist groups are still angry. ThisDay’s managing director, Victor Ifijeh, confirmed a report in the Post Express that a group calling itself the Movement Against Attack on Prophet Mohammed had sent a threatening letter. According to the Post Express, the letter said: “Arrangement has been made to launch an attack on the following reporters who we considered as accomplices to the offence committed by the lady who fronts them,” Agence France-Presse reported.
Latin America Remains Dangerous for Journalists
The probable war with Iraq has a number of newspapers training correspondents to work safely in that hostile area, writes Mark Fitzgerald in Editor & Publisher. But he writes that U.S. reporters are more likely to face violence as they work alone or in improvised groups covering nations in Latin America, where a passel of drug traffickers, guerrillas, death squads, and even uniformed government officers have all declared local and foreign journalists as legitimate military targets.
Sun-Times Columnist Mary Mitchell Gets Syndication Deal
Mary Mitchell, editorial writer and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, will have a weekly column syndicated by United Feature Syndicate starting Jan. 3, the syndicate announces. The column addresses justice, social responsibility, family and race issues. Mitchell has been writing it for the Sun-Times since 1996.
“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” says Mitchell. “I believe that compelling stories about the struggles of everyday life can form a bridge across ethnic, gender, class and racial divides.”
Mitchell is the immediate past president of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists and a member of the Association of Women Journalists. She earned her degree in journalism from Columbia College Chicago after working for nearly 20 years as a legal secretary. She began an internship with the Sun-Times in 1990 that led to a position as an education reporter. She has covered city hall and the federal courts, and co-wrote an award-winning series about racial attitudes in Chicago. Before becoming a columnist, Mitchell worked on several series about urban violence. Mitchell grew up in a Chicago housing project, attended Chicago public schools, and now lives in Maywood, a predominantly African-American suburb. She is divorced, with three adult children, a teenage son and three grandchildren.
Inquirer’s Acel Moore Returns Fire in Kind
In the new issue of Philadelphia magazine, four sidebars accompany Laurence Roy Stains‘ profile of Inquirer editor Walker Lundy and the bag of woe he inherited, reports the Philadelphia Weekly. The sidebars are formatted as open letters to Lundy from four former Inquirer reporters, including Buzz Bissinger, Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of “A Prayer for the City,” on former mayor Ed Rendell‘s first term.
Bissinger writes of columnist Tom Ferrick: “Repeat after me, Tom: It’s okay to be an asshole. It’s okay to be an asshole.” And of longtime editorial page columnist Acel Moore, “Gently tell him that the odds of his saying something original and provocative and controversial in his op-ed column, after 15-plus years of not saying anything original and controversial and provocative, are not very good.”
Responds Moore: “Being obnoxious is not the only mark of a good columnist. He says there’s nothing wrong with being an asshole. Well, I think there is. But I guess [Bissinger] is the expert on that.”
Former CBS Chief Quits All-Male Augusta Golf Club
Protesting Augusta National Golf Club’s refusal to admit a woman member, Thomas Wyman, the former chief executive of CBS and a 25-year Augusta National member, has resigned from the club, he told the New York Times in an interview. Wyman is the only member of the exclusive club to resign since Augusta National’s all-male makeup became a public issue last June.
N.Y. Times Kills Columns Disagreeing With Augusta Stance
Editors of the New York Times killed a column by Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson that disagreed with an editorial about Tiger Woods and Augusta National’s refusal to admit women as members, the New York Daily News reports.
A column by sportswriter Harvey Araton also was zapped, sources said, because it differed with the paper’s editorial opinion about the golf club standoff.
The moves came amid extensive coverage of the Georgia club under former editorial page editor Howell Raines, who’s called for high-impact stories since becoming executive editor last year. “That’s right, my column didn’t run,” Anderson told the Daily News. “It was decided by the editors that we should not argue with the editorial page.”
Seven journalists from four private media outlets – including the director and three reporters from the privately owned Radio Etincelle – in Gonaïves, a seaside town northwest of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, went into hiding Nov. 21 after receiving menacing telephone calls and verbal threats on the street for covering the Cap-Haïtien protests, sources tell the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The committee issued a statement of concern about growing threats against Haitian journalists in the wake of anti-government protests in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien that began Nov. 17 and continue to rattle the country.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reports, demonstrators demanded justice in the death of radio journalist Brignol Lindor, who was hacked to death a year ago by Aristide supporters. Lindor was slain after he allowed opposition politicians on his talk-show program. Protesters hung photos of Lindor’s mutilated body on storefront doors. Some set fire to shacks in Petit-Goave.
