Originally published April 18, 2005
NABJ, University Leaders Face Off on J-Program
Armed with reports from journalism students that they felt intimidated by administrators at Hampton University, leaders of the National Association of Black Journalists met with Hampton University officials and faculty Wednesday in the university president’s office.
How much the meeting resolved is open to question, as participants said university President William R. Harvey and Journalism Dean Tony Brown asked for evidence of the intimidation and the NABJ leaders—President Herbert Lowe and Vice President-Print Bryan Monroe—said they would not do so in such an open meeting, at which 16 people were present.
The session itself was either an exercise in bullying by the Hampton officials or in lack of preparedness by the NABJ leaders, depending on who described the closed-door meeting.
“It was like a roller coaster ride. It was an opinionated group. Some people were emotional. I can honestly say everybody’s passionate about HU,” Kafi B. Rouse, president of the Hampton Roads Black Media Professionals, told Journal-isms.
Meeting aside, the events have left Pearl Stewart, founder of the Black College Wire, a project that works to improve newspapers at historically black colleges and universities, believing that “the students need an independent, online publication, and Black College Wire would be very willing to help them produce that,” she told Journal-isms.
Stewart, who was not at the Hampton meeting, works with journalism students in her role with the Black College Wire, a project of the journalism departments at historically black schools. “It’s going to be very difficult for them to have a student newspaper within the confines of that Hampton campus,” Stewart said. “We’re at a point where other colleges are being encouraged to put their papers online, and Hampton University is taking its paper offline. As the school regresses, the students are regressing as well.”
The journalism program at the Virginia campus is the recipient of a $10 million commitment from the Scripps Howard Foundation, including a new building. But it has had three leaders since 2002, when Charlotte Grimes resigned after saying she disagreed with Harvey’s view that “that journalism is ‘to do good, not muckraking.'”
In 2003, the university’s commitment to journalism came under scrutiny again when acting president JoAnn Haysbert ordered copies of the student newspaper, the Hampton Script, seized when it printed a story about health violations in the cafeteria and declined to run a statement from Haysbert about the situation on the front page. That episode resulted in a task force that recommended that “student journalists on the staff of The Script have the right to a free press,” among other declarations that were accepted by the administration.
Then, in September, the student newspaper failed to publish as scheduled because it lacked the required adviser for its editorial content.
In January, the NABJ’s Lowe wrote Harvey to ask for a meeting, saying, “we know of student journalists feeling intimidated, limited administration support for them or The Script, and threats of expulsion for students who speak out. If true, these circumstances surely would be inconsistent with last year’s recommendations—or with the ideas and mandates espoused by any journalism accreditation entity.”
That meeting took place Wednesday. “NABJ reached out and said we’d like to help you in any way we can,” Script editor Talia Buford told Journal-isms. She said the president’s office called her the evening before and asked her to attend, along with other student leaders, and that the meeting was not about the Script.
Syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, who is a visiting Hampton faculty member, was also asked to be present, along with fellow faculty members and veteran black journalists Jack E. White, Doug Smith and Earl Caldwell. To Pitts, “NABJ went in woefully unprepared,” saying the NABJ leaders offered “very little in the specifics” of the allegations. “I was just really disappointed as an NABJ member,” he said. “How do you write a letter saying that we know of instances of intimidation” without having talked to the faculty about them? Pitts asked. Smith repeatedly asked why Lowe had not replied to a letter Smith had written in January.
“We had a frank and honest conversation,” Lowe said today, “and NABJ stands ready to work constructively with Dr. Harvey and Dean Brown and the others in the journalism department, and we will be going to the [NABJ] board of directors meeting next week in Atlanta. We will share what we said and what we heard and what we saw.”
Lowe had written on Jan. 4 that, “The reputation and credibility of journalism education at historically black colleges and universities are at stake. NABJ’s primary goal is to diversify newsrooms. That quest is undeniably hurt when newsroom recruiters can for any reason question whether true journalism is taught at the institutions that produce so many black journalism graduates.”
Told of Stewart’s idea for the student paper to pursue operating independently, Rouse said the local black journalists organization was willing to help. “We are the professionals. We’re constantly telling them, ‘write wherever you can, get published.’ We’ll continue to teach, mentor and supervise. We’re here for the students,” she said.
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Acting “White” Not Required, Editor Says
“We have spent years and years of hiring people of color,” said Mark Silverman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, “and trying to make them white.”
He added: “And as soon as they act white they get promoted.” Otherwise, it’s “she’s too quiet and he’s too loud. Society values diversity on paper, as long as you act white.”
Silverman was speaking at a session at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention Thursday on ASNE’s Diversity Leadership Institute, a retreat for newspaper editors.
He and other panelists said editors must break out of their comfort zones and respect cultural differences. That means not automatically favoring people who look like them, or expecting everyone to act like the white journalists who grew up in the suburbs, they said. Sometimes it means extending news meetings to allow for more conversation.
The remarks had special significance as newspapers deal with lack of retention as a major impediment to improving diversity. As Melanie Sill, editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., said, “Just because we’ve brought more cultural [groups] in the newsroom doesn’t mean we know what to do” with them.
Marty Benetau, editor of Canada’s Windsor Star, said that was exactly his problem. Recent immigration has made his the third-most diverse city in Canada, he said, but the Star has no “visible minorities,” in Canadian terminology. “I think I can find them—but I’m not sure what to do with them when I get them,” he said from the audience.
“It’s helped in retention, in reaching out to people,” W. Martin Kaiser, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said of the leadership institute. “Who do you take to lunch? Who do you ask, ‘how’s it going?'”
Later, Silverman told Journal-isms that his observation about “making them white” was based on “just being 55 years old and being in newsrooms since I was 21.” Naming a number of people of color in high positions at the News, Silverman declared, “when you come to work at the News, if you’re not yourself, that’s not why we hired you.”
The leadership institute “gave me a vocabulary” to talk about these issues, said Silverman, who had described himself as a Jew raised in a Catholic neighborhood. He called the institute “the single best program” he had participated in throughout his career.
Also at the ASNE convention in Washington:
- “Journal-isms” was the subject of a story today by Alexander R. LeMaine in the student convention newspaper, the ASNE Reporter.
- Caesar Andrews, editor of Gannett News Service, was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors. Officers include Rick Rodriguez of the Sacramento Bee, first Latino elected president; Vice President David A. Zeeck, executive editor of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.; Secretary Gilbert Bailon, editor of Al Día in Dallas; and Treasurer Charlotte H. Hall, editor of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.
- Gay journalists assumed more mainstream roles. Gays and lesbians were represented for the first time in the convention’s “Diversity Roundtable”; an official “gay reception” honored the late Leroy Aarons, founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and a Maynard Institute board member; and an openly gay candidate, J. Ford Huffman of USA Today, ran for the board of directors, though unsuccessfully.
- Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, succeeded Milton Coleman of the Washington Post as chair of the Diversity Committee. She was also re-elected to a one-year term on the board.
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NAMME Diversity Winners Relate Tales, Lessons
Acel Moore recalled being a copy boy at the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1962, “the third or fourth African American male who didn’t sweep the floor or clean the building.”
One editor would call out “copy” when addressing a white copy boy, but said “boy” to Moore and other blacks. Moore recalled that he told the man, quietly, “I will never respond to you if you call me ‘boy.’ I said it was a classic racial insult. If you insist on doing that, you and I need to talk about this after work one day.”
Word of the exchange got around the newsroom, Moore recalled, and “that man [and I] later became friends. Before long, I had him reading ‘Manchild in the Promised Land,’ and he gave me advice on how to be a good writer.”
It was one of many anecdotes Moore, an associate editor at the Inquirer who is recovering from a debilitating illness, told about the course of his career as he was presented with the Robert C. Maynard Legend Award on Thursday night. The occasion was the awards banquet of the National Association of Minority Media Executives in Washington, which drew an audience of 240.
Other awardees were:
- Gordon Parks, the photojournalist, writer, novelist, poet, composer and cinematographer, who is now 92. Unable to travel, he filmed an acceptance of his lifetime achievement award and recalled his mother’s advice: “Know what you want to do and know how to do it well, and do it with pride.” She also said, “if a white boy can do it, you can do it—and you better do it better or you better not come home,” Parks recounted.
- Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. A veteran of civil rights work in Mississippi in the 1960s and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Ghiglione urged NAMME to consider becoming international. Medill recently hosted the new National Association of African Journalists and Ghiglione has led student trips to Africa and India. He recalled last week’s Pulitzer for international reporting won by Nigerian-born Dele Olojede of Newsday. “We are such an ethnocentric, U.S.-centered nation,” he said. It’s time “to champion an even broader definition of diversity.”
- Jeannie Park, executive editor of People magazine and a founder of the New York chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association, who has increased the number of Asian Americans wherever she has worked. The previous day, Park said, she was at an awards luncheon of the American Society of Magazine Editors, at which a speaker remarked, “This is the whitest display I’ve ever seen.” Considering the speaker’s recognition of the lack of diversity as a sign of progress, Park said her next thought was, “Now, what are you going to do about it?”—a challenge she left with the audience, adding, “whatever ‘it’ is to you.”
- Maria Hinojosa, CNN correspondent, formerly of National Public Radio, who recalled reporting for NPR a story on the South Bronx. After it aired, a colleague congratulated her and asked, “aren’t you afraid to go to the South Bronx?” Hinojosa told the audience that she was more afraid being the first Latina hired at NPR. “That was scary for me,” she said. “We are covering American stories,” Hinojosa added, not simply gay issues, African American issues or Latino issues.
- Omar Wasow, executive director of BlackPlanet.com, who confided that he had been obsessed with video games as a kid and that, “I owe an incredible debt to Donkey Kong.” But, he said, “I went from somebody who played video games to one who programmed video games,” a concept “that’s at the heart of BlackPlanet and at the heart of NAMME.”
Moore, who said he would celebrate his 43rd year as a journalist in September, learned in November that he had a compressed, herniated disc that was pressing against his spinal cord.
He told the audience that he recently broke his ankle in his backyard, putting him in a wheelchair. He walked last night with a cane.
A founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former board member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Moore also produced and was a regular panelist on a public affairs show called “Black Perspective on the News,” originating at WHYY in Philadelphia and transmitted by the Public Broadcasting Service. The show gave exposure to a diverse group of journalists, including Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Maynard and Gwen Ifill. When the show was canceled, he said he discovered that WHYY destroyed all the tapes it had of the show. Debuting in 1968, the program had interviewed newsmakers from President Jimmy Carter to the head of the United Farm Workers union.
Moore agreed with other speakers that class diversity was important. A white journalist who grew up in a low-income black neighborhood and went to a state school, he said, might be more relevant to that black community than African Americans or Hispanics who grew up in the suburbs and went to Ivy League schools.
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“BET Nightly News” Demise a Topic for Ed Gordon
The upcoming cancellation of “BET Nightly News,” announced this week, was a topic Thursday on National Public Radio’s “News and Notes” with Ed Gordon.
“For those who don’t know, I was anchor there for many, many years and held the post there at ‘BET Nightly News’ and have had two stints at that network,” as Gordon said by way of introduction.
Some comments from the program:
- George Curry, editor, National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service: “I was on there a lot, seven years with you, Ed. If they don’t think that people should wait till 11:00, then move the newscast up earlier. That’s the solution to that. The problem is that even before BET was sold to Viacom, they had gotten rid of ‘Lead Story,’ which we were on. They’ve gotten rid of ‘BET Tonight.’ They had gotten rid of ‘Teen Summit.’ And I used to defend BET. People always complained about the rump shaking. I said that even with the rump shaking, they had more public affairs than any other network combined. You can’t say that anymore, and it’s not any different but a black version of MTV.”
- William C. Rhoden, sportswriter, New York Times: “This is just one more breath of life that’s been taken out of our ability to define ourselves.”
- Terrie Williams, founder, Stay Strong Foundation: “It’s a great loss to our community. Let me just say that at the outset. But I also like the idea of news updates during the day. I think that they should have been able to find a way to do both, and I remember when your show, the show that you did in evenings where you brought three black folks together to talk about issues that affect our community; really a devastating loss. Where else do we get that kind of dialogue about who we are?”
- Curry: “The real growth is going to go in communities of color, and therefore, you will see more and more of our news organizations, our entertainment organizations being purchased by companies like Time Inc., Time Warner, Viacom, and then they will have control, and you’ll have fewer outlets where you can really get your message out about your community of concern.”
- Gordon: “If, indeed, we continue along these lines—and I hope some way, shape and form, they figure out how to, if not bring news back, have a real news presence there, and they say they will continue with specials and the like. I would hope that there would also be—and it’s been my fight from the day, even before I got there, BET news went on to the day it goes off, you should also supply it with the wherewithal to do the kinds of programming and do the kind of news that this community, black, as well as white who should watch, as a potato to your meat, if you will.”
Black Entertainment Television Cancels its “Nightly News” Program (BlackAmericaWeb.com and Associated Press)
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