Media Managers of Color Tell What It Takes
“There’s always a gnawing shadow,” says one of the successful media managers of color who responded to a survey on what it takes to succeed in the news media. “It’s a disempowering thing to think that perhaps you were not good enough because somebody gave you a break. But, I don’t know why we have to be such purists about this. In a lot of ways, people at the top level in society get a lot of breaks. Oh, they’re talented as well, but it’s not a total meritocracy. We need to acknowledge the beneficial effect of diversity programs and keep pushing for them?
Respondents in “What It Takes to Succeed,” a research report examining the success of some of the nation’s top media executives and managers of color, listed hard work, skillful communications, intelligence, courage and mentors among the factors that worked for them. The report was sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the National Association of Minority Media Executives Foundation.
Written by Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the report is the result of the third annual telephone survey of past and present McCormick Fellows. Thirty-four were interviewed, including 21 men and 13 women. Nineteen were African American, 10 were Latino, three were Asian American and two Native American.
Another fellow explains, on mentorship: ?The most valuable mentor was not a formally assigned mentor. He was my supervisor who, by his own performance and his own qualities of leadership skill and integrity provided a living example of a role model that I strove to pattern my own performance after.?
A PDF of the report is available on the NAMME Web site at: http://www.namme.org/, or contact Jeanne Fox-Alston, executive director, for a hard copy, at nammeexecutivedirector@att.net.
Nicholas Lemann Named Columbia J-School Dean
Nicholas Lemann, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, has agreed to become dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, an appointment that comes at a pivotal time for the school, the New York Times reports.
Lemann, 48, has worked as a reporter and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post. Journalists of color might remember Lemann most for his 1991 book “The Promised Land,” which traced the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Chicago.
The Times said that Lemann hoped to turn in a book on post-Civil War Reconstruction by the end of the summer.
Lemann’s appointment, which is subject to a vote by Columbia’s trustees, comes after university president Lee C. Bollinger spent more than six months leading a broad review of journalism education by a task force of more than 30 journalists, educators and others ? including Lemann. The next dean is expected to play a central role in reshaping the school, the Times said.
Bollinger released a 10-page statement on his conclusions about where journalism education should go, a statement that is expected to contribute to the direction the journalism school takes. “Mr. Bollinger called for more investment in journalism education; a lengthening of the time students spend earning a degree; a broader intellectual base that includes subjects like statistics, economics, modern political theory and philosophy; and opportunities like clerkships after graduation,” the Times said.
Of Lemann’s 1999 book, “The Big Test, the Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice:
“If anything, Lemann’s racial concerns have intensified since The Promised Land, where in his tough-minded refusal to mince words about anyone’s shortcomings he sometimes risked blaming the victim. One of The Big Test’s strongest moments is a grimly laconic explanation of how its only significant ‘black’ characters, half-Persian babysitters whom [the character] sees into college, must defeat not just poverty but the social disadvantages specially reserved for Americans of African heritage. As Lemann understands, the SATs have given many a well-earned leg up. But they’ve also hurt a lot of people who deserve better, too many of them black.”
Accusations Against Tri-State Defender Get Uglier
?For several years, the weekly newspaper that calls itself ?The Mid-South’s Best Alternative Newspaper? on its editorial-page masthead has been ripping off other weekly newspapers’ stories, changing the datelines and place-names, and running them as its own ?lead story? under the byline of Larry Reeves,? reports the Memphis Flyer, speaking of The Tri-State Defender, Memphis? venerable black weekly.
?What its readers were led to believe was hard-hitting reporting about crime or civil rights violations in Nashville, Jackson, the Mississippi Delta, or other Mid-South locales was in fact the work of reporters in such faraway cities as Cleveland, Los Angeles, or New York. The actual reporters were never credited and, until this week, were not aware that they were being plagiarized,? the Flyer says.
?Reeves is something of a mystery, and it is by no means certain that he actually exists.?
When the East Bay Express in California broke the story last week, it said:
“When alerted last week to the stolen story, the Defender’s new publisher and editor, Marzie Thomas, expressed shock and surprise. Thomas, who was named the paper’s chief in January, described Reeves as a freelancer and vowed to banish him from the paper.”
Gasps at O’Reilly’s “Stealing Hubcaps” Remark
Emceeing Saturday night’s Best Friends rock-and-roll gala at Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park — which raised $800,000 for the 15-year-old charity benefiting inner-city schoolchildren — Fox News Channel star Bill O’Reilly was trying to fill dead air during a lull in the entertainment, reports Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove.
Members of the “Best Men,” as the sixth-to-eighth-grade boys in the program are called, were delayed getting onstage to perform a lip-synced rendition of the Four Tops standard “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).”
O’Reilly ad-libbed: “Does anyone know where the Best Men are? I hope they’re not in the parking lot stealing our hubcaps.”
” ?To say that this conservative audience — dominated undoubtedly by many of Mr. O’Reilly’s biggest fans — was aghast, is an understatement,? one attendee e-mailed us, asking for anonymity. ?The well-known Republican politicians and their spouses seated at or near my table were appalled.?”
FCC Member Urges Coverage of Ownership Debate
More than seven of 10 Americans, 72 percent, say they have heard “nothing at all” about the Federal Communications Commission media-ownership debate, according to a late-February survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, reports Mark Fitzgerald in Editor & Publisher. Only 4 percent of respondents said they had heard “a lot” about the debate.
“Three out of four people don’t know — that’s not acceptable,” Commissioner Michael Copps said. “My plea, for all people with the media, is to exercise your responsibilities and your rights in this debate,” E&P reported.
South American Journalists Evaluate War Coverage
For a column that ran on the TV.spy Web site, Peru native Belisa Morillo, an Atlanta-based freelancer, asked South American journalists how viewers in their home countries view the war coverage by U.S. and Western media.
Most cited shortcomings in U.S. coverage and the antiwar feelings in their own countries. Said Brazil’s Luiz Fernando Magliocca, CEO of CIN – Central Internacional de Notí£©as, “There’s a joke running in the country that says that they gave 48 hours to start the war because there were no sponsors for the show!”
Columnist Covers Black Commentators’ War Views
“Although there has been debate in the mainstream media over the wisdom and tactics of the fighting in Iraq, many black journalists and commentators — reflecting a black America that, polls said, was overwhelmingly opposed to going to war — have been considerably more outspoken and skeptical about the decision that put U.S. troops onto a Middle East battlefield,” writes media columnist Mark Jurkowitz in the Boston Globe, drawing heavily on the content of BlackAmericaWeb.com.
He adds:
“In his war dispatches from Qatar, the [National Newspaper Publishers Association] news service editor-in-chief, George Curry, has touched on subjects that generally are ignored on cable news networks and front pages. On the day Baghdad fell, he expressed concern that African-American troops might have suffered ‘disproportionate casualties during the war.’ And in one piece about Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, an African-American who became famous overnight as a skillful briefer at daily press conferences in Qatar, he sent a message about the legal challenge to affirmative action at the University of Michigan. ‘If [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia comes here,’ Curry wrote, ‘he will see that the Army didn’t lower its standards to produce quality leadership.'”
Black Columnists’ Page on Affirmative Action
In addition to a page devoted to its members’ columns on the war in Iraq, the Web site of the William Monroe Trotter Group of African American columnists is building a page on affirmative action. Both can be reached through the Trotter Group home page, http://www.trottergroup.com.
E&P Columnist Plugs Indianz.com
“Native American issues touch all of the U.S.,” writes Editor & Publisher “Reporters’ Digital How-to” columnist Charlie Bowen. “For example, did you know that right now ancestors of the Lumbee tribe seek federal recognition? If that is granted, the Lumbee would become one of the largest tribes in the nation, and that would mean millions of dollars in housing, education, and health funds flowing into the tribe’s traditional territory. And where’s that? Eastern North Carolina.
“This is the kind of background that a major Web site called Indianz.com can provide your newsroom.”
MSNBC’s Rick Sanchez Headed Back to Miami?
Veteran Miami TV anchor and sometimes-bad-boy Rick Sanchez is leaving his job at cable network MSNBC and may be headed back to South Florida — a story that Sanchez denied, but not very forcefully, the Miami Herald reports.
Wayne Dawkins Leaving Va. Paper
After five years working under a shifting cast of managers at the Daily Press in Hampton Roads, Va., editorial board member Wayne J. Dawkins is leaving the paper. Dawkins is the unofficial historian of the National Association of Black Journalists, publisher of the Black Alumni Network News for graduates of Columbia Journalism School, and principal of his own publishing house, August Press, which published his “Black Journalists: The NABJ Story.” Dawkins, the only African American editorial writer on a paper whose circulation area includes historically black Hampton University, is working on another installment of that story. Dawkins had worked at the Post-Tribune in Gary, Ind., the Courier-Press in Cherry Hill, N.J., and the Daily Argus in Mount Vernon, N.Y., an experience recounted in the 1995 anthology, “My First Year as a Journalist.”
Editorial page editor Jesse Todd wrote this memo to the staff yesterday:
“Associate Editor Wayne Dawkins, who has been a member of the Daily Press Editorial Board for five years, is leaving the newspaper in May.
“During his tenure Wayne has become a recognized name in our community through his columns, his frequent speaking engagements and his many interactions with the authors of letters to the editor. Our sometimes irascible letter writers have been the beneficiaries, whether they knew it or not, of his exquisite patience and firmness. Wayne says he’ll be staying in Newport News and plans to pursue other writing opportunities as well as an independent publishing venture. Please join me in wishing him the best as he sets out on a new course.
“Wayne’s departure leaves a vacancy. If you are interested in writing and editing for our opinion pages, or if you know someone you think would be well suited to the job, please contact me.
“Thanks,
Jesse Todd”
“Sam Lacy will turn 100 years old in the fall,” writes columnist Michael Olesker in the Baltimore Sun, “and he’s still got plenty to say. So naturally, he showed up yesterday morning at the Baltimore Afro-American, as he has for the past 64 years, to write his sports column and take part in the business of the day: writing not only about games but how they connect to the human conscience.”
Lacy figures in a new book, “Beyond the Shadow of the Senators”, by Brad Snyder (Contemporary Books), as in the old baseball Washington Senators, and in 1998 he wrote his autobiography with Moses J. Newson, “Fighting for Fairness” (Tidewater Publishers).
NABJ President Re-Elected to RTNDA Board
Condace Pressley, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, has been re-elected to the board of the Radio-Television News Directors Association.
RTNDA, which met in Las Vegas last week, reports that its voting members elected seven regional directors earlier this year, re-electing Pressley, assistant program director at WSB-AM in Atlanta, from region 13. She had been on the RTNDA board and the NABJ board simultaneously before her election as president in 2001.
Representatives from each of the journalist-of-color organizations, as well of as the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, serve as an ex-officio, or non-voting, members of the RTNDA board.
Two members of the NABJ board, Randye Bullock and Meta Mereday, additionally serve on the board of the National Black Public Relations Society
Secret to Diversity Attendance: Scheduling
John Thomson, deputy managing editor for administration at the Dayton Daily News, said the diversity panel he sat on at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention last week in New Orleans was one of the best-attended he’d seen. He praises board member Milton Coleman of the Washington Post, incoming ASNE board member, and David Yarnold, editor of the San Jose Mercury News and incoming chair of the ASNE diversity committee, for “cleverly” scheduling it at 10 a.m. as part of a morning on diversity issues. Some 400 attended the panel discussion.
“Had it been in the afternoon, I’m sure they would have been out partying in New Orleans,” he told Journal-isms.
NAMME Honors Six for Diversity Efforts
Six media leaders were honored in New Orleans by the National Association of Minority Media Executives at its ninth annual ?Celebration of Diversity? awards banquet, attended by 200:
The winners:
Robert C. Maynard Legend Award: Edward Lewis, chairman and CEO, Essence Communications
Distinguished Diversity Award for Lifetime Achievement: David Honig, executive director, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council
Catalyst – Print: David Yarnold, editor, San Jose Mercury News
Catalyst – Broadcast: Tamara Robinson, vice president and director of programming, WNET-TV, New York
Catalyst – New Media: Christian Hendricks, vice president/interactive media, McClatchy Co.
The Lawrence Young Breakthrough Award: Toni Laws, retired senior vice president, diversity, and NAA Foundation, Newspaper Association of America. This is a new award, named after Young, a NAMME board member and long-time journalist who died last year, in tribute to one known for his extensive mentoring efforts, said NAMME executive director Jeanne Fox-Alston.