Publishers Aim for 18- to 29-Year-Olds
An alliance of black publishers has hired a New York investment-banking firm to raise $15 million to start a new black newspaper targeting 18- to 29-year olds that would appear first in Chicago then spread to other cities, Chicago publisher Dorothy Leavell said today.
“It would incorporate not only the newspaper itself, but the Internet, television, radio . . . a fully converged newspaper [that would] attract the young person who does not read the newspaper now,” Leavell, publisher of the 65-year-old weekly Chicago Crusader, told Journal-isms.
“I want to leave a legacy to the industry,” said Leavell, a former president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the trade group of black-newspaper publishers, and “perpetuate the black press.”
Asked what this would mean for black journalists, she said, “Soon you’re going to be able to come home and bring that talent that we could not afford. All of that journalistic energy and journalistic prowess that they have. They’ll be able to write the stories that they want to write.”
Leavell said she had been working on the idea for three years, but the project was disclosed today in the last paragraph of a story in the New York Sun about the new New York Times Co. newspaper targeting black readers in Gainesville, Fla., to be called the Gainesville Guardian.
“A former Times corporate development director, Porter Bibb, said that given the small size of the East Gainesville market, the Guardian will do little to reverse the Times’ recent financial woes,” said the story by Daniel Hemel.
“‘They should put their effort into a much more propitious business development program, rather than spending time and money on something like the effort in Gainesville,’ Mr. Bibb, who is now a managing partner at MediaTech Capital Partners, said.
“In a move that is indicative of the growing competition for black readers, Mr. Bibb said his bank – in conjunction with a group of 283 black publishers – is planning to roll out a twice-a-week newspaper targeting a largely black, 18- to 29-year-old audience in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.,” the story continued. A partner in Bibb’s firm, Van Negris, told Journal-isms that the firm could not comment.
But Leavell said “Bibb has been very successful raising money,” and would not have taken on the project if he did not think it would succeed. “We will have 51 percent ownership of any publication. It will be a black publication.” At the recent NNPA convention in Chicago, she said, the group decided it would “fight tooth and nail the New York Times and any other” white companies that go after the African American market.
The project is being conducted under the auspices of Amalgamated Publishers Inc., which describes itself as “the nation?s oldest media placement firm representing leading Black newspapers from coast to coast.” Leavelle, its chairman, said 20 papers own Amalgamated.
Already on the project’s staff is an African American who has worked for a major media company on both the editorial and business sides, she said.
The as-yet-unnamed new paper will seek a circulation of half a million in Chicago, which far exceeds that of any existing African American newspaper. It would replace the weekly Crusader, which she said has a circulation of 80,000. In other cities, the publication would partner with an existing paper or start independently.
Leavell said she has struggled to keep the Crusader going for 44 years but that the black press had not had the resources to properly compete with mainstream media. “It’s not that we haven’t had the talent available,” she said, but it needs an infusion of cash that the investment bankers were hired to provide.
The black press has been hostile to the New York Times Co. plans, but the director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Alex Jones, said in the Sun that the Times should not be criticized for competing against black-owned outlets. “That would be like saying integration is a bad thing because it destroyed the segregated, black-owned businesses in black parts of town,” he said.
“Mr. Jones said that from a journalistic standpoint, ‘the main point as far as the ethnic press is concerned is not who owns it, but how well they serve the market,'” the story said. Jones is a former New York Times media writer.
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Survey Finds “Plateau” in Radio, TV News Hiring
“The percentage of minorities working in local television news last year was largely unchanged, according to a survey released today by the Radio-Television News Directors Association. The percentage of minorities working in local radio dropped,” the association announced.
“According to the 2005 RTNDA/Ball State University Annual Survey, minorities comprised 21.2 percent of local television news staffs in 2004, compared with 21.8 percent in 2003. At non -Hispanic stations, the minority workforce remained steady at 19.5 percent, compared with last year?s 19.8 percent. In local radio, the minority workforce fell to 7.9 percent in 2004 from 11.8 percent in 2003.
“Bob Papper, who conducted the survey for RTNDA, said that while the percentage of minorities in radio appeared to drop, the ongoing consolidation of radio newsrooms and significant shifts from year to year on which radio stations respond to the survey make year-to-year comparisons difficult.
“The percentage of minority TV news directors is 12 percent, compared with 12.5 percent in last year?s survey. In radio, the percentage of minority news directors rose from 8 percent to 11 percent.
?’The percentage of journalists of color in electronic newsrooms should be keeping pace with changes in the American population,’ says Barbara Cochran, RTNDA president. ‘RTNDA is committed to assisting newsrooms to better reflect the diverse communities they serve.’
“‘The survey suggests that we may have hit a plateau at a time when having a diverse newsroom, especially in decision making positions, is so important,’ says Janice Gin, RTNDA diversity chairman and associate news director at KTVU-TV in Oakland, CA. ‘Successful newsrooms have learned that having a diverse staff generates better stories, better storytelling, and better serves our viewers. As an industry, we can do more to improve the recruiting, hiring and retention of minorities.’ “
- Survey results (PDF)
Steve Holmes Leaving N.Y. Times for D.C.’s Post
Steven A. Holmes, one of the most prominent black journalists at the New York Times, is leaving the New York paper, where he is deputy education editor, for the Washington Post, where he will be a deputy national editor overseeing domestic policy.
The move represents another in a series of hirings of editors of color at the Post since newsroom staffers confronted management on its diversity record last November after a new managing editor was named.
For the Times, it represents the loss of another editor of color at a paper that once had, in Gerald M. Boyd, an African American managing editor. As reported at the time, an internal post-Jayson Blair committee urged in 2003 that the Times “expand the recruitment of experienced journalists from a diverse pool as a necessary complement to the apprenticeship programs already in place.” But no action seems to have been taken on the recommendation.
“I looked around that newsroom — it’s like, wow! It is amazing,” Holmes told Journal-isms today, describing the Post. “You look at not only just the number but the quality of black folks in positions of responsibility at the Post.” Since late last year, the Post hired Joe Davidson as editor of the District Weekly, promoted Deborah Heard to assistant managing editor of the Style section and Jabari Asim to deputy editor of the Book World section, and named correspondent Keith B. Richburg as foreign editor, the No. 2 post on that desk, among other moves. Don Podesta, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, was named assistant managing editor in charge of the newsroom’s copy desks and Sandy Sugawara, a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, was named deputy assistant managing editor for business.
Holmes said his reasons for changing employers was “more personal” — he wanted to be in Washington and to stay on an editing track. Returning to the Times’ Washington bureau, where he had been a reporter and editor, would be “a step back.” He said he had “nothing but good things to say about the Times” and that he “may decide I don’t want to stay on a management track.”
Holmes “has covered race, politics, Congress and foreign affairs for the Times since 1989,” according to a bio accompanying his 2000 biography of Ron Brown, the late Commerce secretary. “Prior to joining the Times, he was a reporter for Time magazine in its Chicago, Los Angeles, London and Washington bureaus, covering politics, sports, international finance and the Supreme Court.”
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AOL Black Voices Site to Be Missing Some Writers
The regular lineup of writers will be missing from AOL Black Voices as it makes personnel changes, a spokeswoman said today.
Some writers for the Web site received this message late last week: “I regret to inform you that publishing of the BlackVoices commentary and opinion page, BV Views, has been suspended.
“Effective immediately, BV will not be publishing any columns until further notice.”
Regular columnists include Jimi Izrael, Amy Alexander and William Jelani Cobb.
An AOL spokeswoman told Journal-isms: “Due to an internal transfer of the Black Voices news programming manager, there will temporarily be less BV Views programming available on the service until her replacement is identified. With Janet Rollé, the new Black Voices Vice President/General Manager beginning her new position today, we’d anticipate this position to be filled in the coming weeks.”
As announced last week, Rollé, a former vice president at VH1 and onetime marketing and new-media director for HBO Home Video, was named vice president and general manager of AOL BlackVoices, which combines three former Web sites: Black Voices, AOL Black Focus and Africana.com.
Less than six months after Africana.com shut down its Web site and merged into the AOL site, the editor of the merged site, Gary Dauphin, resigned and his deputy, Barbranda Lumpkins Walls, left as well. In addition, programmer Bianca Prade is leaving, the spokeswoman confirmed today.
- AOL Appoints New Chief of Black Voices Service (Washington Post)
How About an Indian to Replace O’Connor?
“I can’t imagine that [President] Bush would decide it’s time for an American Indian to join the Supreme Court,” Mark Trahant, Maynard Institute board chair and editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote Sunday. “But he should at least consider the idea. No group of Americans has as much at stake: The court has its hand in everything from treaty rights to jurisdictional disputes involving domestic violence on reservations.”
“From my perspective, the U.S. Supreme Court has been busy rewriting American Indian law for at least the past three decades. The court has ignored judicial history and political decisions made by Congress or presidential administrations and instead invented new policies defining the nature of tribal governmental powers. . . .
“They’ve pushed the idea that tribes are essentially little more than social clubs, carrying on private conduct that benefits individual members. (Gambling is the exception here, perhaps because Congress expressly recognized the conduct through the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.)”
- O’Connor trampled on Native religious rights (Suzan Shown Harjo, Indian Country Today)
- O’Connor’s tenure filled with key Indian law cases (Indianz.com)
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Ta-Nehisi Coates Leaves Village Voice for Time
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Village Voice writer who served briefly as its Afrocentric media critic, has joined Time magazine assigned to its “Society” section.
Coates, 29, told Journal-isms he felt constrained by the Voice’s “outlook on the world. Ideology was a big problem, pressure to fall in line with the ideology. From the staff, not the management,” he said. He prefers people who challenge what he believes, Coates said.
Still, the writer said he was grateful to the New York alternative weekly. “Where else can I write about having a crush on Condoleezza Rice?” as he did two years ago.
At Time, “obviously, race is the thing that interests me the most,” Coates said, and he wrote for the July 4 issue about the heart drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration specifically for African Americans.
Coates dropped out of Howard University and spent eight or nine years in the alternative press, including Washington’s City Paper. He is the son of W. Paul Coates, director of the Baltimore-based Black Classic Press.
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Short Takes
- “Rafael Lorente, a Washington correspondent for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel who has covered two presidential elections and specializes in U.S.-Cuba relations, is joining the University of Maryland?s journalism school as a doctoral fellow and visiting professor,” the university announced Thursday. He starts Aug. 31.
- The National Association of Minority Media Executives begins its annual conference in Chicago Wednesday, the association announced. Farai Chideya of National Public Radio; Sandy Close, executive director of Pacific News Service/New California Media; Maria Hinojosa, former correspondent at CNN; and Clark Hoyt, Washington bureau chief of Knight Ridder are among those scheduled to participate.
- “I’m not surprised by the president’s lukewarm commitment to reducing African poverty — which is, ironically, more generous than President Clinton’s,” Donna Britt wrote Friday in the Washington Post. “Many who refer to Africa as the ‘motherland’ barely shrugged when Bush denied Mom a decent slice of the foreign-aid pie.”
- “Starting today, WKMG-Local 6 will air Spanish subtitles during its 6 p.m newscast,” Breuse Hickman wrote today in Florida Today, based in Brevard County. “Providing Spanish subtitles during newscasts is a given in Central Florida, which has experienced an increase in its Hispanic population.”
- “So, which image of black folks does more damage to the race?” Gregory Kane asked Wednesday in the Baltimore Sun. “The one of Memin Pinguin, the little guy on the Mexican postage stamp who looks like he was yanked off the screen of a cartoon in the 1930s or 1940s? Or the image of rappers 50 Cent and Tony Yayo on the cover of XXL magazine that its editors proclaimed ‘The Jail Issue’ and dedicated to ‘hip-hop’s incarcerated soldiers’?”
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