Journalist-Surgeon Performs Surgery in Iraq
While reporting on a U.S. Navy medical team in Iraq on Thursday, CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta unexpectedly became part of the story when asked to perform emergency brain surgery, the Associated Press reports.
“The 2-year-old Iraqi boy did not survive,” reports the AP?s David Bauder.
“As the only neurosurgeon available to treat a patient with a severe brain injury, Gupta said it was his moral duty to help. But it raised questions about the blurring of roles between doctor and journalist.
“Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University in Atlanta, has been traveling with the Navy’s “devil docs” unit. Dr. Bob Arnot, a nonpracticing internist, has also spent time with that unit for NBC News and reported on a harrowing firefight early Thursday.”
Add to the list of journalists in the Gulf: Michael Martinez of the Chicago Tribune, who has been reporting from southern Iraq. WAGA-TV Atlanta photojournalist Eddie Cortes returned Sunday after nearly a month in Kuwait and Iraq, reports the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. He and reporter Doug Richards “spent much of the time embedded with the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division. The only “embeds” from an Atlanta TV station, the duo fought sandstorms and lack of shut-eye to report for almost every newscast on the soldiers who were comparative grizzled veterans of such tough conditions,” the story said.
Scripps Co. Joins NAHJ Diversity Effort
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and The E.W. Scripps Company have announced a joint effort to improve news coverage of Latinos and to dramatically increase the number of qualified Latino journalists employed at selected Scripps newspapers around the country.
The new initiative, called “Si Se Puede,” is to be launched April 22 in Denver at a community forum sponsored by NAHJ and the Rocky Mountain News.
NAHJ will work with Scripps to rapidly improve the hiring of Latinos and news coverage of the Latino community in selected cities that have Scripps newspapers. The first three papers participating in the project are the Rocky Mountain News, the Ventura County (Calif.) Star and the Naples (Fla.) Daily News. In each location, NAHJ plans to co-sponsor community forums with the management of the local paper and work with local Scripps staff to improve diversity initiatives. The community forums are to bring together various industry stakeholders and create local task forces to monitor the improvement of diversity in hiring and in news coverage.
E.W. Scripps, based in Cincinnati, is the first media company to partner with NAHJ in its new Parity Project. The project is the centerpiece of NAHJ’s five-year strategic plan, which seeks to double the percentage of Latinos in the nation’s newsrooms by 2008.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am about this partnership,” Mike Phillips, editorial development director for the E.W. Scripps Company Newspaper Division, said in a news release. “NAHJ’s proposal is, in essence, that the newspaper industry get strategic about diversity. I believe it is the insight we all needed to help us pick up the pace on our diversity efforts.”
NAHJ President Juan Gonzalez said he hoped this would be “the first of many partnerships with other media companies . . . NAHJ is raising the bar for diversity,” he said.
Will Sutton Joins 75 at FCC Ownership Hearing
Several North Carolina local media owners and musicians joined about 75 concerned citizens Monday to speak out against any more federal deregulation of media ownership, the Durham Herald-Sun reports. Speakers included Will Sutton of the Raleigh News and Observer, immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists.
“The public hearing at Duke University’s Law School was one of a handful of Federal Communications Commission hearings nationwide and the first in the Southeast. The two FCC commissioners in attendance said they will use the public comments in June when the FCC reviews several media ownership regulations, including the rule that limits a single corporation from dominating a local media market, such as by owning a TV station and a newspaper in the same area, the Herald-Sun story said.
“U.S. Reps. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat, and Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, and others voiced concern about the effects of deregulation on media diversity, local values and competition throughout the five-hour hearing. Tift Merritt, a local singer-songwriter who has garnered national acclaim, and Bill Willis, a bluegrass musician and an advocate for traditional music, joined a panel on diversity and the importance of local programming.
“Of the 11 media owners and musicians who spoke on the panels, two spoke in favor of more deregulation. “William Sutton, past president of the National Association of Black Journalists and the News & Observer’s deputy managing editor, said a large number of black radio journalists lost their jobs because of consolidation. Sutton said 98 percent of radio stations had news operations in 1982. That number has dropped to 67 percent because of consolidation, he argued.
“‘Does that sound like a diversity of viewpoints to you?’ he asked. ‘If we consolidate TV as we did radio, if we continue to go down this path, we’re going to see a nation less informed, not more,'” the paper quoted Sutton as saying.
The Black World Today Site Suspends Operations
The Black World Today, a news site with a strong black consciousness that launched in 1996, suspended operations effective April 1, national editor Herb Boyd has announced.
Boyd, editor of a number of nonfiction anthologies, including 1995’s Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America, said the site had received about 150,000 unique visitors a month during peak periods and operated with five or six regular employees, all part-time.
In December, founder Don Rojas, a former editor of the New York Amsterdam News, became the new general manager at WBAI-FM, a Pacifica station, while continuing to work with the Web site. Statement by Boyd at the end of today’s posting.
Jim Wilson Named N.Y. Times Picture Editor
Jim Wilson, a longtime photographer and editor at the New York Times, has been appointed the newspaper’s picture editor, the Times announces.
Wilson, 51, will manage a staff of 80 photographers, editors and technicians. Wilson, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, has been the newspaper’s chief assignment editor since 1998. From 1991 to 1997, he was a staff photographer in the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau and, before that, was a staff photographer in New York.
Before joining The Times in 1980, Wilson worked for two years as a staff photographer for The Associated Press and, from 1974 to 1978, as a photographer for The Charlotte Observer. He graduated from Duke.
Black Network’s Newscast Starts Tonight
The Major Broadcasting Cable network’s one-hour newscast debuts tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern time with a replay at 11 p.m. The newscast is to be followed by a 30-minute special on Memphis 35 years after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.
The network, a five-year old Atlanta-based project, plans a black-themed companion channel that by next year is to broadcast news and public affairs programming 24 hours a day.
Criticized Immigration Series Up for Pulitzer
Leaders of the Asian American Journalists Association will be paying special attention when the Pulitzer Prizes are announced Monday: President Mae Cheng, along with Jeordan Legon, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, had criticized one of the finalists: Washington Post writer Anne Hull’s front-page series on immigrants in Atlanta.
According to a leaked list in Editor and Publisher the series is a finalist in the national reporting category. But as reported here in December, Cheng and Legon wrote letters to the editor of the Post criticizing the series.
Parts of the series “are disappointing because they resort to cliches that were more relevant a decade ago,” Cheng wrote.
“Rather than displaying varied portraits of Latinos, your paper presents stereotypical views of minorities,” said Legon.
“Poverty Beat” Reporter Wins Guild Award
“In an age when newspapers cater to advertisers by abandoning inner-city coverage,” as the Guild Reporter put it, the Newspaper Guild has awarded its top Heywood Broun Award to Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee, its “poverty reporter” for the past two years. The Guild paper praised executive editor Rick Rodriguez for creating the beat.
I come from a background not many editors come from, Rodriguez, who is on the ladder to head the American Society of Newspaper Editors, told the Guild Reporter. “He’s a Latino, of course, which is still unusual enough to merit comment, but also the son of illegal immigrants who scrabbled for a living. He knows the value of sweat equity in citizenship, and saw the extent to which it was devalued if only by being ignored by the rest of society, wrote Andy Zipser. “That story’s got to be told,” Rodriguez insists, “and nobody’s going to tell it if we don’t.”
“And then, even though the Broun Award is Furillo’s and not his, Rodriguez adds: ‘This is one of those awards that means a lot to me personally, because it’s the reason I got into this business in the first place.’
“Furillo, meanwhile in one of those coincidences made all the more wonderful because they can’t be orchestrated is an activist in the Northern California Media Guild. One of two unit chairs at the Bee, he helped negotiate a contract reopener a year ago.
“Poverty beat and labor activism. Broun would have loved the guy,” said the Reporter piece.
The Broun competition honors work in the previous calendar year that best exemplifies the spirit of Guild founder Heywood Broun.
Best Obit of “War” Singer Edwin Starr?
The war in Iraq has given new life to the 1970 Edwin Starr song “War,” but Starr himself had the misfortune to die in the middle of it. Though he was born in Nashville, the best obituary most likely will be this one from overseas, in the Independent of England, where Starr lived most recently, at http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=393717 or click on the headline of this item.
Statement by Herb Boyd on The Black World Today
I deeply regret informing you of our suspension of operations at a most critical time in our nation’s history. It has taken all our resources to sustain the site beyond 9/11 and the attendant financial turndown. No, this is not an April Fool’s prank!
For several months our situation has been dire and we exhausted all means of survival short of prevailing on our readers, who have been unstinting in their devotion to our coverage.
Our temporary shut down, we hope, will not inconvenience you too much, and it has been our delight to provide alternative news reports for you over the last seven years. Indeed, it’s been a very good run and I think you’ll agree that while we were here we made a difference. Thankfully, there are a number of productive/informative sites you can turn to, particularly WBAI.com and a number of potent listservs.
There’s no way to say for certain what our fate will be, perhaps yet another progressive casualty of the dom.com bust, though we can’t be seen in that context, given our mission to provide a forum to continue what many of us had done in other spheres for so long. Let me say in closing that it’s been a pleasure to serve you and to work with such a enjoyable bunch of comrades, many of whom will continue to be close associates in other endeavors. Kwaheri, so long, and we truly hope this is not a permanent goodbye.
Best, Herb Boyd, National Editor, The Black World Today.
