Roy Johnson Leaves Savoy for AME Job at SI
Roy S. Johnson, who saw through a long-burning vision when he became the founding editor-in-chief of Savoy magazine, is leaving to become assistant managing editor/special projects at Sports Illustrated, the Time Inc. weekly where he once worked.
Keith Clinkscales, chairman and CEO of Vanguarde Media, Inc., Savoy’s parent company, said he had not decided on a successor, although he said, “I have several candidates,” whom he did not want to name.
In addition to being editor of Savoy, Johnson was editorial director of Vanguarde, which includes Savoy, circulation 325,000; Honey, 400,000; and Heart and Soul, also 400,000.
“This is a great, great opportunity for me. For nearly 25 years, I tried to do good work, excellent work, hoping to serve my readers, and to put myself in position to have this kind of opportunity,” Johnson told Journal-isms. The Sports Illustrated job is “a senior-level position at a magazine with a circulation of more than 4 million. It’s at the largest magazine publishing publisher in the world. It’s just a great opportunity to continue my growth, and to potentially have an even greater impact on our industry.
“Savoy was a blessing that allowed me to fulfill a dream. But it’s just one of my dreams. Now, I will chase a few others!”
Clinkscales said he was “trying to organize the staff and enjoying the fact that Roy’s put together such a good staff.” He said there was no timetable for filling the editor’s job and was grateful for the “great publication that [Johnson] left us with. He helped us get though one of the most horrendous media recessions ever.”
The successor will have to be like Johnson, he said — “someone who is dedicated to African American culture, who has a great journalism background, has intellectual curiosity and management skills.” Vanguarde employs 90 people, of whom 12 work on Savoy’s editorial side, said Clinkscales.
Savoy was born amid strong emotions. In February 2000, Clinkscales, a former publisher of Vibe magazine, entered into a joint ownership agreement with the magazine arm of Black Entertainment Television. Vanguarde gained control of BET’s three magazines — the political magazine Emerge; Heart & Soul, a fitness magazine; and BET Weekend, a Sunday magazine supplement for newspapers. Clinkscales folded Emerge in May 2000 (along with BET Weekend), amid protests from Emerge editor George Curry and other black journalists. “We put Emerge magazine on hiatus because we wanted to do Savoy,” Clinkscales told the Washington Post. The lifestyles-oriented Savoy was offered to Emerge subscribers, giving it a subscriber base of 120,000 when it debuted on newsstands the following January.
Johnson had tried earlier to sell the concept to Time Inc., where he had worked as a writer and editor at Fortune and at Sports Illustrated.
Johnson told Journal-isms: “Seven years ago I began to believe that the African-American marketplace was changing, that it was growing and rising and ready for another voice — one that complemented the current titles aimed at black readers and tried to capture what was important to us in all aspects of our culture in a package that was smart, sexy and elegant. That we have reached our second anniversary, in the midst of the most treacherous advertising market in memory, proves Savoy was more than a notion. The road has been rocky, as with most startups. But I’m proud that as I leave, Savoy is coming off its highest-revenue issue ever and that our circulation is a solid (and audited) 325,000 after launching at well under 200,000 in January 2001. The Savoy brand is strong. Its audience is growing. And the magazine is poised for more.”
Memos from Johnson, Time Inc. at the end of today’s posting.
Severe criticism of Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., for his allegedly racist remarks is growing in a surprising place — among his home state’s major newspapers, including his hometown paper, which on Thursday joined the push for him to step aside as incoming Senate Majority leader, reports Editor & Publisher.
“We have not had a lot of support [from readers] on that position,” Editor Dan Davis of The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula told E&P Online after his paper urged its most famous local product to step down from his leadership post. “We have had some people call and cancel subscriptions, but we expect that when we take an unpopular stand.”
Throughout the state, papers have blasted Lott since the remarks made news nationwide earlier this week. The uproar began after Lott commented at the 100th birthday part of retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., that the country would have been “better off” if Thurmond, a former segregationist, had been elected president when he ran on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948.
Since then, Mississippi papers have made the story a Page One regular and, for the most part, editorialized against Lott’s remarks.
Stanley Crouch Asks What Took Media So Long
“In late 1998 and early 1999, when I was writing column after column about [Trent Lott] and calling for his resignation because of his connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens, there was no response from the media at large, with the noble exceptions of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, both of The New York Times,” writes columnist Stanley Crouch in the New York Daily News.
“That proved to me that all the talk about a liberal media bias was bunk — at least when it comes to race. . . . Lott might survive all this. He is not black. If he were, and if he had associated with a racist black organization, the media would have pressed his pants while he was wearing them.”
Among the sudden blizzard of stories about Lott and his past is one on the Time Inc. Web site, in which former CNN President Tom Johnson said that at Ole Miss, Lott helped lead a fight to keep blacks out of his national fraternity. In the Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. asked Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, now 83, the only black Republican to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction, for his thoughts.
Ethnic Indian to manage WSJ in Europe
Until recently the deputy national editor at The Wall Street Journal, Raju Narisetti has a new assignment. He has been appointed managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe and assigned to run the paper’s operations across the Atlantic, reports the Indian Web site rediff.com. The South Asian Journalists Association describes Narisetti, a co-founder of the organization, as a “behind-the-scenes guiding force.”
“You don’t say no to such an opportunity, but yes, I was taken by surprise,” he told rediff.com, primarily because he had been appointed deputy national editor only a few months back. “I had always thought, even in India, that it would be fun to actually run a paper,” says Narisetti, who came to the U.S. in 1990 with “$2,300 in Travelers Checks and two suitcases” to do a master’s in journalism at the Indiana University in Bloomington.
Monroe Anderson, 9 Others Leaving CBS Chicago Station
At least 10 producers and other staffers at Chicago’s WBBM-Channel 2 were fired Wednesday in the most sweeping changes yet by new management of the CBS-owned station, reports Robert Feder in the Chicago Sun-Times. Most work behind the scenes. Among the casualties were Monroe Anderson, director of station services and community affairs and former board member of the National Association of Black Journalists, and weather anchor Markina Brown.
Anderson, 55, told Journal-isms he was taking an early retirement buyout and was shopping his novel about the first wave of African Americans to go into mass media in Chicago in the 1970s (and working on a second). He had been with the station for 13 years and had been press secretary to Mayor Eugene Sawyer, a Chicago correspondent for Newsweek, a writer for the Chicago Tribune and Ebony, and in Washington, a writer at the old National Observer.
Feder wrote that the end-of-the-year purge was viewed as an effort by Joe Ahern, president and general manager of Channel 2, and Carol Fowler, vice president of news, to make room for a new cadre of employees to carry out the rebuilding of the fifth-rated news operation. Among those laid off were two executive producers, Jill Manuel and Karin Movesian, and a longtime sports producer, Lissa Druss. Others included news producers, assignment editors and a promotion staffer.
Pember Goes from NAJA Board to Executive Director
Mary Annette Pember, vice president of the Native American Journalists Association, has been hired by the NAJA board as its executive director after serving as interim executive director since November, the board announced. Pember now has resigned formally from the board.
Pember is a longtime member of the 600-member organization and an independent journalist based in Cincinnati.
She is a member of the Red Cliff Ojibwe tribe in Wisconsin.
The board also named Ron Walters as associate executive director. Walters is a member of the Lakota Nation, Hunkpapa Tribe of the Dakotas.
Spanish, Portuguese Speakers Lose at Weather Channel
The Atlanta-based Weather Channel is closing its TV operations in Latin America — its last international TV holdings — as it blamed the region’s deep economic problems, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Fewer than 50 jobs will be eliminated as part of the closing, the company said. Most of them are in Atlanta, where programming is produced for the Spanish- and Portuguese-language operations. El Canal del Tiempo and O Canal do Tempo are slated to cease operations on Dec. 20.
Branham, at U-Texas, May Cut Undergrad Photojournalism
The University of Texas, alma mater to a dozen Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers, may cut its undergraduate photojournalism program to focus on graduate studies that emphasize video and other new media, the Associated Press reports.
“It’s a proposal that’s still on the table,” Lorraine Branham, director of the university’s journalism school, said. “This program has such a good reputation. We’re not making this decision casually.” The proposal was prompted because of changes in the news industry, especially a growing appetite for online news. Branham noted there are fewer jobs for photojournalists who take only still pictures, while there is greater need for photographers who can also shoot video and edit digital images and videos for Web sites and other media.
Branham was appointed to the director’s job in April after serving as assistant to the publisher at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and as the first African American executive editor of the Tallahassee Democrat in Florida.
Latina Columnist Tina Griego Leaves Denver Post
The Denver weekly Westword, writing about editor Greg Moore‘s problems with columnists, says Tina Griego fled the Post partly because Moore wasn’t terribly interested in columns.
Griego refutes that conjecture, although she does so in a manner that hints at a lack of support, editorial or otherwise. “The Post has many good people working in its newsroom, but for whatever reason, I never quite found a home there,” she told Westword. “I guess the position isolates a little bit; I think some of it is the nature of the job. And I’m not used to that.”
Griego’s leaving couldn’t have thrilled Moore, especially because he’s spoken so frequently about his interest in diversity; as a Latina, Griego was the paper’s only metro columnist with an ethnic background, says Westword. But in speaking about her departure, Moore has only compliments to pass along. “I like Tina, really respect her and her talent,” he allows. More intriguing are his remarks about filling the Post’s vacant slots. He says he’s “possibly” looking for two new metro columnists, but “I haven’t fully made up my mind.”
Chicago Black Journalists Continue to Duel
The officially recognized Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Chicago Association of Black Journalists, which is not recognized by the national, are giving competing holiday parties this year. The Chicago Reader attempts to put the jockeying, which continues even after the national board made its choice, into focus.
St. Pete Times Integrates Board of Directors
Fifty-one years after hiring its first black reporter, 34 years after eliminating its “Negro News” page, the St. Petersburg Times has integrated its highest level of management, the newspaper reports.
Karen Brown Dunlap, a veteran African American journalist and educator, was appointed Wednesday to the board of directors of Times Publishing Co.
The news was greeted with enthusiasm inside the newspaper and out. As dean of the faculty of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists, Dunlap is homegrown talent with a national reputation.
Her appointment also eases long-standing frustration and tension within a 118-year-old institution that always prided itself on idealism but reflected only white faces at the top.
“The absence of an African-American member of the board has gone on too long,” said board chairman and chief executive officer Andrew Barnes. “To have found a woman who can so ably function at every level of board membership, who also happens to be African-American, removes any sense of compromise that might have been attached if we had had to bend the rules.”
Roy S. Johnson Resignation Statement
Friends-
It will be announced today that I am leaving Vanguarde Media to return to Sports Illustrated (for the third time!) where I will be an Assistant Managing Editor.
Leaving Vanguarde was unquestionably the most difficult professional move I’ve ever made. Nearly three years ago, I joined Keith in his mission to create the next great media company, and I truly believe Vanguarde has become just that. It is a company with great vision and passion for its audience, and it is guided by some of the best young executives in the magazine industry. I will miss them all.
Vanguarde allowed me to realize a dream I conceived seven years ago: Savoy. With the February issue, the magazine will celebrate its second anniversary, no small achievement in these treacherous times. I will be forever thankful to everyone who’s contributed to Savoy, and I leave knowing that it is poised to become one of the premier magazines aimed at African-American readers. I will watch with great pride as Savoy and Vanguarde grow, and I’ll always cherish the times I shared with everyone here.
I am excited about the opportunity to return to SI. For those of you who don’t know, I began my professional career at SI a “few” years ago. In many ways, it is my professional home.
Thanks to all of you who have contributed to Savoy and Vanguarde with your thoughts and prayers. I will be forever grateful.
Onward!
r
Time Inc. Statement on Roy Johnson
TO: Time Inc. Staff
FROM: Terry McDonell, Managing Editor/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
DATE: December 12, 2002
SUBJECT: Time Inc. Memo: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Staff Announcement
_____
I am pleased to announce that Roy S. Johnson is joining SPORTS ILLUSTRATED as Assistant Managing Editor/Special Projects, effective December 23.
In addition to traditional editorial responsibilities, Johnson> ‘> s New role will include the oversight of editorial business projects, such as television and special events.
As many of you know, this announcement marks a homecoming for Roy, Who began his distinguished journalism career as a reporter at Sports Illustrated in 1978. Then, following six years at The New York Times and two years as a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he returned to SI as a senior editor in 1989. Among his many accomplishments, Roy co-authored SI’ s exclusive, first-person account of Magic Johnson’s retirement from the NBA in 1991 because of the HIV infection.
Not only has Roy lent his talents to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in years past, but he also was a highly regarded Editor-at-Large at Fortune. Under Roy’s supervision, Fortune published its award-winning 40-page cover package entitled “The New Black Power,” which highlighted a new generation of African Americans who are seizing real power in the business world. Roy also authored Fortune’s cover stories on Tiger Woods and the golf business, Michael Jordan and the economic impact of the Jordan era, and NASCAR sensation Jeff Gordon and the growth of stock-car racing.
Roy returns to Time Inc. from Vanguarde Media, where he served as Editorial Director of the company’s publications and Editor-in-Chief of Savoy magazine since the spring of 2000.
Roy’s recent experience as a publishing entrepreneur, combined Roy with his work at Time Inc., guarantees that his contribution to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED will be immediate and meaningful.
Please join me in welcoming Roy back to SI.