Legal Climate Cited in Magazine Name Change
The magazine Black Issues in Higher Education is removing the word “black” from its name and broadening its focus, partly because public colleges who advertise in it are being told by their counsels that it is legally risky to help support a racially identified publication, Frank L. Matthews, the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief, told Journal-isms.
The new name is “Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.”
“The court has struck down race” as a factor allowed to be used in many cases involving public dollars, “and it is exceedingly difficult to attract the support we need to survive,” Matthews said on Wednesday. “It has resulted in a significant decline” in advertising, at least 70 percent of which comes from public dollars, he said.
“If colleges and universities are queasy about the legality of doing business with us, then they opt not to do it — especially the ones who didn’t want to do it in the first place,” he said.
Black Issues, founded in 1984 and based in Fairfax, Va., publishes every other Thursday and has an unaudited, controlled circulation of about 14,000, Matthews said. Many of the ads are for faculty positions.
The new “Diverse,” which launches Aug. 25, is expected to have a circulation of 20,000. It will augment its staff of a dozen writers and editors by adding four more editors and using “a full complement” of Hispanics, South Asians, Asian Americans and Native Americans as free-lancers, Matthews said.
But, Matthews added, “our black readers need to know there will be no compromise on the rigor of our reporting on issues that affect African Americans. We are not firing any black staff members.”
In addition to the “legal and regulatory” climate, Matthews cited “the demographic environment” as reason for the change, which was inadvertently disclosed Thursday by Matthews’ partner, Black Issues president William E. Cox, at a symposium for college administrators sponsored by Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Cox said, “people might find bold or quite innovative” the idea to change the magazine’s name, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. “Or you might take me as crazy as hell,” according to reporter Peter Schmidt.
Matthews told Journal-isms today that “our sales team reports that enthusiasm for the change is very strong among college and university people who form our core advertising base. All of our advertisers have either renewed, extended or expanded their schedules.”
At two universities, at least, the name change was viewed as unnecessary.
“When we do searches [for talent], we encourage people to advertise in Black Issues and similar publications, because we are highly interested in diverse pools when we are hiring staff,” Carol S. Wood, assistant vice president for university relations at the University of Virginia, told Journal-isms. “There are certain publications in higher education that you read — the Chronicle of Higher Education, Black Issues,” Wood said.
“For several years, we have placed advertisements in Black Issues in Higher Education, and other publications, for the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the University of California,” said spokesman Brad Hayward of that university, which has been the focus of affirmative action battles.
“This is a program that offers outstanding Ph.D. recipients a postdoctoral fellowship at UC, giving special consideration ‘to candidates whose record of scholarship and service will contribute to the diversity of the academic community’ and to applicants who ‘have demonstrated significant academic achievement by overcoming barriers such as economic, social, or educational disadvantage.’ (Race and ethnicity of applicants are not considered.)
“We continue to place these advertisements in Black Issues, and the next such ad is scheduled to appear in September. There has been no change at UC. It is important to note that we also place these advertisements in other publications with broad readerships, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
- Pressure forces change in program for Latino journalists (March 17, 2004)
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Baquet Threatened to Quit L.A. Times Over Funds
Dean Baquet’s promotion Wednesday to editor and executive vice president of the Los Angeles Times “followed days of sometimes tense negotiations” involving Baquet, Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and a corporate executive in Chicago,” James Rainey wrote Thursday in that newspaper, as Baquet was named the first black editor of a daily newspaper with a circulation as hefty as the Times’ 1 million.
“As recently as two weeks ago, Baquet threatened to leave the newspaper, according to several Times staffers who spoke to him,” Rainey’s story continued. “He told some of his top editors that a meeting with Tribune managers before the Fourth of July weekend had left him wondering whether he would have the freedom, and funds, needed to maintain the paper’s worldwide news operation.
“Baquet eventually got the reassurances he wanted from the Times’ corporate parent, said some of his close associates.
“‘Have I had disagreements with Chicago and others about the paper? Sure,’ Baquet said in his office Wednesday. ‘But obviously I feel like I am in sync enough with the people who own the joint’ to have accepted the editor’s job,” Rainey wrote.
In the New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye reported Thursday that, “Mr. Baquet went into marathon negotiations with Tribune in late June over his future. Another Los Angeles editor said that Mr. Baquet also talked with other newspapers about executive positions.
“Mr. Baquet said the discussions went beyond budgets to his plans for the paper, which include initiating more investigative projects, providing more hard-hitting coverage of California, and giving writers more latitude to write in their own voices. He said that perhaps 70 percent of what he wanted to accomplish could be done without more money.”
In the L.A. Weekly Thursday, Nikki Finke wrote, “Clearly it’s a coup for the LAT to have one of the most prominent African-American media members now leading its newsroom, especially since the paper has a shameful history of ignoring black and other minority issues.”
But staffers of color said that while Baquet had enticed a number of white men from the New York Times, the paper had not hired a significant number of Latino, black or Asian reporters or editors on Baquet’s watch as managing editor. It is also true that among the paper’s Pulitzers was this year’s for public service, exposing deadly medical problems and racial injustice at King/Drew hospital, which predominantly serves people of color.
“I’d like the paper to have more of a sense of California,” Baquet said in a piece by Rachel Smolkin in the American Journalism Review. “We have as strong a sense of place here as any paper in America. We’re in the center of Hollywood. We’re in a place that inspires books and movies. One of the most important things I can do for the paper is to have California show more in the pages of the paper, have Los Angeles have more of a place in the paper.”
“That means improving entertainment and metro coverage and evoking a sense of place in both series — such as a recent piece on a young female boxer–and daily stories.”
Overall weekday circulation for the Times has dropped from 1,018,000 in 2000 to 907,997. The paper sells 1,253,849 copies on Sundays, according to the Baltimore Sun.
- Passion for Reporting News Drives Baquet as an Editor (Stephanie Simon, Los Angeles Times)
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New Orleans School Produced Top Black Journalists
Two journalists in the news — Dean Baquet, just named editor at the Los Angeles Times, and Will Sutton, newly named as a visiting professor at Hampton University — along with their brothers, Terry Baquet of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Gavin Sutton of ABC Radio — all attended a school in New Orleans that another graduate, Warren Brown of the Washington Post, has described as “the top black Catholic high school for males in the South.”
St. Augustine High School, founded in 1951, also graduated Warren Bell, former news director at New Orleans’ WYLD radio and now spokesman for Xavier University of Louisiana.
In fact, Jonathan Louis of St. Augustine told Journal-isms today, graduates also include 14 sitting judges, the New Orleans police chief, its civil sheriff and its district attorney.
Louis, who graduated in 1973 with Will Sutton, said part of the reason for the school’s success in producing those journalists had to do with the times — the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was a time of dismantling segregation, and pursuing such fields as law and journalism was inspired by “the whole idea of setting the facts straight.” When students turned 18, he said, the principal would take them to register to vote — an “unprecedented” act, according to Louis. Having strong English instruction didn’t hurt either, he said.
Yet Louis, who is executive director for institutional advancement and alumni relations, said that “the challenges that face our youth today are greater than for the guys who came before. The problem isn’t as obvious as it was back then,” when segregation was the barrier. “You don’t have the same focus from parents that you had 15 years ago. A lot of people in our community take whatever [gains] there are for granted.”
St. Aug’s, as it is known, now has 950 students and serves grades 7 through 12. It is setting up a business and technical center, with a focus on entrepreneurship, in partnership with Louisiana State University; on technology, in partnership with the University of New Orleans, and on communications.
In the technology component, Louis said, some students will spend a semester at the well-regarded Limerick School of Technology in Ireland to help narrow the “digital divide” among the races. The communications portion includes an emphasis on switching from street talk among peers to speaking professionally at school, a language lab, and hopes for a television studio, for which the school is still seeking funding.
And of course, Louis said, “a couple of journalism courses.”
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Hannah Allam Leaving Baghdad for Cairo
“Hannah Allam, the 27-year-old Knight Ridder Baghdad bureau chief who has received praise for building that chain’s largest foreign bureau into a major force for Iraq War coverage, plans to leave the country in September after more than two years there,” Joe Strupp reported Tuesday for Editor & Publisher.
“Her next stop will be Cairo, where she will open a new Knight Ridder bureau in January 2006 and cover news throughout the Middle East,” the story continued.
“I’m going to have to start again from scratch in Cairo, it is my dream job definitely,” Allam, who was the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2004 Journalist of the Year, was quoted as telling E&P via cell phone. “Iraq will still have a bureau and Jerusalem will have one and we will all cover it all.”
“Clark Hoyt, Knight Ridder’s Washington editor, confirmed the reassignment, saying ‘Hannah has done a spectacular job and she will be moving to Cairo so she can apply those great reporting skills to much of the rest of the Middle East.’ He said a successor will be named, but has yet to be chosen,” Strupp wrote.
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ESPN Touts Wiley with Docu, Book, NABJ Reception
Author and sports columnist Ralph Wiley died in June 2004 but ESPN is gearing up the tributes for him now.
An ESPN television documentary, “Classic Wiley,” has been running on the ESPN Classic channel; a book by the same name, with a foreward by Bob Costas and introduction by Michael Wilbon, was released in June when the special premiered, and ESPN plans a tribute to Wiley during the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta. That tribute is scheduled during a reception on Thursday, Aug. 4, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Westin Hotel.
The book “Classic Wiley: A Lifetime of Punchers, Players, Punks & Prophets,” a collection of Wiley columns edited by Michael Solomon of ESPN Books, had a print run of 10,000, said spokeswoman Ellie Seifert.
In Sports Illustrated, where Wiley worked for nine years, Charles Hirshberg wrote, “Wiley’s greatest gift was his ability to combine his vast knowledge of sports with his discerning, unpredictable views on major social issues. . . . For instance, Wiley ferociously defended a college basketball player’s right to turn her back on the American flag during the national anthem because he believed in ‘freedom, tolerance, not cloth flags.’ Too often, he wrote, fans wanted athletes to behave like cattle . . . [to] just give their milk and moo and shut up and not have their own feelings.'”
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Short Takes
- Journal-isms is the subject of “Five Minutes with Richard Prince,” a q-and-a with Jeanne Fox-Alston, vice president for diversity of the Newspaper Association of America, the trade organization for newspaper publishers. It appears on the NAA Web site.
- While conservatives call Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. an “all-star,” “and praise Bush for keeping his promise to nominate someone in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, many from the liberal side of the political spectrum, including African Americans, were left with more questions than answers,” Joe Davidson wrote Thursday on BET.com.
- “Linda Williams has a new job ? deputy managing editor for local news,” the Raleigh News & Observer’s managing editor, John Drescher, told his staff last month. In the newly created job, the former metro editor rises to the rank held by former deputy managing editor Will Sutton, who resigned. Williams plans to edit the NABJ Monitor, the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention newspaper, for the third year next month, she told Journal-isms.
- Morning anchor Elizabeth Bermudez was to leave San Francisco’s KGO-TV today to become a full-time mom, and last week Thuy Vu resigned as co-anchor of the Sunday morning show, news director Kevin Keeshan told Journal-isms Thursday. “There is an open door to both to come back. I have two working mothers who job share in the East Bay area, another on a three-day week. We’ve had 14 babies in 3 1/2 years,” he said.
- Already, 25 papers have agreed to syndicate Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post op-ed column, including dailies in San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix, Harry Jaffe reported today in the Washingtonian magazine. The column began in February.
- A number of black journalists are participating Saturday in the Harlem Book Fair. The event is to be televised live on C-SPAN.
- “You can count me as one of the folks who is happy to see the New York Times” Co. produce a “black” newspaper, executive editor Roland S. Martin wrote today in the Chicago Defender. “The other black newspaper owners are responding defensively to the move. For me, I’m ready to go on the offense.”
- “With the launch of the online news channel www.andnetwork.com on September 01, 2005; internet users in Africa and around the world will now be able to access up-to-date news from the continent much faster, on a second by second basis,” a news release announces under the headline, “Africa Launches Africa’s Answer to CNN.”
- “Lee Gaither has left his position as TV One evp [executive vice president], programming/production. He is consulting for the net[work], while pres Johnathan Rodgers searches for a replacement. Rodgers wants someone who will work out of the net’s East Coast office, while Gaither wants to stay in L.A.,” CableFAX Daily reported on Tuesday.
- “WWE announced Thursday that its controversial Arab-American character Muhammad Hassan is unlikely to return after a final pro wrestling pay-per-view appearance, in part due to concerns from UPN,” Christopher Lisotta reported Thursday in Television Week.
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