San Diego Paper Wants to Double Number of Blacks
The San Diego Union-Tribune wants to double the percentage of African Americans on its news staff in the next three years, editor Karin Winner has told a delegation from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Newly elected NABJ President Herbert Lowe reports on the NABJ Web site that “Winner told us she wanted to double the percentage of blacks on her staff in the next three years, and said she would seriously consider black candidates for the next senior level job openings, which she conceded don?t come about often. Winner also pledged to seek more job candidates through the NABJ Journal and www.nabj.org. ‘We?re going to forge a new partnership here,’ the editor told [vice president/print Bryan Monroe and me] in front of two dozen editors at the morning news meeting,”
Union-Tribune features copy editor Jerry McCormick, who is the regional representative for the West Coast states on the NABJ board, said the Union-Tribune had 13 African Americans on its news staff. The paper reported 14.7 percent people of color in the latest census of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a figure that lags behind the San Jose Mercury News (33.2 percent), Los Angeles Times (20.1 percent) and San Francisco Chronicle (16.1), for example, among California dailies.
McCormick told Journal-isms that Winner has “always been committed” to diversity, despite the conservative views of the paper’s editorial page, and had sent its recruiters to the last few NABJ conventions. He was recruited from The State in Columbia, S.C., at the Unity ’99 convention, McCormick said.
Lowe and Monroe were in San Diego for the Asian American Journalists Association convention, which concluded Saturday.
In a development that doesn’t look hopeful, the newspaper announced Tuesday that it would eliminate 102 positions over the next few weeks as part of a reorganization of its circulation department.
FCC Answers Critics With Ownership Initiative
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell today announced a series of initiatives “aimed at ensuring broadcasters serve the communities in which they operate,” David Ho of the Associated Press reports.
However, Unity: Journalists of Color issued a statement afterward saying that “any discussions about localism should go hand-in-hand with a strong push by the FCC to ensure that broadcasters are bringing more peope of color into newsrooms, including the key decision-making positions.”
Ho reported that the FCC move “comes amid intense criticism of the FCC’s decision in June to revamp media ownership rules, which opponents said would promote more mergers and limit local programming.
“‘We heard the voice of public concern about the media loud and clear,’ Powell said. ‘Localism is at the core of these concerns, and we are going to tackle it head on,'” the story continued.
“Powell said the FCC will form a task force that will make recommendations to the commission within a year on promoting localism in broadcasting. The FCC also will speed up the licensing of hundreds of low-powered radio stations, often run by churches, community groups and schools. And Powell directed his agency’s staff to begin an inquiry seeking comment on FCC rules aimed at promoting localism.
“An advocacy group said the announcement doesn’t go far enough,” Ho wrote.
“‘Talking about new rules to protect media localism, particularly when those rules creep into the area of content regulation, is merely an effort to divert attention from badly reasoned and badly written ownership rules that won’t stand up in court,’ said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America.”
Unity statement at the end of today’s posting.
Gerald Boyd Shops Memoir Proposal Light on Blair
“Gerald Boyd, former managing editor of the New York Times, is . . . shopping a memoir — but he doesn’t want to play up the Jayson Blair scandal,” writes Keith J. Kelly in the New York Post.
“If I write a book, it will be about my life and the world of journalism,” Boyd said in the Post item. “It will not be a kiss-and-tell about the Jayson Blair scandal or settling scores.”
“Boyd acknowledged that Marie Brown, a friend and literary agent, has begun to sound out selected publishers. ‘Marie has talked to a publisher about pursuing a book, but it’s very preliminary at this point,’ said Boyd,” the item continued.
Boyd went on to say that since he resigned from the Times June 5 in the wake of the Blair scandal, “I’ve had conversations with people about editing papers.
“It was very hard going through the blackout as a civilian, not being at my desk,” Boyd was quoted as saying. “It’s quite different dealing with batteries and candles instead of trying to put out the best newspaper you can.”
Meanwhile, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Boyd is to be ushered into the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame on Sept. 6, and Post-Dispatch columnist Greg Freeman will be honored posthumously. Proceeds support community projects and the Minority Journalism Workshop.
Rick Bragg Not Telling Times Tales
Rick Bragg, whose use of uncredited stringers forced his own resignation from the Times and compounded Gerald Boyd’s problems, tells the Tennessean in Nashville that he won’t be telling stories about the Times, which he says he had planned to leave in a few months anyway.
”I guess if I had invested my life into the institution, then I would have been a lot more disappointed than I was,” Bragg, 43, told the newspaper. ”I have got a writing life ahead of me most people would kill for. I left a place that really was a rocket-ship ride for me.”Bragg has signed a $1.5 million two-book deal and still writes magazine articles, the Tennessean said.
Not Every Reporter Read About Jayson Blair
Apparently, not every reporter read about Jayson Blair. The Sacramento Bee published this “apology to our readers” today:
“On Aug. 7, a story on the cover of the Sports section about the Giants game at Pacific Bell Park was filed by a Bee reporter who was not at the game. The reporter watched the game on television at a location away from the stadium.
“He filed his story without telling editors at The Bee his true location, leaving the impression he covered the game from the ballpark.
“In addition, it was discovered later that the story included quotes from other media outlets that were unattributed and old, made to reporters on a previous occasion before the day of the game.
“The story violated basic journalistic values and ethics as practiced by The Bee.
“The reporter involved, Jim Van Vliet, no longer works at the newspaper.
“The Bee regrets the situation and apologizes to its readers.
“Armando Acuña
“Sports editor”
Michael Savage Adds Half-Dozen Radio Stations
“His crass anti-gay comments got him fired from his weekly show on MSNBC, but Michael Savage’s radio show, syndicated by Talk Radio Network, continues to thrive,” reports Media Week.
“Since last month, The Savage Nation has been added on more than half a dozen radio stations, including WOR-AM, Buckley Broadcasting’s Talk station in New York, putting his total affiliate count at more than 330 stations.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. Takes Over Freeman Space
Those of us not in St. Louis might not realize that Sylvester Brown Jr., the publisher of Take Five magazine, the city’s “black independent voice,” has succeeded the late Greg Freeman as three-times-a-week Metro columnist in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The St. Louis native founded Take Five in 1987. He had been a frequent contributor to the Post-Dispatch Commentary page.
In his first column, June 29, Brown wrote:
“After I shut down Take Five late last year, the opportunity arose for me here. Life is full of coincidences. I respected the voice of the African-American writer who occupied this space until his death. I will not attempt to fill his shoes. I am not Greg Freeman. We may have both been born black, in the same city and about the same time, but we traveled different paths that led us to this page.
” . . . I am 46, and the father of four children. I have a 24-year-old daughter and a teenage son by my first marriage. Victoria and I have two girls, 2 and 7, and we live in a richly diverse area of the city — the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood. I am an extremely private person, yet I’m intrigued with other people and the things they do. My passion is to write and research, research and write.
“I will not attempt to be someone I’m not. I’m too old, opinionated and stuck in my ways to try to be the man you’ve grown accustomed to reading in this space. I approach this column with respect for Greg and for what he accomplished at the Post-Dispatch. He has been gone from us for only a short time. Yet I miss his voice, his eternal optimism and his many contributions to our community. I hope to add to his legacy and engage readers with a different bag of social spices and informative ingredients.”
Rice Called Wrong About “Werewolves,” Too
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is having a hard time finding columnists who liked her speech at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
Latest to find fault is veteran columnist David Rossie, associate editor of New York’s Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, who says Rice was wrong about the “werewolves.”
“And now comes Condoleezza Rice, she of the selective memory, with some real historical revision,” he wrote Sunday. “In an attempt to explain why Iraqis are waging an unexpected guerrilla war against American soldiers, Rice tried to find a precedent in what she claimed happened in Europe following Germany’s surrender in World War II.
“‘SS officers — called “werewolves” — attacked coalition forces and engaged in sabotage, much like today’s Baathist Fedayeen remnants,’ Rice told an assemblage of black journalists in Dallas last week.
“In fact, the werewolves were schoolboys and a few older fanatics inspired by Hitler to fight against Allied troops (try to find the term coalition forces in any history of WWII) after Americans and British forces entered Germany in the spring of 1945.
“In Monty, his biography of Bernard Law Montgomery, Allistar Horne writes that in February 1945, when Montgomery’s 21st Army Group neared Wesel, ‘There was some of the most bitter fighting of the war in the Reichswald Forest against defenders who were often schoolchildren of sixteen — “Werewolves” — driven on with all the ferocity of despair by the menace of unconditional surrender and the terror of Nazi discipline and reprisals against families.’
“As for SS officers, their chief concern after the war wasn’t guerrilla warfare but rather eluding capture by the Allies. An estimated 20,000 of them made it out of Germany with the help of Odessa (Organisation der SS Angehorigen).”
Columnist Starting Fellowship Joins in Rice Critique
“To pretend we’ve been raining bombs on Iraq merely to lift the weight of political oppression is laughable,” writes Lynne K. Varner in the Seattle Times. “Our country’s foreign policy is far more complex than the threat emanating from a single despot.”
Varner wrote a column bidding so long to her readers as she departs for a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where she says she might run into Condoleezza Rice, a former Stanford provost.
Varner, who just ended a term as regional representative for the National Association of Black Journalists, wrote that she’ll study “the evolving political dynamics of African Americans and Hispanics, America’s two largest minority groups. It is a topic soon to return to center stage. Just as soon as President Bush finishes searching for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, he and the Republican Party will wage a battle for the political support of blacks and Latinos.
“I’ll also study literature from Africa and the Americas. I’ll sit in on a class about U.S. economic history and another on the role of American art in contesting racial, class and gender hierarchies. Every moment won’t be so intellectually heavy. I want to study the history of jazz, boost my fitness regimen with daily swim laps and maybe piece a quilt or pen a poem.”
“Fatwa” Continues Against Journalist in Hiding
Journalists worldwide condemned the fatwa, or death sentence, issued last November against a Nigerian journalist who wrote a commentary saying the Prophet Muhammad might have married a Miss World contestant. But though most journalists’ outrage has been redirected, the fatwa apparently is still in effect against Isioma Daniel, the journalist who was reported to have relocated to the United States after being forced to resign from the newspaper.
The International Federation of Journalists is condemning a July 21 affirmation of the fatwa issued by a Committee of the Jama’atul Nasril Islam against Daniel and the publisher of ThisDay, Nduka Obiagbena, the federation says in a news release.
“This death sentence exacerbates an already intolerable climate of fear and oppression for the media in Nigeria,” said Aidan White, IFJ general secretary.
“The IFJ demands that the ‘fatwa’ on both journalists should be lifted or cancelled immediately. . . . Taking into account the apology by ThisDay, the Nigerian government must proactively push all parties concerned to enter into dialogue in an attempt to find a solution to this issue in order to prevent further catastrophes,” said White in the release.
The IFJ says it represents more than 500,000 journalists. in more than 100 countries.
Statement by Unity on FCC “Localism” Action
For Immediate Release
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Contacts:
Ernest R. Sotomayor, President, UNITY Board of Directors; Long Island Editor, Newsday.com, 631-843-3664; Anna M. Lopez, Executive Director, UNITY, 703-469-2100
Statement by UNITY President Ernest Sotomayor Jr. on FCC localism initiative
Michael Powell’s call for a summit comes two weeks after the UNITY alliance challenged the broadcasting industry to hold a high-level National Broadcasting Diversity Summit to find ways to boost diversity in hiring and make broadcasting newsrooms more representative of their communities.
UNITY’s call came in response to the latest annual survey by the Radio and Television News Directors Association that showed representation by people of color in local radio and television news outlets had decreased.
UNITY and RTNDA on Aug. 8 jointly announced they would partner to organize the summit on newsroom diversity in broadcasting, likely in December.
While Powell’s call this week did not say it was aimed specifically at newsroom diversity, we believe that as you make the newsroom workforces better reflect the communities, you will improve the quality, fairness, accuracy of the news reports, and lead to more local coverage that will be even more relevant to audiences.
So any discussions about localism should go hand-in-hand with a strong push by the FCC to ensure that broadcasters are bringing more peope of color into newsrooms, including the key decision-making positions.
As always, UNITY and its alliance partners reiterate past offers to the FCC to participate in discussions on how this can all be accomplished.