ASNE Chief Cites Lack of Contrition at Hampton
One reason the American Society of Newspaper Editors pulled its high-school journalism program from Hampton University is that “there’s been no sense of contrition” from the administration over its seizure of student newspapers, according to ASNE President Peter Bhatia, the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., reported today.
Acting President JoAnn Haysbert, the provost who ordered the confiscation, was unavailable for comment yesterday and today.
Haysbert made what appears to be her only comment to a reporter since the Oct. 22 seizure two days later, while her secretary was away from her desk and Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reached her. Williams wrote that he asked Haysbert if it had been a mistake to pull the papers.
Her terse reply was: “I would say I learned a lot. And I hope that my students have as well,” Williams wrote.
The same day, as the Hampton board of trustees met, Haysbert issued her only public statement on the matter, announcing the creation of a task force.
“There is indeed a lesson to be taught from all of this,” began Haysbert’s sole comment in the news release, “and I propose that through research, discussing our differences and listening to one another, we will uncover valuable insight that will collectively make Hampton stronger.”
Similarly, though the newspaper seizure was said to be a topic at the trustees meeting, the trustee chair, Frank Fountain of DaimlerChrysler, who is Chrysler Group senior vice president of government affairs and president of the DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund, has not responded for nearly a week to requests for comment placed through Debra Nelson, senior manager for labor, manufacturing and government affairs and media relations at DaimlerChrysler.
The decision by ASNE to pull out of Hampton was reported in a special edition of “Journal-isms” yesterday.
Either/or: Hampton University must decide what paper will be (Editorial, Daily Press, Newport News)
Howard U. Widens Search for GM of TV Station
Howard University has hired an executive search firm to help find a general manager for its television station, WHUT-TV, some 11 months after Adam Clayton Powell III stepped down as general manager and was assigned the task of heading the search for his successor.
“We decided to cast a wider net,” J.J. Pryor, assistant vice president of the office of communications at Howard, told Journal-isms. Many of the candidates submitted “were referrals from Adam.” She maintained that “those people might end up being finalists for the job.”
An advertisement seeking a general manager ran in Current, a biweekly newspaper about public broadcasting.
Powell told Journal-isms that the university had interviewed five finalists 10 months ago. The search firm, Livingston Associates, is headed by Tom Livingston, who was general manager of WETA-FM in Washington when its format was totally classical music.
Before he spent eight months as WHUT’s general manager, Powell was vice president of technology and programs at the Freedom Forum. Now a visiting professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Powell said that WHUT and KMPT in San Francisco were the only African American-owned public television stations in the nation.
Stations Give Local Public Affairs Low Priority
Local public affairs shows account for less than one half of 1 percent of all programming on local television stations, according to a study by the Alliance for Better Campaigns.
“The study examined one week?s worth of programming on 45 local television stations in six cities (seven media markets) in preparation for the town hall meetings on localism being convened by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Programming was split into 14 categories. Local public affairs programming, which is devoted to local issues of governance or civic affairs and typically consists of interviews with local newsmakers about issues of importance to the community, ranked dead last,” the group’s news release says.
The alliance is a public interest group founded by former Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor, who has crusaded for years for free air time for political candidates. It boasts Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite and Gerald R. Ford as honorary co-chairs.
Cal State Offers Spanish-Language J-Minor
Cal State Northridge, “already known for its journalism program, began offering courses this fall designed to train reporters and editors to work in the burgeoning field of Spanish-language print and broadcast media,” reports Stephanie Stassel in the Los Angeles Times.
“Plans are in the works for a new minor in Spanish-language journalism. Officials hope to have the program approved and in place by December 2004.
“The first of two new classes is being taught this fall by José Luis Benavides, a former University of Texas assistant professor who came to Cal State Northridge from a Catholic university in San Antonio to be the program’s steward,” the story continues.
“The 20 students in his Spanish-Language News Environment class are exploring the development of Spanish-language media and related issues in the Latino community, such as immigration and labor. Students also are visited by working print and broadcast journalists who occasionally speak to the class about what it’s like to work in Spanish-language media.
“The second new course, to be offered in the spring, will be a Spanish-language media writing class.”
Young Hispanic Men Blamed for Ratings Falloff
“After some dogged investigating, NBC yesterday offered up its answer to television’s big mystery of the fall, the case of the disappearing young, male viewer. And in this television version of Clue, the solution by NBC was a young Hispanic man, in the living room, with the remote. Or perhaps more accurately, without the remote,” writes Bill Carter in the New York Times.
“NBC has determined that a disproportionate amount of the falloff in viewing levels among young men, a decline of 11 percent so far this season, can be tied to the decision of Nielsen Media Research to add a significant number of Hispanic viewers to its national survey.
“Because many of these young Hispanic men may not be participating in the button-pushing process that determines TV ratings, the decline in viewing levels may be exaggerated. NBC executives argue that, as a result of the changed statistical sample, comparisons to last season’s ratings are skewed,” Carter’s story said.
Iowa State Student Nguyen is “Reporter of the Year”
Dan Nguyen, an Iowa State University senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication, won the Associated Collegiate Press Reporter of the Year Award for four-year students, accompanied by a $1,000 scholarship, for a five-part narrative series on the life and death of a former Iowa State student killed in a hit-and-run car accident, the Iowa State Daily reports.
Nguyen accepted his award in Dallas last week.
Michael Hernandez of the Richland Chronicle at Richland College in Dallas won the first-place award for two-year students.
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists named Nguyen winner of its scholarship competition last summer. “My parents, Dzung and Thanh, came here as refugees from the Vietnam War ?- I myself have never been to Vietnam but might go this summer,” he said in his bio for the columnists.
“The kid has a future,” said columnist Mike Argento, who judged the finalists in the society’s competition.
ABC’s Adaora Udoji Switches to CNN
“CNN has hired Adaora Udoji as a New York-based correspondent. Ms. Udoji, a former correspondent for ABC’s NewsOne feed for affiliates, had been based in London, where her husband of a year, NBC News correspondent Ron Allen, was based until being transferred to New York late last summer,” reports TV Week.
The Allen-Udoji wedding was covered by the New York Times last year.
“Ms. Udoji and Mr. Allen met in 1995, while covering the O.J. Simpson trial for ABC. The friendship that followed took a sudden turn in the summer of 1999 during a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Seattle,” the Times wrote then.
“‘It was spontaneous combustion,’ Ms. Udoji said. ‘Sparks flew.'”
NYU Job Called Latest Gerald Boyd Prospect
“Five months after Gerald Boyd resigned under pressure as managing editor of The New York Times, he’s being discussed as a possible journalism teacher at New York University,” writes Paul Colford in the New York Daily News.
“According to sources at NYU, Jay Rosen, chairman of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he was asked by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. if the school might be interested in Boyd’s services.”
Beverly Kirk, Danyell Irby in NPR-PBS Project
Beverly Kirk, formerly with NBC News Channel, will be the weekend anchor of “PBS/NPR Newsbrief,” hourly 30-second television news reports produced by National Public Radio for stations in the Public Broadcasting Service, the two networks announced yesterday.
The reports are scheduled to begin airing on pilot stations starting in December, with a national launch on PBS stations in January.
Danyell Irby, deputy supervising senior producer for NPR’s Newscast unit, is to be alternate newscaster, with public television correspondent Sheilah Kast anchoring weekends.
Kirk, “a Kentucky native, most recently served as a freelance reporter for FOX 5-WTTG-TV in Washington, DC. Kirk spent six years (1997-2003) as a correspondent for NBC News Channel, the affiliate division of NBC News, where she covered major breaking news stories, from the Clinton impeachment to September 11 and the DC sniper attacks, and contributed occasional features to the Weekend Edition of NBC Nightly News,” a news release said.
Kirk also briefly hosted “Lead Story” on Black Entertainment Television, interviewing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Nov. 10, 2002.
Irby was an NPR Next Generation Project mentor at last summer’s convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas.
Black Enterprise Wins Award, Is Starting TV Show
Black Enterprise magazine beat Money magazine for Folio magazine’s gold Eddie award in the consumer business/finance category.
Folio is the magazine about the magazine industry. Black Enterprise was judged on its October 2002 issue.
Meanwhile, the business publication announces that “Black Enterprise Report,” a weekly television series that focuses on “financial and personal empowerment,” is to debut Nov. 29, three Saturdays from now.
However, Erma Gray, who is handling sales and syndication information for the show, told Journal-isms that it was too early to disclose how many stations had signed up for the show or who they were.
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