It Was Time That Rejected Original Savoy Concept
Jon Housman, CEO of Jungle Media Group, was interested primarily in Savoy Professional, not all of Vanguarde, and said he thought it had become more likely that Vanguarde could be sold in pieces.
But at the latest session Monday in bankruptcy court in Manhattan, “Graves and Jungle Media got into a bidding war on Savoy. The price inched up to $375,000 at which point Time Warner showed up and asked for more time,” Joseph E. Sarachek, managing partner of Triax Capital Advisors, told Journal-isms. Sarachek’s firm is overseeing Vanguarde’s restructuring.
“Based on the fact that Jungle Media will get a $25,000 break up fee and certain other consideration, and that Time Warner’s bid must be at least $600,000 to cover attorneys fees, etc. the hearing was adjourned until Monday at 9:30 am,” Sarachek said via e-mail.
Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose Wallace said the corporation would have no comment, but it would be ironic if Time Warner won the assets.
It was while Savoy founding editor Roy S. Johnson was at Time Inc. in 1995 that he tried to sell Time on the idea of Savoy, which was named after the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.
But as former Vanguarde CEO Keith Clinkscales explained to Media Week in 2000, “It was the mandate of Time to try to have magazines that can provide big profits — big revenues, in the Time vernacular — which might be, like, $10 million a year in profits. This magazine might not have been that — it might get to that one day, but it might not have been that. So it might have been a little bit off strategy for them.”
Major Shakeup at Dallas Morning News
In a major shakeup at the Dallas Morning News, Executive Editor Gilbert Bailon officially relinquishes that job to concentrate on the newspaper’s Spanish-language projects, and Leona Allen, currently Collin County editor, moves up to assistant managing editor/suburbs/Collin County, becoming the top African American in newsroom management.
However, in a separate memo, Publisher and CEO James Moroney III wrote that “We lost our focus on the development of a diverse workplace. We must understand we can only truly serve our diverse group of readers by reflecting that diversity among our own employee population.”
An announcement from President and Editor Bob Mong said that Bailon, one of the highest ranking Latinos at a mainstream newspaper, “becomes publisher/editor of Al Dia — up from his current title of president/editor. With his increased role at Al Dia, Gilbert will concentrate on building our Spanish language franchise. Al Dia has been growing editorially and as a business under Gilbert’s direction. Gilbert also will join the Management Council of the paper that includes Jim Moroney, me, Steve Weaver, Evelyn Miller, Barry Peckham and John Walsh.” Al Dia is the News’ Spanish-language product.
Allen’s “expanded duties reflect the outstanding work Leona has done since launching the Collin County edition last March,” Mong said.
In the early 1990s, the Morning News had three African American assistant managing editors: Kevin Merida, Lennox Samuels and Vernon Smith. Merida left for the Washington Post, Smith is now a deputy international editor and Samuels stepped down two months ago, preparing to become a correspondent based in Mexico City.
“After 20 years at the newspaper and 14 of those as a senior editor here, I decided that I wanted to do something completely different,” Samuels told Journal-isms. I wanted to get back into the field. Throughout my career, I wanted to get back to being a reporter.” He had headed investigative reporting, national and international news, as well as Texas news.
Al Neuharth on the Mess From “White Males”
No people of color were named in the appointments at USA Today topped by the choice of Gannett veteran Ken Paulson as new editor, though Bennie Ivory, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, was reported to be one of the three finalists.
But USA Today Founder Al Neuharth injected race into the equation in his column today.
Former editor “Karen Jurgensen, 55, apologized and retired,” Neuharth wrote. “Of course, she should have caught [Jack] Kelley earlier, but she actually inherited the mess that did her in from a series of white males.”
Race Called Outdated Description of Suspects
In his Sunday column, Tony Marcano, ombudsman of the Sacramento Bee, took on the issue that surfaces at many news outlets — the use of racial identification in describing crime suspects.
In arguing for the most complete description possible, Marcano quotes Deputy Managing Editor Mort Saltzman as saying that if the purpose of running descriptions is to help police ferret out suspects, a partial description can result in too many false leads, not to mention the heightened possibility of racial profiling.
But Marcano adds:
“As Saltzman pointed out, traditional racial descriptions are fast becoming outdated, and thus inaccurate. For example, if I were a crime suspect here on the West Coast, where vast swaths of the populace seem to believe that all men with roots in Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations look like Ricky Ricardo, I have no doubt I would be described solely as African-American, but that would be only partially correct. Back home in New York, I’d be pegged as Dominican, Puerto Rican or that catchall phrase, ‘dark-skinned Hispanic.’
“The point is, my heritage is much more complicated than the woefully inadequate, Census-based, socially biased descriptions that government and law enforcement agencies persist in perpetuating. The same can be said for millions of other Americans.”
Marcano, who came to the Bee last year from the New York Times, is a 1985 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, was a program manager for Maynard’s 1993 Los Angeles Total Community Coverage program, and took part in the 1994 TCC program in Atlanta as well as the 2000 TCC Trainers Program in Oakland.
“Where Are the Journalists” on Sudan Tragedy?
“The international media don’t send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries,” writes Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch, in a commentary in the Los Angeles Times.
“Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring farmers don’t get back to their villages by then, the crops will not get planted this year ? and that could mean mass starvation as well. But no one will go back as long as the janjaweed (literally, ‘armed horsemen’) militias remain in the area.
“So where are the journalists?
“The fact is, with or without a war in Iraq, American journalists are generally slower to cover mass death if the victims are not white.”
New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who actually has been covering the genocide of blacks by Arabs, asked the same question Sunday in a piece in the New York Times Magazine.
“The world seemed to spend more time observing the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly vowing ‘never again’ than actually doing something to prevent a recurrence in Darfur,” Kristof wrote.
And while such shortcomings could be a topic for media critics, Richard Goldstein, writing the “Press Clips” column in the Village Voice, makes this charge:
“I know many journalists who would like to comment on the deep structure of their profession and its suck-up to advertisers, not to mention the dominant social order. But their editors won’t let them. And don’t tell me about The Washington Post’s media arbiter, Howard Kurtz. I’ve yet to see him tackle a question of fundamental bias, such as: Why do words like savage and animal appear frequently in tabloid accounts of black mothers charged with killing their babies, while such words are rarely used when the killer mom is white?”
A Shout-Out to Foreign Correspondents
Mike Ottey, Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald, is proposing a gathering of foreign correspondents, editors and photographers at the Aug. 4-8 Unity convention in Washington.
“What I am trying to do is have an informal gathering where we can meet, greet, trade war stories over cocktails,” he tells Journal-isms.
“As foreign correspondents, we rarely get a chance to meet and trade helpful information because we’re running around various foreign countries. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to get together. I run across certain people, say in Haiti, but we’re usually on the run with barely time to speak. I know many of those foreign journalists of color will be at Unity (or will try to be, given world events) . . . I don’t have a time and place to meet yet, that will be decided based on convention schedule. . . . Also, I’m hoping that such a gathering will lead to more young journalists of color to consider the foreign arena. It’s tough job and not for everybody, but the exposure to other worlds and cultures is rewarding.”
Ottey can be reached at MOttey@herald.com.
AAJA President Says Remember Others of Color
The recently released diversity survey from the American Society of Newspaper Editors “shows that the industry needs to continue to be vigilant in helping to recruit and retain Asian Americans in newsrooms,” President Mae Cheng of the Asian American Journalists Association wrote her members Thursday.
But, “just as importantly, the data also shows that we need to continue to advocate for the growth of all journalists of color in newsrooms, pressing the industry to expand the pie for us all rather than at the expense of one group over another, since it is clear that for all the journalists of color groups, we are all far behind in reaching parity with the U.S. population at any time soon.”
The letter follows the more strongly worded column by Juan Gonzalez, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, in which he wrote that “it is clear that for the past few years the major companies, in their practice, have been opting to hire fewer blacks and Native Americans, and far more Asians, and to a lesser extent, Hispanics.”
Fla. Writer Disputes Pitts Piece on Kelley, Blair
Bill Cotterell, a white columnist at the Tallahassee Democrat, takes issue with the widely circulated Monday column by the Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts wondering why white journalists aren’t pointing to Jack Kelley’s race after the USA Today scandal the way they pointed to Jayson Blair’s at the New York Times.
“In hundreds of stories about Blair, I don’t recall one suggesting that all minority reporters are suspect or that ‘outreach’ programs inevitably lead to fraud,” Cotterell wrote.
“When the Blair and Kelley deceptions were revealed, media critics correctly explored the angle of what they had going for them.
“Race was not a line of inquiry in the Kelley story because businesses don’t have majority-outreach programs. Hiring preferences were part of the Blair story because the New York Times practiced them,” Cotterell asserts.
Darrell Dawsey, a print journalist who co-authored a book with comedian Bernie Mac and produced his own book of interviews with young black men, has surfaced in his home town as host of Detroit Public TV’s “American Black Journal,” described as “the nation’s longest-running, locally-produced program on issues from an African American perspective.”
In the 1990s, Dawsey worked at the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Daily News, the Detroit News and was an editor of the now-defunct hip-hop magazine Blaze.
His 1997 book on young black men, “Living to Tell About It,” is still in print, as is his 2001 book co-written with Mac, “I Ain’t Scared of You: Bernie Mac on How Life Is”.
Recent editions of “American Black Journal,” which airs Sundays at 6:30 p.m., have examined financial troubles facing the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the urban agendas of the leading presidential candidates, a news release says.
N.Y. Reporter Arthur Chi’en Has “CSI: Miami” Role
Arthur Chi’en, reporter at WCBS-TV in New York, filmed an episode of “CSI: Miami” and will be playing the part of a reporter. The episode airs May 17, his talent agent reports.
Chi’en formerly worked at the all-news NY1 cable outlet and has been New York chapter vice president of the Asian American Journalists Association.
FCC Won’t Go After “Beloved” Oprah
“The moral arbiters at the FCC have officially declared that Oprah Winfrey is free to describe oral and anal sex acts on air — but Howard Stern is not,” reports Richard Johnson in the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column.
“Stern show regular Captain Janks phoned the shock jock yesterday to report that the FCC had sent him a response to his complaint about a recent ‘Oprah’ episode in which an O! magazine editor graphically described the act of ‘tossing salad.’
“The FCC’s deep thinkers said: ‘We previously found that fleeting and isolated remarks of this nature do not warrant commission action because the complained-of material does not fall within the scope of the commission’s indecency prohibition. We reject the claims that this program content is indecent and we need not reach the second element of the indecency analysis.’ But Stern was recently slapped with a $27,500 fine for a discussion that was remarkably similar to Oprah’s. An FCC aide then admitted to The Post that Oprah can cross the line with impunity because she is ‘beloved’ while Stern can be persecuted at will because he’s ‘a lightening rod.'”
Ex-Cincy Reporter Wants Tapes Suppressed
“Former Channel 9 reporter Stephen Hill returned Wednesday to the Hamilton County Courthouse, but not to a courtroom,” reports Kimball Perry in the Cincinnati Post.
“Hill and his attorney gathered with prosecutors in the jury chambers of Common Pleas Court Judge David Davis to view 18 or so videotapes seized from Hill’s home. Police and prosecutors said the tapes provide proof that Hill performed sex acts on teen boys and had them perform anal sex on him.
“The videotapes are key to both sides.
“Hill has a May 6 hearing in which he will ask Davis to prevent prosecutors from using the videotapes as evidence”.
Al Sharpton Gets Busy Again With Media
“The Rev. Al Sharpton just may emerge as the big winner from the 2004 Democratic primaries. Sharpton is in discussions with CNBC about a deal for a series of specials that could lead to a regular primetime berth for the activist-turned- candidate who is no stranger to the cable news talk show punditry circuit,” reports Cynthia Littleton in the Hollywood Reporter.
“Sources also say that Sharpton is being pursued for a syndicated radio talk show gig by leading distributors including Westwood One and Premiere Radio Networks.”
Meanwhile, Stefan C. Friedman reports in the New York Post that “Nielsen Media may find itself the subject of an anti-discrimination lawsuit if it goes forward with a controversial new TV ratings system in New York City, the Rev. Al Sharpton threatened yesterday after meeting with the head of the company.
“Sharpton was fuming over Nielsen’s plans to replace the current written-diary system with an electronic tracking device called Local People Meters on June 3 — which critics say undercounts minority viewers.
Sharpton met for 40 minutes with Nielsen President Susan Whiting, Friedman reported.
The New York activist also announced his National Action Network’s sixth annual “Keepers of the Dream” Dinner & Awards Ceremony May 7 in New York, at which honorees will include “Geraldo Rivera, award-winning Fox News Channel correspondent, for his courage and fairness in delivering the news; Jann Wenner, Founder, Editor and Publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine, for empowering musicians and artists of color for many years; Glenda Glover, Jackson State University Professor and activist; and Comcast Corporation, for their work in diversity.”