Essence Editor Weathers Denies Any Drama
The announcement this week that Diane Weathers is stepping down as Essence editor in chief left many journalists skeptical, given recent developments at the magazine, but Weathers and Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications Partners, separately maintained to Journal-isms today that the editor’s decision was voluntary and without drama.
“There’s no more than what the press release said,” Weathers said. “I want to do some other kinds of things. I want to quit while I’m ahead. I’ll still be on the masthead, but I won’t be editor-in-chief.”
Much of the reaction to Monday’s announcement was captured in the tone of a story by Keith J. Kelly in Wednesday’s New York Post:
“Time Inc. appears to have some major headaches after completing its acquisition of the 51 percent of Essence earlier this month,” Kelly wrote.
“Weeks before the deal was finalized, Essence pulled the plug on Suede, the new urban fashion magazine that was being headed by Editor in Chief Suzanne Boyd.
“Time Inc. wants her to accept an editor at large job with the parent company and is making space.
“Boyd has not said yes or no to the idea.
“The turmoil continued this week when Diane Weathers told staffers she was resigning as Essence’s editor in chief. She’s had a stormy tenure, with at least a half dozen top editors heading to the exits in the past year.”
Monday’s announcement said of Weathers, “The June issue will be her last. Diane will become an editor-at-large for the magazine, as she devotes more time to her family and concentrates on writing books and other special projects.”
“Skepticism is healthy, of course, and perfectly understandable given the timing of Diane’s decision,” Ebanks told Journal-isms today.
“Nevertheless, the fact stands: Diane took herself out of the editor-in-chief role to step into the position of editor-at-large for both personal and professional reasons. Signs of such a decision date back to the summer when she took a sabbatical. Women need this type of professional flexibility given the often competing demands of work and family—no matter the timing.”
Boyd could not be reached for comment about her future role.
Meanwhile, Essence veteran Susan L. Taylor, who will once again assume day-to-day editorial responsibilities for the magazine while it seeks a successor, addresses the controversy over Time Inc.’s purchase of the million-circulation publication in her latest column:
“There are serious vulnerabilities in Black America beyond the matter of who owns Essence,” Taylor wrote. “Joining the Essence family?s vision, passion and commitment to social justice with Time Warner?s resources, we can address critical issues such as underserved schools in our community, which are the pipeline to prison. With Time Inc.?s dedication to education, we can help transform low-performing schools into schools that offer Black children the rich educational experience suburban White kids take for granted. Time Inc. chairman and CEO Ann Moore said it well: ‘It?s possible to start a social revolution!’
“Does our relationship with Time Inc. ensure Essence?s survival? No, you do. We have seen the demise of the Black magazines Emerge, Heart & Soul, Honey, Savoy and BET Weekend. Today there?s not a single Black newspaper in the nation that isn?t struggling. Only your support as conscious, vocal consumers will keep Black media alive.
“Essence has never really belonged to anyone but you. Keep writing to us. Respond to us, monitor and pressure us. Keep this magazine yours. Support advertisers who support us and other Black media. Subscribing to our national and regional publications keeps them alive.”
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Red Lake Story Fading from Front Pages
With a few notable exceptions, the story of Monday’s deadly rampage on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota is fading from America’s front pages faster than you can say “not Columbine”—just as some predicted.
“My guess is that probably less than 10 percent of the papers are playing it on the front page at this point—if that many,” Paul Sparrow, executive producer for media at the Newseum in Arlington, Va., which daily displays the front pages of 337 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, told Journal-isms today.
Sparrow said he was surprised that even in nearby areas, the coverage had been pushed inside. But, he said, the big story has become the continuing case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents are trying to have her feeding tube reinserted. The NCAA basketball championship also competes for attention.
On Tuesday, the Twin Cities City Pages predicted: “Expect the story to fall off the national media radar much faster than Columbine did, as media absorb the fact that this happened on an Indian reservation and involved Native American victims.”
According to Sparrow, however, the reservation violence wasn’t played as a Native story: “The case broke through the Native American ghetto because it was a school shooting. It was the school shooting script, not the poor Native American script.”
To Daffodil Altan, writing for Pacific News Service, the fact that the events happened on a reservation is very much the story.
Joseph Orozco, station manager and radio host for Hoopa Tribal Radio, “believes cultural elements in Native culture, beyond a shared oppressive poverty, do play a role” in why the violence might have happened there, Altan wrote. “But Duane Beyal, editor of the Navajo Times, believes that cultural and spiritual grounding are precisely what may keep teens from self-inflicted or outward violence.”
Among the metro papers continuing to keep the story out front were the Denver Post, the Washington Post, the Forum in Fargo, N.D., and the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota.
[Added March 26: “Columbine,” said Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post. “Our interest in those stories is informed by the Columbine tragedy and we will never ignore shootings like those.”]
Contributing to today’s Washington Post story, written by Blaine Harden and Dana Hedgpeth, was Dalton Walker, a reporter for the Reznet News journalism program who grew up on the reservation and had filed a commentary on deadline Monday for Minnesota’s Duluth News Tribune.
In the Chicago Tribune, public editor Don Wycliff on Thursday rejected complaints that the Red Lake killings were underplayed for racial reasons.
“The fact is that Columbine was the apogee of an escalating series of school shootings that included cases in Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., among others. Happily, no one has done anything as deadly as Columbine since Columbine,” Wycliff wrote.
But on a Minnesota Public Radio special that aired nationally today, “What happened at Red Lake?” it was noted that this was the first time a mass school shooting had taken place in a “community of color.”
Meanwhile, Floyd Jourdain Jr., chairman of the Red Lake tribal council, “said more access will be given to the news media, including to some of the funerals of the shooting victims,” according to a story today in North Dakota’s Grand Forks Herald, in a report credited to the Herald and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
“Relatives of two shooting victims criticized Red Lake tribal authorities Thursday for not visiting injured students in the hospital and for imposing restrictions on media visiting the reservation,” the story began.
On Tuesday, two photographers were handcuffed and detained after taking pictures of a roadside memorial while in a moving vehicle, the Associated Press reported.
Tribal police thought a gun was in the photographers’ vehicle and had their firearms drawn when detaining the photographers, J. Pat Carter of the Associated Press and Scott Olson of Getty Images.
Amid Red Lake’s media circus, look for the truth (Kent Nerburn, Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Circumstances of Red Lake slayings defy reason (Robin Washington, Duluth News Tribune)
In Red Lake, healing begins (Dorreen Yellow Bird, Grand Forks Herald)
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Women of Color Virtually Invisible on Sunday Shows
“In recent weeks, criticism of the shortage of women’s bylines on newspaper op-ed pages has roiled the media waters, prompted by syndicated columnist Susan Estrich’s attack on Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley for his failure to bring more women onto the Times’ op-ed page,” begins a media advisory by the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Media.
“This issue certainly deserves discussion, but the problem extends beyond newspaper op-ed pages and into television. An upcoming FAIR study has found that on television, as in print, female pundits are in short supply.
“FAIR looked at Sunday morning talkshow panels, where two to four journalists (political reporters as well as columnists) often join the shows’ hosts to discuss the week’s big political stories. The study examined six months (9/1/04-2/28/05) of NBC’s Chris Matthews Show and Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week and Fox News Sunday. (CBS had no consistent panel feature on analogous shows.)
“All of the program hosts, who direct the discussions, are white men: NBC’s Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Fox’s Chris Wallace.
” . . . But which women get to speak? Certainly not women of color. While the Chris Matthews Show did well on gender parity, every one of its 49 female panelists was white. The only two appearances by non-white women in the six months studied were PBS’s Gwen Ifill (Meet the Press, 10/24/04) and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile (This Week, 2/27/05). And Brazile falls into a somewhat different category?unlike the other shows, This Week’s pundit roundtable sometimes includes newsmakers like her in addition to journalists.”
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Blogging Phenomenon Reaches Editorial Pages
The blogging phenomenon has reached the editorial pages of newspapers, with some opinion writers generating Web logs as well as the columns and editorials they produce for the print edition. But few of these writers have been journalists of color.
Allen Johnson, editorial page editor of North Carolina’s Greensboro News & Record, is one. His blog, “Thinking Out Loud,” began Feb. 1.
Is it important for journalists of color to join the blogging world?
“Absolutely, it’s important to have diverse voices in blogs,” Johnson told Journal-isms. “Two journalists of color at the News & Record have blogs: Myself and religion writer Nancy McLaughlin.
“The blogs help us connect with readers and to have ongoing dialogues about topics and issues—even before we’ve written an editorial.
“For an editorial page editor, it’s almost like being able to invite the whole city to editorial board meetings.”
Ellen Simon reported for the Associated Press today that, “The News & Record’s Web site features 11 staff-written Web journals, or blogs, including one by the editor that answers readers’ questions, addresses criticism and discusses how the paper is run.”
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“Forgotten” Magazines for Black Women Unearthed
A new book “debunks the popularly held belief that the 35-year-old Essence was the first significant magazine for African-American women,” according to a Princeton University news release about “Ladies? Pages: African-American Women?s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them? (Rutgers University Press).
The author is Noliwe Rooks, associate director of Princeton?s Program in African-American Studies, who “unearthed a trove of forgotten publications” from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
?Before ?Ladies? Pages,? there wasn?t much historiography that indicated that black women were discussing the issues of sexuality, self-presentation, child care and other important women?s issues,? said Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton?s Edwards Professor of American History, in the Princeton release. ?What this book shows is that black women were talking about these issues in print long before they were raised in the mainstream.?
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Meredith Station in Hartford, Conn., Feels Fallout
A station meeting at WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., to introduce the new broadcasting president became another forum to question parent company Meredith Corp. about the actions of Kevin O’Brien, the fired head of 13 stations of the company’s broadcast group who has been accused of making racist statements.
Two African American engineers asked at the meeting that WFSB managers hired by O’Brien be investigated, a staff member at the station told Journal-isms.
The meeting to introduce Paul Karpowicz also heard criticisms of the station’s decision to move out of the city of Hartford. A link between that decision and O’Brien is also being made by a city official, according to the Hartford Advocate.
“This month WFSB-TV Channel 3 suddenly ditched its agreement to keep the station in Hartford, saying the downtown site it had agreed to buy from the city was too small,” according to the story yesterday by Meir Rinde.
“But a city official is now pointing to the significance of another sticking point — the city’s requirement that WFSB hire minority and women contractors to do construction work — in light of new revelations of racism at Meredith Corporation, WFSB’s parent company.”
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Rideau’s Judge Presents Him With $126,000 Bill
“As soon as acclaimed prison journalist Wilbert Rideau walked free following his January manslaughter conviction, there were whispers around the Calcasieu Parish courthouse that the 44-year prison inmate would be hit with court costs from his unprecedented fourth trial,” Michael Perlstein wrote Thursday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“His legal team thought the figure could even climb past $1,000, despite the fact Rideau was tried as an indigent defendant. But when Calcasieu Parish District Judge David Ritchie slapped Rideau with a tab of more than $126,000 this week, the reaction from the Rideau camp went beyond outrage.
“‘To me, it’s flabbergasting,’ said Julian Murray, one of Rideau’s attorneys. ‘You’re going to put that type of burden on a man who’s 63 years old and is just starting his life after 44 years in prison? It doesn’t make any sense.'”
Rideau had been convicted of first-degree murder for killing a woman during a 1961 bank robbery. His conviction was reversed in 2000, and a trial in January concluded with manslaughter verdict. Rideau, who worked as a journalist while incarcerated, was freed based on time served.
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See the Vote on Terri Schiavo by Caucus
Ken Colburn’s Techpolitics Web site enables readers to see the early-Monday House vote on the Terri Schiavo case by caucus. The 203-58 vote helped give jurisdiction over the brain-damaged Florida woman’s case to the federal courts.
Clicking on the link to arrange the votes by caucus shows that nine members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted yes and 13 no; six members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus voted yes and one no; and three members of the Progressive Caucus voted yes and 15 said no. The rest were listed as not voting.
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Short Takes
- The Dallas Morning News named sports editor Dwayne Bray, 40, as deputy managing editor for metro news, effective immediately, the paper announced Wednesday. Side effect: The promotion reduces the number of African American sports editors at the nation’s “mainstream” newspapers from five to four.
- The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been advising Michael Jackson on spiritual and personal issues during his trial, plans to interview the entertainer for one hour this weekend on “Keep Hope Alive with Rev. Jesse Jackson,” his syndicated radio talk show, Robert Feder reported in the Chicago Sun-Times.
- The Rev. Al Sharpton met for 25 minutes Thursday with three members of the Federal Communications Commission, urging them to step in to stop what he said was violence fomented by radio stations, Reuters reported.
- Muhammad Ali showed up Thursday at the official Chicago area launch of Bridges TV, the first network created for an American Muslim audience, Michael Hirsley reported in the Chicago Tribune.
- Asha Blake, Denver’s newest anchor, was named best TV news anchor by Denver’s Westword magazine.
- A show co-hosted by rap godfather Chuck D was dropped from the Air America lineup to make way for one hosted by Jerry Springer, the Cincinnati Post reported. Air America had already been criticized for its low on-air participation by African Americans.
- On Wednesday, CBS chief Leslie Moonves repeated the criteria that is guiding the development of the next incarnation of the “CBS Evening News”: making it more relevant and faster paced, with an ensemble approach, the Hollywood Reporter said. Leaders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists met last month with CBS to urge that a Latino be considered for the show.
- Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is writing a weekly column of conservative political and social commentary for Newspaper Enterprise Association. She replaces Joseph Perkins, whose column recently left the NEA offerings after Perkins resigned from the San Diego Union-Tribune, Editor & Publisher reported last week.