Long Island U. Shuts Down Campus Paper
“Long Island University has shaken up the top brass of its Brooklyn campus student newspaper, Seawanhaka, after the paper ran the grades of a student leader who had resigned,” James T. Madore reports in Newsday.
The top student editor has been suspended, the faculty adviser reassigned and the office locks changed, Robert S. Anthony, an editor who teaches a class on computer-assisted reporting at the Brooklyn, N.Y., school, told Journal-isms.
Both the student editor, Justin Grant, and the faculty adviser, Dr. G.M. “Mike” Bush, are African American, Anthony said. He said students were coming into the journalism department office to sign petitions in support of Grant and Bush.
In Newsday, Madore wrote that, “The shutdown raises questions about press freedom, privacy and academic freedom, according to journalism experts. It also disrupts LIU’s journalism program because the student paper serves as a laboratory where class assignments are published.
“The controversy stems from a Jan. 21 front-page article about the sudden resignation of Student Government Association president Abdel Alileala, who cited ‘personal problems I have to take care of’ for his decision. But later in the story, it was stated that there had been campus ‘speculation that Alileala’s academic struggles last year are the reason for his decision to resign.’ The student leader’s grades followed, but he was not asked to respond.
“In an interview, Justin Grant, the paper’s editor and author of the controversial story, justified disclosing the grades because Alileala was ‘an elected official’ similar to President George W. Bush.
“‘I stand by my work,’ said Grant, who has been barred from his job until Feb. 29. ‘I feel the constituents had a right to know the academic status of their president.’
Publishing a student’s grades, regardless of their status as a campus leader, is a violation of privacy, according to Bernadette Walker, dean of students . . .
“The controversy is being followed by media rights groups nationwide including the Society of Professional Journalists and Student Press Law Center.
“Mark Goodman, the center’s executive director, pointed to a 1979 ruling by a Maryland appeals court that stated grades can be disclosed if a student is a public figure such as a government leader or athlete.”
Fire Destroys Black Paper’s Building in Tuskegee
“Downtown Tuskegee was the scene of a horrible fire Tuesday, considered one of the worst in the city’s history,” reports WFSA-TV in Montgomery, Ala.
“Three buildings in the downtown area were destroyed after a space heater was apparently left on inside one of the buildings, causing it to catch fire.
“Tuskegee’s newspaper, community action program, and civil rights attorney Fred Gray’s offices were all housed in the destroyed buildings. Mayor Lucenia Dunn says ‘This is a major loss for the town of Tuskegee because some civil rights artifacts were housed in those buildings.’
“Tuskegee’s newspaper has been in business since the late 1800’s. George Washington Carver was one its contributing writers. The current editor says it will publish a paper Wednesday, thanks to the help of surrounding newspapers.”
A follow-up tonight from reporter Bryan Henry: “It’s the biggest story about downtown Tuskegee in recent memory, and Jacquelin Carlisle helped put it together.
“Carlisle says writing this story was a like writing an obituary. In many ways, seeing the fire and its aftermath was like watching the death of a loved one. It was one tough assignment. ‘Very gut-wrenching,’ says Carlisle.
“‘To sit there and write about something you witnessed was difficult,’ says Carlisle.
“A news editor for the Tuskegee News, Carlisle wrote her part and then revisited the place she often called home — the newsroom.
“‘This used to be the newsroom, but as you can tell there’s not much left,’ Carlisle says. . . .”
AOL Buys BlackVoices.Com; Principal Figures Leave
America Online has acquired the BlackVoices.com Web site from the Tribune Co., continuing without principal figures Barry Cooper, the CEO; Will La Veist, the executive producer; and editor David Squires.
“Over the next six months, AOL will evaluate the integration of BlackVoices with its own services focused on the African American community. During that time, Tribune Company will continue to host the BlackVoices site,” Tribune Co. spokeswoman Christine A. Hennessey told Journal-isms.
“As you are aware, BlackVoices and Tribune had been seeking a partnership with an outside media company for some time. We believe we’ve found a great strategic fit with AOL,” she continued.
“AOL is very committed to the African American community and currently has more than 4.4 million African American members. AOL’s acquisition of the BlackVoices Web site and community paves the way for it to broaden its reach even further.
“The current producer of the site is Aretha Fouch and it is my understanding that she will stay on board to assist with the transition,” Hennessey said.
Cooper, founder of the Web site while at the Tribune Co.’s Orlando Sentinel, told Journal-isms that he planned to “take a break for a few months, then either start something new or go back into corporate America. It was a great experience with Black Voices. It made quite a splash.” He said he was “in good shape” financially. Black Voices personnel were all Tribune Co. employees eligible for severance.
Squires is now a free agent and LaVeist has taken a job as a local columnist with the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., he said. The Daily Press is also owned by Tribune Co., and LaVeist, a graduate of the Maynard Institute’s 1992 Editing Program for Minority Journalists, starts in late March to write a three-times-a-week column, metro editor Brad Stertz said.
Squires told Journal-isms, “I’m going to very slowly look at what’s the best job for me.” He said he had started to rent time-sharing on the e-Bay Web site, so “I am able to pay my bills and relax a little bit.” Squires also edited Black Voices magazine, which was not part of the sale to AOL. “Hopefully, it can be revived,” though there will not be a winter issue, he said.
Also leaving is Cathy Taylor, a sales representative who in an earlier life was in radio news in Orlando, and head of the National Association of Black Journalists chapter there.
Late last year, AOL promoted africana.com CEO Kenn Turner to senior vice president and general manager for key audiences for AOL; those audiences being African Americans, Latinos and small businesses. Black Voices will come under his jurisdiction, integrated with the other products such as africana.com, with no one person running Black Voices separately, AOL spokeswoman Tracy Williams told Journal-isms.
Gerald Boyd to Write Syndicated Media Column
Gerald Boyd, former managing editor of The New York Times, will write a weekly media analysis column for U.S. newspaper readers that will be introduced in newspapers in March, according to Universal Press Syndicate.
The notice was tucked into a Feb. 4 news release from the syndicate for Black History Month, “Black Talent Making Headway in Print and Web Syndication.” Lee Salem, executive vice president and editor of the syndicate, told Journal-isms that so far four or five papers had signed up for Boyd’s column, but that it was early.
Boyd will write about national media issues, Salem said. When Boyd proposed the column to Universal in the fall, the sample columns he submitted were on whether the Los Angeles Times should have disclosed the groping incidents attributed to then-California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger and on the Rush Limbaugh-ESPN flap, when the talk-show host called Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb an affirmative-action hire and was forced to resign.
Salem said he and Boyd had been together on a few committees of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and that syndicate chairman John P. McMeel had also met Boyd and thought a column would be a good idea.
Boyd is also working on a memoir and is director of case studies at Columbia University School of Journalism.
He “will act as a kind of national ombudsman in his column by bringing readers on the inside of journalism?s most heated controversies and covered topics. Boyd was the first African-American to head The Times [that is, he was the number 2 newsroom manager]. Under his direction, the Times garnered six Pulitzer Prizes for its groundbreaking coverage of September 11, 2001,” the release said.
“Same-Sex Marriage” Term Called Inaccurate
The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association has issued a “Dear Fellow Journalist” letter calling the terms “gay marriage” and “same-sex marriage” inaccurate and misleading. “The accurate terminology on-air, in headlines and in body type should be ‘marriage for gays and lesbians’,” it says.
It doesn’t say whether the authors of the recommendations ever had to write in tight headline space.
The letter also says that, “When sourcing stories, NLGJA recommends that legal quotes and expertise be kept distinct and separate from religious quotes and opinions. Don’t contrast a legal expert’s comments on points of marriage law and civil legislation with opinions of theologians, for example.”
Text of the letter at the end of today’s posting.
Time’s Parsons Gives $2,000 to Bush Campaign
While the barons of black media have been consistent financial backers of Al Sharpton, Time Warner chief executive Richard Parsons has handed over $2,000 to the George W. Bush reelection campaign, according to Owen Gibson of the Guardian newspaper in England.
As the New York Daily News noted last month, Parsons “worked for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in New York and in the White House when Rocky was vice president. To this day, he considers himself a Rockefeller Republican. He also co-chaired, with former Sen. Daniel Moynihan, President Bush’s commission on the future of Social Security.” Early in his career, the Financial Times has written, Parsons was groomed to become a Republican power broker.
The Guardian story went on to note that, “as John Kerry’s campaign to secure the Democrat nomination — and with it a crack at the White House — continues to gather pace, it has emerged that it is being bankrolled by key executives from News Corporation, MTV-owner Viacom and Sony,” detailing other media-figure donations.
As reported last month, Sharpton’s career has been aided by African American and Hispanic media moguls who have become “the inner core of supporters that have financed his campaigns — and lifestyle — for years,” in the words of the Center for Public Integrity.
Detroit Black Journalists Remember Ben Johnson
Local high school students were among the 50 to 60 packed into a Detroit memorial service Monday for veteran journalist Ben Johnson, whose body was found Dec. 22 after a suicide, according to documentary filmmaker Ted Talbert, the event’s chief organizer.
The idea was to “try to give young journalists a perspective on what it was like back in the day,” and so the midday program in the Joe Louis Room in Detroit?s Cobo Center featured a 30-minute video, “Black Words on White Paper,” a documentary about the black press that helped win Talbert a spot in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame. Johnson’s name was added to the end of the video for the occasion.
Johnson was founding president of the Detroit chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists in the early 1980s, and Johnson and Talbert worked together at the Detroit Free Press, where Johnson was a night city editor and assistant to the managing editor in that decade.
Detroit black journalists spoke at the event, including former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus; former Detroit Free Press columnist Susan Watson, editor of The Detroit Teacher, newsletter for the Detroit Federation of Teachers; News Senior Editor Luther Keith; Pulitzer-winning News reporter Angelo Henderson; Free Press Public Editor and Maynard Institute board member John X. Miller; and Free Press reporter Cassandra Spratling. Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson spoke as well.
San Jose’s Loretta Green Quits “to Change the Pace”
After nearly 11 years as a columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, Loretta Green says she resigned last week becasue “I will reach a ‘significant’ birthday on the 20th and I think it’s time to smell the Birds of Paradise.
“I’ll write my ‘goodbye column’ for Feb. 25. I’ll walk out of the newsroom for the final time Feb. 26 that will be bitter-sweet. I love this work, but it’s just time to change the pace — to travel, read, continue in a few of the community things that I do and talk about the book that I probably am never going to write,” she said.
Before joining the Mercury, Green, who is a member of the William Monroe Trotter Group of African American columnists, spent 21 years at California’s Palo Alto Times, a daily that became the Peninsula Times Tribune when the Tribune Co. bought it.
“I started in the business right after graduation in 1960 from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pa. where I majored in Journalism. My first job was general assignment at a small paper called the Clairton Progress in a steel mill town just outside of Pittsburgh. I had one of those yelling, cussing editors just like in the 1940s movies. And of course, there were the big smelly linotype machines!” she told Journal-isms.
PR Firms Praise Janet Jackson Breast Baring
“For those in the business of masterminding public-relations stunts for marketers, Janet Jackson’s big expose during CBS’s airing of the Super Bowl has raised a serious issue: how to top it,” Claire Atkinson writes in Advertising Age.
“For James LaForce, partner in New York PR agency LaForce & Stevens, the Jackson episode was ‘extremely successful. . . . We love stunts at our agency and she opened the door for more people to take risks,’ he added. ‘It raises the bar for all of us.’
“The ‘costume reveal’ also catapulted Ms. Jackson into search-engine record books, conveniently just weeks in advance of her first album in three years, ‘Damita Jo.’ According to janet-jackson.com, one of the singles from the album was released to radio stations around the globe on Feb. 2 — the day after the Super Bowl. Ms. Jackson is also planning a world tour and is starring as singer Lena Horne in an upcoming ABC special.”
Armstrong Williams Now Michael Jackson Defender
“Talk about strange bedfellows,” write Soni Sangha and Corky Siemaszko in the New York Daily News. “Michael Jackson has turned to one of his harshest critics, conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, to help dig him out of his child-sex mess.
“Jackson went to Williams at the urging of youngest brother Randy, who is leading a new push to save the singer’s hide, a family friend told the Daily News.”
“Williams denied he is now an official spokesman but appeared on two news shows yesterday with a new take on the man whose makeovers and child sleepovers he has slammed.
“‘I was more surprised after speaking to him,’ he told ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’ ‘I always perceived him as someone feeble and weak and soft-spoken. I was stunned at the strength of character,'” the story continued.
Spanish Station’s “Truly Filthy Jokes” Escape Fines
“The Federal Communications Commission acted with the urgency befitting a national disaster after Janet Jackson’s most unfortunate wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl halftime show. An outraged FCC Commissioner Michael K. Powell quickly launched an investigation,” writes Al Kamen in the Washington Post.
But, Kamen writes, it “turns out that on Dec. 13, 2002, the FCC issued a ‘notice of apparent liability for forfeiture (NAL)’, meaning a proposed fine, of $22,400 against one Edmund Dinis, who ran a radio station in Springfield, Mass. Dinis’s Spanish-language station allegedly aired some truly filthy jokes — which the FCC translated into English — on several occasions at the end of 2000 and in January 2001.
“Dinis mounted a telecommunications variant of the classic defense in a ‘your dog bit me’ lawsuit. First, he questioned whether the jokes really were aired. (That would be the ‘I don’t have a dog’ gambit.) Then he questioned whether the jokes were actually indecent under the law. (If I did have a dog, he didn’t bite you.) And then he noted that most of the jokes were made first by callers, not by his staff. (If I did have a dog, and if he bit you, you provoked him.)
“The FCC was buying none of this and proposed the fine. But last week the commission closed the case. ‘After reviewing the record, we have concluded that the NAL was issued outside the statute of limitations,’ it announced.
“So remember, it’s important to keep abreast of things. The statute of limitations is one year.”
At the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in New York last June, Latino activists held a news conference to accuse authorities of ignoring inappropriate behavior on Spanish-language radio.
Letter from Gay, Lesbian Journalists on Terminology
February 10, 2004
Open Letter from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association
To the News Industry on Accurate Reporting About Marriage for Gays and Lesbians
Dear Fellow Journalist:
On February 4, 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down a 4-3 ruling reaffirming their November 2003 decision to confer marriage rights for gays and lesbians, beginning as early as this spring. With news coverage expanding rapidly concerning the issue of marriage and gay and lesbian couples, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) urges all media professionals to use accurate and clear terminology in reporting.
The terms “gay marriage” and “same-sex marriage” are inaccurate and misleading. The decision made by the Massachusetts court affects the state’s existing marriage law. The court has ordered the state to apply the existing law equally to gay and lesbian couples as early as May 2004. The accurate terminology on-air, in headlines and in body type should be “marriage for gays and lesbians.”
The subject of marriage for gays and lesbians requires immediate attention to fair and balanced coverage. When sourcing stories, NLGJA recommends that legal quotes and expertise be kept distinct and separate from religious quotes and opinions. Don’t contrast a legal expert’s comments on points of marriage law and civil legislation with opinions of theologians, for example.
States traditionally have the power to regulate the terms and conditions of civil marriage licenses issued by the state. Independent faiths however remain free to determine which marriages may be sanctified according to their religious tenets, and are not subject to state laws on marriage.
Marriage law also should not be confused with the legal designation of civil unions, which are currently issued only in Vermont. Civil unions are presumed to extend marriage benefits and protections under Vermont state law, but do not include any federal benefits available to married couples. Civil unions also have no effect on religious congregations and their option to bless or not to bless civil unions registered with the state of Vermont.
To distinguish between state and religious institutions — a distinction that is becoming increasingly important for accurate coverage of marriage, we recommend using the term “marriage for gay and lesbian couples” to describe state recognition of a couple’s marriage, “religious ceremony” to describe religious institutions’ sanctification or blessing, or “ceremony of commitment” to describe a couple’s commitment.
Marriage law has become among the most controversial issues of 2004. It will continue to be a hot story as the first U.S. marriage licenses are issued to gay and lesbian couples in Massachusetts, through the election cycle and beyond.
The National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association is an organization of journalists, online media professionals, and students that works from within the journalism industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. NLGJA opposes workplace bias against all minorities and provides professional development for its members. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., NLGJA currently has more than 1,200 members and 21 chapters in the U.S., with affiliates in Canada and Germany. Information about NLGJA and its 2004 convention may be found at www.nlgja.org
Media contact:
Pamela Strother, Executive Director, NLGJA
(202) 588-9888 ext. 11 pstrother@nlgja.org
The words in blue (on most computers) are links leading to more information.
