Brother: He’s “Proudly the First Black Editor”
Dean P. Baquet, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, will become editor of the paper Aug. 15 upon the retirement then of John S. Carroll, editor for the past five years, it was announced today.
Although Baquet has not been associated with journalist-of-color groups, and the announcement made no mention of race, “he’s proudly the first black editor of a major newspaper in this country,” his younger brother, Terry Baquet, page one editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, told Journal-isms (perhaps in a flush of enthusiasm, given the editorships of Greg Moore at the Denver Post, Michael Days at the Philadelphia Daily News and others).
At a newsroom meeting this morning, L.A. Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson called Baquet “an exceptionally talented, dynamic and well-respected editor who has been essential to the progress of The Times during the last five years,” who is “the very best person” for the job, according to a story by John Spano on the newspaper’s Web site.
“Baquet, 48, told staffers in Los Angeles, and via telephone hookup to the newspaper’s national and foreign bureaus, that he wants them ‘to do great stories,'” the paper said.
“I want the Los Angeles Times to be the best newspaper in America,” Baquet was quoted as saying.
Baquet was recruited by Carroll from the New York Times five years ago. He had been national editor at the New York paper from 1995 to 2000, and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune from 1984 to 1990, sharing a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1988.
Baquet comes from a family of restaurateurs in New Orleans. His father ran Eddie’s on Law Street, Terry Baquet recalled, and their brother Wayne operates Lil’ Dizzy’s on Esplanade Avenue. Of five brothers, two, Terry, 43, and Dean became journalists.
Dean Baquet’s photo and name do not appear in advertisements from the Los Angeles Times in trade publications that showcase its black journalists, and he is rarely seen at black-journalist events, or even at occasions that include him as an honored journalist of color, such as the banquet for Pulitzer winners last year staged by the National Association of Minority Media Executives.
Colleagues said he preferred to be known as Creole. However, Terry Baquet said, “Creole in New Orleans is black. We’re descendants of Haitians. We’re black,” he said, and his brother felt the same. “Creole is not a race.”
The L.A. Times did not respond to a query about Baquet’s racial self-identity today, but the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz said in Thursday’s editions that “Baquet . . . said it was ‘humbling’ for a black journalist who began as a police reporter on the old New Orleans States-Item to take over the country?s second-largest metropolitan daily. But, he said, ‘I like to believe I would have become editor of the L.A. Times once I went to work with John regardless’ of race.” [Added July 22: On Thursday night, Times spokesman David Garcia returned the telephone call, saying Baquet “describes himself as black.”]
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New Roles for Sutton, White, Caldwell at Hampton
Veteran journalists Will Sutton, Earl Caldwell and Jack E. White assume roles in the latest changes at Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communication.
Meanwhile, a fifth professor won’t be back next year, and the No. 2 person in the school is said to be moving to another job at the university.
In changes announced today:
- Sutton, who recently resigned as deputy managing editor at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., will be the Scripps Howard Visiting Professor in the 2005-06 academic school year.
- White, former Time magazine columnist who had been a visiting professor, assumes the Scripps Howard Endowed Chair held by Caldwell.
- Caldwell becomes a writer-in-residence, reporting, he said, to university President William R. Harvey but remaining in the journalism school.
- Doug Smith, a Hampton graduate and former USA Today writer who had been Scripps Howard Visiting Professional since the spring 2004 term, becomes visiting professor of journalism ethics, a position supported by a $120,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
Sutton, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a Hampton graduate, told Journal-isms by e-mail, “I’ll be teaching a couple of sections of a course titled Introduction to Media Writing, along w/others.
“I’ll be teaching another course, too. We’re talking about that, but it’s likely to be a class about visual communication or another about media coverage in a multicultural society. . .
“Also, I’ll be helping the dean w/some administrative matters, research and a new program aimed at helping the best students become the best writers in the nation. I’m real excited about that!”
Caldwell said, “I’ll be doing projects I came here to do,” mentioning a two-semester course called “Emergence of the Black Journalist,” and working on two books, whose subjects will be include the emergence of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. He said Hampton would begin a “black American writers history series” that would “tell stories not told.”
White said he sought the endowed chair because of “the opportunity to teach bright young students, to set them on the right path.” He said he would be teaching an introductory course.
“I get to teach them before they acquire bad habits, and fire them up with a sense of mission,” he said, adding that he was happy to do that at a historically black institution.
To help boost the number of African Americans in the journalism pipeline, Scripps Howard made a $10 million commitment to the Hampton University journalism program, 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 April, armed with reports from journalism students that they felt intimidated by administrators, leaders of the National Association of Black Journalists met with Hampton University officials and faculty in Harvey’s office.
“I have not personally witnessed any of the things complained about by NABJ,” White said, “I’ve witnessed things contrary to what they were charging.” And while there have been complaints about Dean Tony Brown’s management style, White noted such innovations as the “6 a.m. club,” in which as many as 30 students gather at that hour to learn basic skills they missed earlier in their education.
University spokeswoman Yuri Rodgers Milligan confirmed that the No. 2 person in the school, Prof. Margaret Martin, who once chaired the English Department, is taking another assignment.
And a fifth journalism professor, Clarence J. Cotton Jr., has reportedly headed out, for Virginia State University in Petersburg. The chairman of the Department of Languages and Literature, Dr. Freddy Thomas, said he was not allowed to confirm or deny Cotton’s arrival.
Cotton’s departure follows that of Jennifer Wood, Kim LeDuff, Curtis Holsopple and Ralph Nickerson, an unusually high number, considering that the school’s director, Christopher Campbell, and another faculty member, Sean Lyons, left last year. The school has nine permanent faculty members, according to its Web site.
The school faces reaccreditation in the 2005-06 school year. Whether the turnover affects its chances depends on “whether the team suspects pernicious reasons” behind the departures, according to Charles Higginson, assistant to the executive director of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.
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Bush Administration Opposes Reporter Shield Law
“The Bush administration today labeled as ‘bad public policy’ legislation to protect reporters from being jailed when they refuse to reveal their sources,” the Associated Press reported today.
“Deputy Attorney General James Comey canceled his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee just before a hearing on this issue was to commence this morning. But in prepared remarks already submitted to the panel, he said the measure would ‘create serious impediments’ to the Justice Department’s ability ‘to effectively enforce the law and fight terrorism.’
“‘The bill is bad public policy primarily because it would bar the government from obtaining information about media sources ? even in the most urgent of circumstances affecting the public’s health or safety or national security,’ Comey’s prepared remarks said.
“‘If that is so,’ said Sen. Christopher Dodd, ‘then wouldn’t we expect to see great threats to public safety in those states that have shield laws which are at least as protective as the shield laws that we propose?’ Dodd, D-Conn., is a cosponsor of the Senate bill.
“The panel is considering a bill, the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005, sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar and Rep. Mike Pence, both Indiana Republicans, that would protect reporters from being imprisoned by federal courts.”
“Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have such ‘shield’ laws, but there is no set of standards that applies in federal courts. It is the federal court’s power that the Senate panel wants to examine.”
The Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists are among the journalist organizations backing the shield law.
The Senate Judiciary Committee posted the prepared testimony of Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time Inc.; Matthew Cooper, White House correspondent for Time magazine; Floyd Abrams, First Amendment lawyer; William Safire, retired New York Times columnist; Lee Levine, a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Forum on Communications Law and law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, winner of this year’s Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.”
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Jet Magazine Issue Nearly All on Luther Vandross
On July 8, this column said the funeral for singer Luther Vandross was full of “Jet” moments.
This week, the actual Jet magazine’s coverage of Vandross hit the newsstands, and it consumes nearly the entire 66-page issue.
It’s an honor reserved for such notables as lawyer Johnnie Cochran and entertainers Sammy Davis Jr. and Duke Ellington, a Johnson Publications spokeswoman told Journal-isms. Jet publishes more than 900,000 copies, she said.
Jet’s sister publication, Ebony, will have a “major tribute piece” by Joy Bennett Kinnon in its September issue, according to managing editor Lynn Norment.
Remember the newspapers that thought Vandross’ death wasn’t worth the front page, or only a few lines there?
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Short Takes
- “Among the U.S.’s ethnic groups, Asians have long held a low media profile relative to Hispanics and African Americans. But that is quickly changing with the emergence of new Asian cable channels in recent months,” Kevin Downey wrote Tuesday in Medialife Magazine. Included are MTV Desi, AZN and ImaginAsian.
- Karen Quinones Miller, former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter turned novelist, told friends yesterday that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor late last year. “I had brain surgery a couple of weeks ago, and the tumor was removed. I only recently received the news that the doctors were able to remove the whole thing, and that it wasn’t malignant,” she said.
- James Powell has been named president and general manager of WVTM-TV in Birmingham, Ala., NBC Universal announced. Powell was senior vice president of NBC’s Broadcast and Entertainment Operations, based in Burbank, Calif., and is active in the GE African American Forum. NBC Universal is 80 percent owned by General Electric.
- The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation has chosen nine scholarship winners and four fellowship winners, it announced Monday, including these to people of color: Ed Bradley Scholarship to Belia Mayeno Saavedra; Carole Simpson Scholarship to Damon Maloney; Ken Kashiwahara Scholarship to Robert Wu; N. S. Bienstock Fellowship to Dr. Prerna Mona Khanna; Michele Clark Fellowship to Marc Willis; Mike Reynolds Undergraduate Scholarship to Vanessa Alonso; and George Foreman Tribute to Lyndon B. Johnson Scholarship to Hema Mullur.
- Pam Moreland, assistant managing editor for State/National/Foreign at California’s San Jose Mercury News, has been promoted to AME in charge of Features, editors announced to the staff on Friday.
- Alturo Rhymes, segment producer at CNBC, starts Aug. 8 in CBS’ new News Development Program announced last year. He is to be a producer for CBS NewsPath, the network news service for its affiliates and owned-and-operated stations. CBS spokeswoman Linda Mason said the network received 80 to 100 applicants and was not ready to announce the second participant, a reporter. Rhymes was honored by the New York Association of Black Journalists for “On the Line: Poverty In America” and “America’s Economic Divide.”
- In Chad, “One journalist was sentenced to three years in prison and another to three months today for commentaries in the private weekly L’Observateur that criticized President Idriss Déby, according to local sources. The Committee to Protect Journalists deplores the court’s decision and calls on authorities to release the two immediately,” the Committee said on Monday.
- In Zimbabwe, the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe was denied a license to resume publication of the banned Daily News and Daily News on Sunday newspapers after the Media and Information Commission ruled that it had breached sections of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Media Institute of Southern Africa reported on Tuesday.
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