Native Journalists Facing Financial Crisis
The Native American Journalists Association, which just concluded its annual convention, has enough money for only six more months of operation and is looking for new sources of revenue, according to NAJA officers, the student convention newspaper The Native Voice reported.
“The budget crunch has NAJA considering several options, including shifting from an annual conference to one every other year.
“NAJA will co-host the UNITY 2004 conference in Washington, D.C., next summer, and is still going forward with the 2005 conference in Lincoln, Neb. However, plans for a 2006 conference and NAJA’s long-term ambitions are undecided,” the paper reported.
In addition, executive director Mary Annette Pember, citing family concerns and a desire to resume her freelance career, announced her resignation, five months after taking the position. NAJA president Patty Talahongva has announced she will not seek reelection this year, the Native Voice reported.
The major reason for the shortfall is a decrease in cash donations, said Pember, according to the paper.
“‘It’s difficult to predict where NAJA is headed, and I’m not in the prediction business,’ Pember said. Sponsors who used to give cash have been shifting to in-kind support, such as computers and other equipment for the group’s conference,” held this year in Green Bay, Wis.
“This year’s conference is expected to generate the first profit since 1999, about $8,400, Pember said. That’s equal to about a month’s expenses, which have been cut from $12,000 to $8,000 with NAJA’s move to Freedom Forum offices at the University of South Dakota. NAJA hopes to put on workshops at the new location to generate income,” reported the Native Voice.
In other developments:
— “Imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier recently filed a defamation lawsuit against Paul DeMain, the managing editor of News from Indian Country,” the student Native Voice reported. “Peltier’s suit claims DeMain irresponsibly told his readers that the ‘primary motive for the murder’ of activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash by other members of the American Indian Movement ‘was her knowledge that Leonard Peltier had shot the two agents as he was convicted.'” Peltier, 58, has insisted he was wrongly convicted of the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents during a shoot-out on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
— The methodology behind NAJA’s latest “Reading Red” report, which urged the news media to stop printing and airing sports teams’ Indian mascots, calling them racist and offensive, was both criticized and defended in the student convention paper.
— About 20 NAJA convention attendees toured what’s left of Wisconsin’s diminishing ancient rice beds as part of a tour of ecological points of interest, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported. The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission is studying how to save the beds.
— Phil Haslanger, managing editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., went on the tour and wrote that the tribes manage their resources with the long view in mind, although that might cause short-term hardships. “Why are people willing to sacrifice? Probably because we have been here for thousands of years,” said one tribe’s forest manager. Haslanger was on a NAJA panel on editorial writing, representing the National Conference of Editorial Writers.
Are Media Making “Harry Potter” Just a White Craze?
“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” set sales records around the world in its first weekend, but the images here of people buying the book have been so near-universally white, such as this collection in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that when a black boy was shown with the book Saturday on washingtonpost.com, in a photo by Dudley W. Books, it stood out like a wizard’s hat. But it’s not as if children of color aren’t among those who pushed the book’s sales to an estimated 5 million copies on its first day on the market.
“‘Harry Potter’ is so popular it crosses a lot of boundaries,” said Simba Sana, co-owner of Karibu Books in Hyattsville, Md. “What is surprising about this book is a lot of black boys who you wouldn’t anticipate would be reading it are,” along with young men up to age 25, said Clara Villarosa, owner of the Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem. Hue-Man had a Harry Potter party that started Friday night at 10 p.m., in which African American kids came in costume with their parents and counted down the minutes until the book went on sale at midnight. Attendance was limited to 50, but “we could have done 75,” Villarosa told Journal-isms. Villarosa, whose store hosted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last Monday, said 200 Potter books were sold over the weekend. No news media were present to cover the party, she said.
House Chairman Says “No Way” on Overturning FCC
Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is pledging to derail legislation that would reverse the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to relax limits on how media companies can merge and grow, the Associated Press reports.
The proposed legislation, approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, would roll back changes the FCC made June 2. That decision allowed individual companies to own television stations reaching nearly half the nation’s viewers and combinations of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city.
”We have no intentions of taking up that bill,” Tauzin spokesman Ken Johnson said. ”This has become a political soap opera, and given the chance Chairman Tauzin intends to cancel its run.”
Univision Wants to Dominate Radio as Well
Univision Communications, the nation’s largest Spanish-language media company and a dominant force not only in broadcast television but in cable, music and the Internet wants to hold the same dominance, if regulators allow in radio, the New York Times reports in an article that asks, “How Big Is Too Big?”
“The Justice Department has already signed off on the $3 billion merger, and the F.C.C. is expected to rule within a few weeks. The handicapping in Washington favors approval,” the Times says.
Grangenois Threatens to Use Strikebreakers at Sun
Mireille Grangenois, a onetime reporter who led diversity efforts for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and then learned the business side of newspapers, is now serving as a voice of management at the Baltimore Sun as it threatens the use of strikebreakers in what the New York Times calls a throwback to the protracted newspaper labor wars of the 20th century.
“If an agreement is not in place by early Wednesday morning, Ms. Grangenois said, the paper’s editors and business managers are prepared to put out ‘a full-size, full-run newspaper’ without the assistance of its reporters and photographers, or its advertising sales staff, all of whom are covered by the guild contract,’ reported the Times. Grangenois is now vice president for marketing and interactive media at The Sun.
The Orlando Weekly reported that the Orlando Sentinel, like the Sun owned by Tribune Co., threatened legal action if the Weekly published the names of Sentinel reporters who went to Baltimore to work as strikebreakers.
Grangenois “began her newspaper career as a Sun reporter in 1978. She has also worked as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, as a reporter for USA Today and Gannett News Service, and was director of minority affairs for the American Society of Newspaper Editors,” the Sun reported in 2001, when she was named vice president of SunSpot, the Baltimore Sun Co.’s Internet site.
“Grangenois held various marketing and advertising positions with Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. and was director of the major retail accounts unit for Washington Post Newsweek Interactive before rejoining the Baltimore Sun Co. last year.”
Earl Graves Questions Times Silence on Boyd
Black Enterprise Publisher Earl G. Graves wonders why the New York Times didn’t discuss Managing Editor Gerald Boyd‘s contributions when Boyd and Executive Editor Howell Raines resigned in the wake of the paper’s ethics scandals.
“On June 6, when the editorial page of the Times sang the praises of the departing Mr. Raines, it did not include a solitary statement honoring Mr. Boyd’s years of contribution to the paper or the profession,” Graves wrote in an opinion piece on the Black Enterprise Web site that was excerpted Friday in the Baltimore Sun. “It took more than 150 years for an African-American to reach the pinnacle of newspaper journalism. If the industry embraces the anti-diversity hyperbole, it may be another century and a half before a minority occupies such a position again.
“He was a source of mentorship and inspiration for journalists of all races,” Graves said of Boyd.
Meanwhile, Condace Pressley, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who has agreed to speak at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Asian American Journalists Association conventions, would also appear on a plenary session on diversity at the NABJ convention, on Friday, Aug. 8.
BET Shows to Encourage Testing for HIV
BET is teaming with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation to televise special programming in support of National HIV Testing Day on Friday. As many as one in three Americans infected with HIV do not know they are, a BET news release says.
On Thursday at 8 p.m. ET/PT, the network plans “BET Open Mic: HIV Testing Day,” a town-hall discussion of the testing issue hosted by Big Tigger of BET’s “Rap City: The Basement,” who is to be joined by a panel that includes comedian/actor Flex Alexander of UPN’s “One on One,” who lost his brother to the disease, and Rae Lewis Thornton, a woman who has been living with the disease since 1986.
“The audience will also follow Big Tigger through his recent testing experience to help demystify the process, and hear from Magic Johnson in a vignette stressing the importance of early detection, as well as Juan Dixon of the NBA’s Washington Wizards, who lost his mother and father to AIDS,” BET says.
Additionally, “BET Nightly News” plans a three-part series, ‘Southern Blues: The Truth About AIDS in The South,’ beginning Wednesday at 11 p.m. ET/PT. “This series explores the cultural issues, taboos and regional influences behind the dramatic and disparate impact of the epidemic which is ravaging Black America’s Southland. Eighteen of the top 25 communities hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic are in Southern states,” BET said.
“This Far By Faith” Finally Airs Tuesday on PBS
The long-delayed project of the late producer Henry Hampton, “This Far By Faith,” airs in three parts starting Tuesday on most PBS stations. The series “explores the connections between faith and the development of African-American cultural values. . . . from the arrival of the early African slaves through the Civil War, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and into the 21st century.”
The companion book by Juan Williams and Quinton Dixie was published in January.
In the words of the PBS Web site, “This Far by Faith” is the last project conceptualized by legendary filmmaker Henry Hampton. Hampton’s contributions to television include “America’s War on Poverty,” “Eyes on the Prize” and “Malcolm X: Make It Plain.” “Before his death in 1998, Hampton wrote that it was his dream to celebrate the sweep and range of African-American religious experience ‘in the context of the nation’s struggle to realize the goals of democracy and humanity, the heart and soul of America itself: who we are as a nation, what we believe as a people, and what we consider worth dying — and living — for,'” the Web site says.
Kansas City Remembers Lucile Bluford
Kansas City Star columnist Lewis W. Diuguid last week recalled digging out old newspapers for stories about Lucile Bluford, the legendary editor and publisher of the Kansas City Call who died at age 91 on June 13. The articles were written by young people in the Kansas City Association of Black Journalists Urban Student Journalism Workshop. “The stories on Bluford were the most difficult ones for the students to do,” Diuguid said.
“I’ll never forget phoning The Call in 1987 to invite Bluford to be among a panel of speakers at a mock news conference for the students on the black press. Bluford knew me from assignments we’d covered for our competing papers.
“She was the veteran whom everyone respected. The workshop students who wanted to be journalists needed her guidance and expertise.
“But my phone call to her didn’t go smoothly. ‘What do you want, Diuguid?’ Bluford barked as any good editor would.
“I explained.
“She said she was too busy.
“I persisted.
“She relented with a ‘maybe’ mostly to get me off the phone.
“I sent Bluford a confirmation letter but didn’t expect to see her. But she surprised me when she walked into the classroom and was the star of the press conference. Regina Akers wrote the cover story for the 1987 KCABJ Journal [of the Kansas City Association of Black Journalists].
“The black press, Bluford said, grew out of protest movements against slavery and racial discrimination. Black people have always viewed the black press as their voice.
“‘From the 1920s on up to the 1950s, the black press was the only place that black folks could learn anything about the whole civil rights struggle,’ Bluford said in Akers’ article. ‘Black newspapers now need to address areas such as economic development, education and corporate advancement for blacks.’
“Her statement was sound then and now,” said Diuguid.
About 250 people attended Bluford’s funeral in Kansas City Thursday. It was covered by the Kansas City Star and Bluford’s own Kansas City Call.
MSNBC’s Rick Sanchez Returning to S. Florida
“Rick Sanchez — the colorful, controversial former anchorman for WSVN-Ch. 7 — is coming back to South Florida,” reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
“Sanchez will join WTVJ-Ch. 6 in late July to begin development of an afternoon news/talk program targeted for a September premiere. He also agreed to be a fill-in anchorman.
“‘But I’m not coming back to Miami to be a local anchor,’ he said.
“He left that role at WSVN-Ch. 7 in May 2001 to take a job at MSNBC, where he has served as an anchorman and reporter. His most prominent task has been as news reader and kibitzer on Don Imus‘ radio show, which is simulcast on MSNBC. Sanchez also has handled news updates on sister network CNBC. He hopes to continue to contribute occasionally to the cable networks.
“In addition to his cable TV duties, Sanchez is the host of an issues-oriented radio show, which airs 4-6 p.m. weekdays on Spanish-language stations in the Northeast and WQBA (AM 1140) in Miami,” the story continued.
S. Florida Anchor Is Gay Parade’s Grand Marshal
“It isn’t unusual for a TV anchorman to serve as grand marshal of a local parade. It is when the parade celebrates gay pride,” writes Tom Jicha in the South Florida-Sun Sentinel.
“Craig Stevens of WSVN-Ch. 7 has accepted this honor for Sunday’s fourth annual Stonewall Street Festival and Parade in Wilton Manors.
Stevens has been at WSVN for 11 years, the last two as the main male anchor, and the parade is the most public acknowledgment Stevens has made of his sexual orientation, Jicha writes.
“Stevens is not the first frontline anchor to be open about his sexual orientation. Randy Price, who works at WSVN’s sister station in Boston, is out, as Hank Plante, who served as an anchorman at KPIX in San Francisco. It didn’t turn out to be an issue in either instance,” Jicha added.
Columnist Likes Feedback to His Play on Race
“For three weeks, I enjoyed one of the greatest experiences in a writer’s life: Hundreds of people streamed into a theater, paying $20 to $30 a ticket, to see a play that I co-authored,” writes columnist Bill Maxwell in Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. “From May 23 through June 15, Parallel Lives, the 90-minute, autobiographical dramatic work Beverly Coyle and I wrote, had its world premiere at American Stage in St. Petersburg. . . .
“Set during the Jim Crow era, Parallel Lives is a saga about race in America. One part of the story begins with a simple telephone call between two strangers who are Florida natives, a black journalist and a white novelist. They are challenged to jointly accept a commission to write about their experiences as Florida children, sometimes nearly side-by-side, but never equal.
“The other part of the story is their relationship while reading their essays on the road, in more than 40 cities, when they become friends, when they dare to tell each other about their private feelings on race and prejudice, when raw emotion brings them perilously close to physical confrontation.”
Maxwell explains that several performances include “talkbacks,” when the audience, playwrights, actors and director discuss the play and related topics.
“And here is where I see the true value of Parallel Lives: It gives ordinary people a safe space to talk about race,” Maxwell wrote. “The discussions mirrored what Americans are thinking, or not thinking, about race, and they reflected the messiness and nastiness of race — the irony, the unexpectedness, the predictability, the anger, the defensiveness, the ignorance, the fear, the sense of hopelessness, the recrimination and, of course, the denial.”