Free Press Completes Probe of Fabrication
The Detroit Free Press has taken disciplinary action against sports columnist Mitch Albom and four other staffers, each of whom had some role in putting his now-infamous April 3 column into the paper “and each of whom had the responsibility to fix errors before publication,” the Free Press says in a letter to readers in its Saturday editions.
An advisory from Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services did not specify the discipline or the names of the other employees.
The advisory reads:
“The Detroit Free Press is publishing in its Saturday editions the following letter to readers from Publisher and Editor Carole Leigh Hutton regarding the paper’s internal investigation of a column written by Mitch Albom.
“The column, which was distributed to Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service clients on April 1, described events that did not occur, specifically the planned appearance of former Michigan State basketball players Jason Richardson and Mateen Cleaves at the NCAA Tournament in St. Louis on April 2.
“Five staffers disciplined after management review
“Dear Readers:
“Detroit Free Press management has completed its internal review of an April 3 Mitch Albom column that contained inaccurate information by describing an event that had not yet occurred.
“Albom will resume writing columns for the Free Press. His work has not appeared since he addressed the incident with readers on April 7.
“Disciplinary action has been taken against five employees, Albom and four others, each of whom had some role in putting the April 3 column into the paper and each of whom had the responsibility to fix errors before publication.
“We took into account many factors, including the seriousness of the offense, the importance of our credibility, the history of those involved and Albom’s 20 stellar years at the Free Press.
“We now look forward to that work continuing in the Free Press.
“We also think it’s important to report on ourselves and our transgressions in the same way we would report on the institutions we write about regularly. So, reporting is continuing on a story that will be published as soon as it is ready.
“The Free Press has an ethics policy that outlines our standards, as well as expectations for staff members. You can find it at www.freep.com/help/ethics_policy.htm.
“If you have concerns about any Free Press content, please bring them to the attention of Public Editor John X. Miller, who acts as the readers’ representative and reports directly to me. Miller can be reached at 313-222-2441 or 800-678-7771 anytime. You can write to him at miller@freepress.com or at Detroit Free Press, 600 W. Fort, Detroit 48226.
“Carole Leigh Hutton
“Publisher and Editor”
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Latinos Sought for Pulitzer Board
New Chair “Skip” Gates Wants More Diversity
“Henry Louis Gates Jr., the newly appointed chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, said he would like to see the board appoint its first Hispanic member soon. He’ll also push for more diversity on the juries that pick finalists in the letters and drama categories,” Joe Strupp wrote Wednesday in Editor & Publisher.
“Gates, who is the third African American to chair the board, said the make up of the 14 juries that choose journalism finalists—which range in size from five to seven each—appear to be diverse. But he noted that the three-person juries choosing the seven non-journalism finalists need some ethnic mix.
“‘Get more people of color, more Hispanics, and more women on those juries,’ Gates told E&P today, the day after he was appointed chairman of the 19-person board. ‘I am an arts-and-letters guy.’
“Among the 19 members currently on the board, three are black, four are women, and the remaining 12 are white men,” Strupp noted. The four women are white.
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NABJ Hopeful Denies Urging Pullout from Unity
“Despite reports to the contrary, Michael Woolfolk, one of three candidates for president, said he does not think NABJ should pull out of future Unity conventions,” Linda A. Moore writes on the Web site of the National Association of Black Journalists, reporting on a candidates debate held in Memphis at an NABJ regional conference last weekend.
“‘I have not said in the past that NABJ should pull out of Unity,’ Woolfolk said during the forum moderated by Indianapolis Association of Black Journalists President Michael Dabney, a NABJ elections committee member and education reporter for The Indianapolis Star,” Moore reported.
“Woolfolk, a former NABJ vice president-broadcast who ran for president two years ago, said he does believe, however, that Unity should be less about the convention and put more emphasis on ‘being that strong collective voice on diversity.'”
As reported in this column, Woolfolk said at an NABJ candidates forum April 9 outside Baltimore that, “I think Unity works better as an organization,” that Woolfolk noted how large Unity conventions had become and that he said, “Do we need to be doing the mega-convention? I don’t think so.”
In Memphis, Bryan Monroe, NABJ’s vice president-print and Unity’s vice president, said, “the direction Unity is headed is a great one,” and that Unity is focusing on advocacy. While it once represented journalists of color who merely wanted a seat at the table, Unity has put them at the head of their own table, he said, according to Moore’s NABJ report.
Candidate Cheryl Smith said that while she is a strong believer in coalition building, it should not be at NABJ’s expense. “When Unity becomes competition for NABJ, you have to look out for NABJ first,” she said in Moore’s story.
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Calvin Stovall Named Top Editor in Binghamton
Calvin J. Stovall, managing editor of the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., has been named executive editor at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y., the Gannett Co. announced Thursday.
Stovall, 51, is a board member of the Associated Press Managing Editors and chairman of the APME Diversity Committee. He starts May 2.
The upstate New York paper has a circulation of 58,619 daily and 73,765 Sunday.
Stovall has worked at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., the Detroit News, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Gannett News Service, and joined Gannett Co. corporate offices as news executive in 1992.
He was in that position for five years before being named managing editor at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J. He joined the Indianapolis Star as managing editor in October 2000, according to the Gannett announcement. He has been managing editor in Wilmington since 2001.
A news story in today’s Press & Sun-Bulletin said, “Stovall said he hopes to build on readers’ satisfaction with the Press by strengthening the depth and sophistication of the newspaper’s content to focus on topics that resonate with people’s lives.”
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Terry Foster: Other Sportswriters Suspected Albom
“There were the Mitch rules and then there were the rules for everybody else,” says Terry Foster, who wrote at the Free Press back in the 1980s and is now a columnist for the Detroit News.
Foster was commenting about Mitch Albom, the Detroit Free Press star columnist and author who described a game that hadn’t yet taken place and is now being investigated by the paper to determine whether there were other fabrications.
“Mitch meant more to the Free Press than anybody else, which created lots of resentment from other reporters.”
“Foster said he had larger questions about Albom’s journalistic integrity,” continued David Lyman, features writer and dance critic for Free Press from 1995 to 2004, writing today in the Los Angeles Times.
“‘Sportswriters talk about it all the time,’ says Foster, who, like Albom, is a Detroit radio staple. ‘We always wondered how come we didn’t see that. How come we didn’t hear that? Mitch is a very talented writer. And sometimes he out-writes you. But sometimes he writes things that just seem too good to be true. My opinion? I think they’re going to find things they’ll question. My gut is that he will resign.’
“Foster is one of several Detroit News writers who have been interviewed by the Free Press investigative team. The session lasted 90 minutes and, says Foster, ‘it was incredibly awkward.'”
The Albom story has no heroes and no martyrs (Jon Friedman, MarketWatch)
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Ordeal in Zimbabwe “for Committing Journalism”
“The iron gate swung open and we were prodded, shuffling in our leg-irons, into a darkened concrete yard.
“Above us was the sound of more than 2,000 African prisoners crammed into their cells, shouting, singing and beating their feet. As the leg-irons were unlocked and we were pushed up the stairs, the stench of Harare’s central remand jail hit me for the first time.
“A mixture of sweat, excrement and rotting sadza—a white, doughy stodge made from maize—made me gag, the reflex colliding with the fear that seemed to be rising from my bowels and spreading upwards through my chest.”
Thus began a first-person account Saturday in the London Telegraph. As introduced by the newspaper, “Two Sunday Telegraph journalists, accused of flouting Zimbabwe’s draconian media laws, were released last week after spending 10 days in a cockroach-infested jail. Toby Harnden, who feared he might be locked up for a year, describes their ordeal.”
Harnden and photographer Julian Simmonds were arrested at a polling station in Norton, a town near the capital, Harare, on March 31, during Zimbabwean parliamentary elections, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“The journalists were charged with violating the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), which requires all journalists in Zimbabwe to register with the media commission or face a two-year jail sentence,” the committee explained.
Harnden’s narrative continued: “We were to be allowed soap, a small towel and a toothbrush, he said,” speaking of the officer in charge, “and were to address the guards as ‘Mambo’—Shona for ‘king’. Any reading material we wanted had first to be examined by the prison censor, and we were forbidden a pen or paper.
“‘You are in here for committing journalism,’ he said. ‘If you have a pen, you might commit journalism again.’
“We had entered Zimbabwe knowing that we were taking a risk. [President Robert] Mugabe bitterly resents the criticism he has faced from the British press. We were there—officially—as tourists, nothing more.
“But we both felt that this tourist status permitted us to take a lively interest in all things Zimbabwean. And, as tourists, we clearly wanted to keep diaries and take photographs. Like every other awe-struck visitor, we would gaze at Victoria Falls and enjoy the sights of Matobo national park.
“. . . Mr Diza, the magistrate, showed that there are people of integrity in public positions in Zimbabwe. Despite knowing that we were journalists—we never denied our profession—he judged the case according to the law.
“A prosecution of stunning ineptitude also helped deliver us, and we thanked God that evil could be so inefficient and Beatrice Mtetwa, our heroic defence lawyer, so incisively brilliant.”
The journalists were deported April 15.
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Few Complain About Lalo Cartoon on Red Lake
Last Saturday’s warning to readers of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that some might be offended by a comic strip about the Red Lake Indian Reservation shootings apparently kept complaints at bay.
“In the syndicated ‘La Cucaracha’ strip that also ran Saturday, a teacher asks what President Bush might have said to console those affected by the shootings last month which left 10 people dead, including the teenage gunman,” the Associated Press reported, writing of the cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz.
“One student answers, ‘I’m really so sorry you’re not an Anglo suburban reservation.’ Another says, ‘You shoulda stuck to arrows.’ A third says, ‘Pow? Wow!’
“Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, in a note to readers, said the paper was not aware of the topic of the comic strip until after the section had been preprinted. He said the paper gives broad latitude to comics and rarely pulls a strip, but it wanted to recognize that some readers could find the cartoon inappropriate,” the AP story continued.
“That may be the reason we had relatively little reaction to it,” Kate Parry, reader’s representative, told Journal-isms Thursday. “I logged four calls objecting and two calls supporting printing it. Readers objected because of what they felt was racial stereotyping. Readers supporting the strip wrote about how they thought it fairly commented on what they saw as a ‘non-response’ to Red Lake by President Bush.”
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BET News Briefs: Been There, Done That?
To journalists with long memories, Black Entertainment Television’s announcement last week that it was canceling “BET Nightly News” in favor of news briefs throughout the day sounded like deja vu all over again.
“When I started reporting and producing for the BET News and Public Affairs Department in 1995, the news consisted of periodic briefs or cut-ins,” Doxie McCoy, now communications director in the office of D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, told Journal-isms. “The network sadly is going full circle.”
Back then, however, “while there was no nightly newscast, the department provided valuable programming with a Friday evening newscast that featured black correspondents from across the country reporting not only on the major news of the day, but also stories about black people and issues that you would not see on majority broadcast news program or in newspapers,” she said.
“That half-hour ‘BET News’ actually started back in 1986, with Paul Berry, a veteran D.C. broadcast journalist. The show, subsequently anchored by Ed Gordon, Jason Hill and Cheryl Martin, had a good run for about 10 years, until ‘BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley‘ went on the air with nightly news and talk segments, until it was cancelled in 2001,” McCoy continued.
“We will see if the upcoming return to news briefs will fill a void that will be left as a result of the cancellation of the ‘BET Nightly News’.”
In addition to the hourly news briefs, BET said it would offer specials about newsworthy events and an urban affairs show, “The Cousin Jeff Chronicles,” that will run four times a year.
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“Hunting for Bambi” Reporter Leaving for Miami
“KLAS-TV, Channel 8 reporter LuAnne Sorrell is leaving for Miami next month to join Fox affiliate WSVN,” Norm Clarke reported last Saturday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Sorrell’s ‘Hunting for Bambi’ report in the summer of 2003 fueled an international firestorm. KLAS’ Web site took so many hits, it crashed.
“She went on a hunt with a Las Vegas-based company that showed a man stalking a naked woman in the desert and shooting at her with a paintball gun. The report said the hunters could shoot their female prey for $10,000.
“Under pressure from Las Vegas city officials, Michael Burdick, the man behind the ‘hunt,’ later admitted it was staged to promote the provocative video.
“‘That was probably the lowlight’ of her 2 1/2-year stint in Las Vegas, said Sorrell, who came to KLAS from her home state of Minnesota.
“She leaves at the end of May. Her going-away party was being planned by former colleague Polly Gonzalez, who died in a car accident March 28.
“‘We had built a friendship that was going to be life-long,’ said Sorrell, who is a single mom, as was Gonzalez. ‘It’s going to be hard to leave that part behind.'”
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3 Magazines Profiled on AOL Black Voices
AOL Black Voices has posted stories on Essence magazine, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary; on Black Enterprise magazine, as recalled by a former editor; and on Amy Dubois Barnett, managing editor of Teen People.
“The history of Essence is as much about advocacy as it is about service and inspiration,” Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications, Inc. says in an article by Kendra Lee. “Essence has always been an absolute voice for those who are voiceless in the community. Whether it’s gun violence, calling attention to the system of incarceration in this country, calling attention to those who have been struck down by the police force or speaking out about the lyrics in hip-hop music. And when 77 percent of the new HIV cases are black women, it is just a travesty about which we cannot be quiet. Advocacy is an important part of our legacy, so it must continue to be an important part of what we do.”
Frank McCoy, who worked at Black Enterprise as a senior or contributing editor from 1989 until 1996, wrote April 4 that “BE is a tough place to work. It is true that the Graves” family, “much to the surprise of outsiders, maintain a wall between their advertising and editorial divisions and try not to interfere in editorial’s article selection but, they are also demanding, impatient, and insistent—much like the Forbes family is at its privately-held magazine and the senior management is at The Wall Street Journal or Fortune. At BE, the editorial team, many of whom have served the magazine for more than a decade, are proud of its rigorous integrity and still committed to the mission statement.”
Barnett, managing editor of Teen People, was profiled in an April 14 article by Ayeko Vinton.
“Hired specifically to halt Teen People’s circulation slippage, Barnett’s challenge was clear: Advance the magazine’s presence despite stiff competition from CosmoGIRL!, ElleGirl, Teen Vogue, Seventeen, etc. Her modus operandi is equally simple: Maintain Teen People’s closeness to readers by increasing teen participation in the magazine, keep a sharp eye out for star power, feature the hottest celebrities first and entirely, and speak to all aspects of teen lifestyle.”
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Lah’s Friend: “I Don’t Know” What She’s Doing
Jeff Soto, the married producer at KNBC-TV who was one of three people fired at KNBC-TV Los Angeles after having an affair with married reporter Kyung Lah, who was terminated for “gross misconduct,” is “observing” at rival KCBS-TV, Soto told Journal-isms.
Soto said Wednesday that his role there is “not established yet.” Asked whether Lah had landed another job, he said, “I don’t know.” The office of Lah’s agent, N.S. Bienstock, Inc., said Thursday that Lah had not yet found a new job.
The third person fired was producer, Jim Bunner, responsible for the 11 p.m. newscast. He said in March he had been “fired for keeping quiet” after learning of the affair, according to an account by Ron Fineman, author of a subscription-only newsletter for L.A. television insiders.
Nothing is as inevitable, or tricky, as workplace dating (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times)
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Short Takes
- Whenever someone utters the phrase “the new Boston,” they should remember columnist Norman Lockman,” who died this week at age 66, Derrick Z. Jackson wrote today in the Boston Globe. “Lockman helped chronicle the old Boston in the hope for change.”
Jackson recalled that as managing editor at Delaware’s Wilmington News Journal, Lockman had written, “One of the first things I did upon returning was to declare that for two years every other reporter hired would be a qualified minority. . . . We needed to play catch-up . . . It may be a heavy price to pay but it’s a necessary price — and it works.” Funeral services are April 30 at 2:30 p.m. in the Episcopal parish of Sts. Matthew and Andrew, at the St. Andrew church at 8th and Shipley streets in Wilmington.
- TV One, the African American cable network, announced plans for a regular series of 60-second social and political commentaries by Roland S. Martin, executive editor of the Chicago Defender, “on a wide range of topics of interest to African Americans.”
- CNN’s naming of White House correspondent John King as national correspondent means “that the CNN White House Unit on-air line-up of Suzanne Malveaux, Dana Bash, and Elaine Quijano will become what some media historians see as the first all-women White House correspondent team in the history of television,” ABC News’ “The Note” reported.
- A feature by Randy Cordova in Phoenix’s Arizona Republic Monday noted that the parents of KPNX-TV morning anchor Tram Mai “went to extraordinary lengths to guarantee their children had a future. In 1975, Tram’s parents fled Saigon on one of the last planes out of the country before the airport was bombed and Communist North Vietnamese forces took over. The family—1-year-old Tram, her older brother Tuan and parents MinhSon and Hanh—left virtually all their belongings behind.”
- The Greater Dayton Association of Black Journalists is planning an intensive Journalism Boot Camp April 30 at the University of Dayton to teach high school students the ropes of the profession, Marie Ratliff reported in the Dayton Daily News.
“Students will visit a mock crime scene, where they will interview ‘witnesses,’ speak with a reporter and photographer who covered the Asian tsunami and interview a soldier who fought overseas. Students also will write stories, which will be used to create a mini-newspaper for them to take home,” she wrote. The boot camp is open to any racial minority group, her story said.
- “O! The May issue—on newstands today—marks five years since Oprah Winfrey launched her magazine, O, which was the most successful startup ever. To celebrate, she threw a party for the 100-person staff and gave them each a bonus check for $5,000,” the New York Daily News reported on Tuesday. In the New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye reported last week that a book of Winfrey’s wit and wisdom, sponsored by Dove soap, will be given free to the magazine’s subscribers and its nearly 1 million newsstand readers. The book cost between $1 million and $2 million to produce and was published in-house by the magazine, Seelye wrote.
- Eight mid-career newspaper professionals of color have been paired with senior-level executives for the Newspaper Association of America’s annual Breakthrough: James K. Batten Leadership Program, the publishers association announced last week.
“The senior executives will serve as mentors to their junior colleagues and offer guidance and advice to help them develop leadership skills and broaden their newspaper-industry knowledge.” Most of those selected are from newspapers’ business side, but Dorrie Toney is readership editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is paired with Michael J. Beck, president and publisher of the Iowa City (Iowa) Press-Citizen.
- Javier Castaño, former news director at Hoy in New York, has been named managing editor of El Diario La Prensa, Editor & Publisher reported last week.
- BlackCommentator.com is celebrating its third anniversary. “For most of the history of Black people in the United States, the obligations of advocacy for justice were a given among African American journalists,” publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble wrote this month.
“Oppression and exploitation are objective realities, not questionable notions to be carefully balanced by lies. Liars and thieves have no rights that honest men and women are bound to respect. There was a time when such values were near-universally understood among African Americans who called themselves journalists. No more. Now, for far too many, journalism has become simply one more route to individual upward mobility, devoid of social obligation and contemptuous of truth.”
The Web site claims 30,000 to 40,000 unique visitors each weekly issue.
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