Vote Extends Membership to High School Students
Bryan Monroe, an assistant vice president for news at Knight Ridder and the vice president/print of the National Association of Black Journalists, Friday defeated two opponents to become president of the 4,010-member organization.
Monroe received 245 votes to 201 for Cheryl Smith, executive editor of the Dallas Weekly, radio talk show host and former regional director for the Texas area, and 154 for Mike Woolfolk, anchor and managing editor for WACH-TV in Columbia, S.C., and a former vice president/broadcast, in unofficial returns.
It was almost a rerun of the 2003 election in which Herbert Lowe, Monroe’s partner in the organization for the last two years, bested Smith and Woolfolk, 220 to 166 and 141, respectively.
Members of the organization, meeting in Atlanta, also voted to admit high school students to the association. A constitutional amendment reading, “Student membership shall also include high school students who indicate a strong interest in pursuing a journalism career, ” won the required two-thirds vote, with 409 in favor and 91 against.
In the only other contested race, Mashaun Simon, a student at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston, Ga., bested Walter Gabriel, NABJ chapter president at Louisiana State University, 109 to 38, to become student representative on the board.
Simon told Journal-isms that it had not been decided whether the newly eligible high school students would be among his constituents. NABJ has 1,295 student members. In elections, they may vote only for the student representative, who has a vote at board meetings.
In his acceptance speech, Monroe, whose background is in news design and photography, thanked those who had mentored him and “had my back,” starting with NABJ’s Visual Task Force, and including former NABJ president Al Fitzpatrick, a former executive editor of Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal who Monroe said introduced him to NABJ in 1989.
He was speaking at the organization’s 30th anniversary commemoration, and he said he wanted to build on the foundation laid by his predecessors.
Monroe, who turns 40 on Aug. 22, advised young people to “find someone to look after you,” and “above all, don’t lose your soul. You do not have to assimilate. . . and make some noise, too.”
Three colleagues were enthusiastic about a Monroe tenure.
“Bryan has been an invaluable source of support for my presidency,” said Lowe, according to the student-written nabjconvention.org. “He has a clear understanding of what it takes to be president.”
“Bryan has some innovative ideas, particularly with reference to new media,” treasurer John Yearwood, world editor at the Miami Herald, told Journal-isms. “I look forward to NABJ leading the industry. I’m telling our friends to hold on; it’s going to be a really good ride.”
“It certainly will be an exciting next two years for the organization,” secretary Sarah Glover, a photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, told Journal-isms, because of “Bryan’s passion and ability to work with a varied number of people. He’ll be able to bring different groups of people in the organization together.”
NABJ members cast 796 votes, according to elections chairman John Hanson, including about 300 submitted online before the convention. [Added Aug. 8: Only the 1,900 full members — not associates or students — were eligible to vote for the top offices. Monroe said he calculated that 600 full members voted for president (796 voted overall, but one did not have to vote for all the offices, and students and associates could vote only for their representatives). That worked out a voter turnout of about 31 percent, he said.]
In the uncontested races, incumbent Barbara Ciara, managing editor/anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va., won 481 votes as vice president/broadcast; Ernie Suggs, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, 506 votes as vice president/print; incumbent Glover, 499 votes as secretary; incumbent Yearwood, 496 votes as treasurer and incumbent Melanie Burney, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, 474 votes as parliamentarian.
Errol Cockfield, Newsday reporter, won 74 votes as Region I (Northeast) representative; Elliott Lewis, Maryland-based freelance television reporter, received 72 votes in Region II (Mid-Atlantic); Tammy L. Carter, Orlando Sentinel columnist, 101 in Region III (South); Russell LaCour, copy editor at Oklahoma’s Tulsa World, 43 votes in Region V (Southwest); and Victor Vaughan, assistant managing editor at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, 19 in Region VI (West). No one ran in Region IV (Midwest), and the new president is expected to appoint someone to the post. Cockfield and Carter will be new to the board.
Monroe outlined these priorities on his Web site:
“RETENTION: Focusing on retaining and training young, mid-career and veteran NABJ members through the Media Institute and national convention.
“RESPECT: Using our bully pulpit and access to industry leaders to regularly speak out on issue of concern to blacks and journalists in America, including pointing out those who fail in their mission to increase diversity in the industry.
“RELEVANCY: Making sure NABJ evolves into a truly year-round organization, offering services throughout the year.
“REALITY: Making sure the association remains financially sound and fiscally responsible.”
- NABJ to Vote on Admitting High School Students (Darryl D. Smith, Black College Wire)
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Carole Simpson Leaving ABC Altogether in January
Carole Simpson, eased out of her anchor chair at ABC News two years ago to become an ambassador to schools for the network, said Friday night she was leaving the network altogether in January and was working on a book.
Simpson was among four inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame at the organization’s convention banquet in Atlanta. In an expansive talk made by a veteran broadcaster who said she never heeded producers’ time constraints, Simpson expressed dismay that no person of color or woman had been mentioned as a successor to anchors Dan Rather at CBS, Tom Brokaw at NBC or Ted Koppel at ABC.
“Is it 1970 again? What happened?” she said, reminding the audience that gains can slip away. “I never thought we’d reach the millennium and we’d not see a woman anchor.” Simpson also said she worried about the priorities of African American journalists who followed her into the news business. “Who is going to stand up?” she asked. “I put my job on the line and I’m worried that there aren’t others who will make that stand . . . People are going to bed hungry. We don’t see those stories any more,” she said.
Simpson, 64, announced in October 2003 that she was vacating the weekend anchor desk after 15 years, leaving network prime-time newscasts with no African American anchors.
Under her 2003 contract with ABC, which was to run through 2005, Simpson was to be a senior correspondent for “World News Tonight” and “World News Weekend,” serve as an ambassador to schools on behalf of ABC News, continue to anchor the “Portraits of Pride” segments that run during Black History Month and provide radio commentary for ABC News Radio, ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said at the time.
The Boston Globe’s Suzanne C. Ryan reported in May 2004 that Simpson had visited 19 high schools in 11 cities since the previous February, speaking with 2,000 students. “This may end up being the most important work of my career,” she was quoted as saying.
But Simpson, who also presented a $10,000 check to the NABJ scholarship fund, said Friday night of ABC, “It’s been a wonderful 24 years, but now it’s time to do something else. I will never retire — too much work to be done.” She said she would leave in January and is working on a book. “I have a lot to tell and a lot to say,” she said.
As she has before, Simpson regretted the changing priorities of television news. “It’s not the profession I entered 40 years ago. People were crusading journalists. It wasn’t, ‘which demographic am I going to reach?'”
Holding her 5-month-old grandson, the former anchor told the journalists to “consider the coming generations — tell the stories. Will he have civil liberties? Will he live in a free and democratic society?”
Expanding on her remarks on diversity, she addressed “the white people here. This is for the nation. This is for the country,” she said to applause. “This is not for us.”
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ABC Exec Credits Max Robinson Charges for Change
Controversial charges by Max Robinson, television’s first black regular network anchor, that his employer discriminated against him and other black journalists might have landed the late anchor in hot water back in 1981, but they led to changes at the network, Paul Mason, senior vice president of ABC News, said Friday night.
“Things have changed a lot because of what Max did in one day,” Mason told the National Association of Black Journalists in Atlanta, as it inducted Robinson posthumously into its Hall of Fame.
“I owe my job to Max,” Mason said. Robert C. Maynard “suddenly became a knight at David Brinkley’s roundtable,” referring to the late longtime host of the Sunday morning talk show “This Week With David Brinkley.” “Carole Simpson came to ABC” from NBC.
Robinson was one of three co-anchors on ABC’s “World News Tonight” on Feb. 8, 1981, when he told an audience at Smith College that that the news media were ”a crooked mirror” through which ”white America views itself,” and that ”only by talking about racism, by taking a professional risk, will I take myself out of the mean, racist trap all black Americans find themselves in,” according to a report in the Morning Union of Springfield, Mass., that was picked up nationally.
Robinson, who was based in Chicago, was summoned to New York by ABC News president Roone Arledge to explain those remarks and Robinson’s reported assertions that he and other black journalists were excluded from coverage of the presidential inauguration and the return of hostages from Iran.
Robinson said the remarks were taken out of context, but after a series of personal and professional difficulties attributed by some to the pressure of being a “first,” Robinson eventually was transferred away from the weeknight anchor desk, left the network and died of AIDS in 1988 at age 49.
Still, as NABJ President Herbert Lowe said of himself, the image Robinson presented of an authoritative black man inspired others to want to emulate him.
Also inducted into the Hall of Fame were veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter- Gault, who delivered an homage to anti-lynching icon Ida B. Wells- Barnett, and the late Charles “Teenie” Harris, a legendary Pittsburgh Courier news and society photographer who died in 1998 at age 89.
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Maynard’s Oakland Milestones Voted Top “Moment”
Robert C. Maynard’s becoming editor of the Oakland Tribune in 1979, and then the first African American to own a major metropolitan newspaper, the Tribune, has been voted the top “influential moment” involving black journalists of the last 30 years, the lifetime of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Seventy-five of the association’s founders, past presidents, board members and committee chairs participated in an electronic survey to rank the top journalism events between 1975 and 2005. Predictably, as Shawnee McFarland reported in the NABJ online convention newspaper, the list drew criticisms for omissions and challenges to the rankings.
The story of Maynard’s purchase of the Oakland Tribune, his biography and the founding of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education can be found elsewhere on the Maynard Institute Web site.
Other top moments were, in order:
- The founding of NABJ in 1975.
- CNN’s Bernard Shaw moderating the presidential debate between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis on Oct. 13, 1988.
- Max Robinson, on July 10, 1978, becoming one of three co-anchors of ABC’s new “World News Tonight,” and thus the first black journalist to serve as a nightly network news anchor.
- Robert Johnson‘s launch of Black Entertainment Television, the first black-owned national cable-TV network, in 1980.
Complete list of 30 influential moments
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Les Payne: Beyond Diversity, to Fairness
Les Payne, columnist and New York editor of Newsday and the fourth president of the National Association of Black Journalists, told the association’s chapter presidents Wednesday that after working with hundreds of editors in his 35 years in journalism, he had met only two who were “fair” to black male reporters, “and only one black one.”
“It is the most perplexing observation of my 35 years,” he later told Journal-isms.
By “fair,” Payne explained, he meant that the editors treated black men “equally, comparable to the white reporter in every way. By the manipulation of rewards and punishment, you can influence a reporter’s performance,” he said. Many editors, by their unfair treatment of blacks, “have negatively stunted their potential, disproportionately stunted their work with the stigma of low achievement.”
Payne told the chapter presidents on Wednesday that it was time to “get beyond diversity to fairness. You can be diverse and still not experience fairness. I would like to have us arrive at a point where fairness is your touchstone. Diversity is numbers. Fairness is an attitude.”
Payne said the American Society of Newspaper Editors had asked journalists to name the quality they most admired in their bosses. Fairness ranked fifth overall, but was first with African Americans. That was because “fairness with whites is a given; that is not a given with us,” he told the group.
Although Payne noted that seven editors worked under him in Queens, N.Y., and that three are black, one is Asian and one is Latino, he said that having black editors was no guarantee of fairness. “Not only are they not fair in some instances, but they are worse. I hate to say this about us,” he added, citing as an example the low numbers of blacks in an internship program supervised by an African American editor.
Payne, who is also a founder of the organization, praised outgoing president Herbert Lowe, who works under him at Newsday, as “a great president, without qualification at all,” and said one of the founders’ best achievements was limiting presidents to one term. That gives more people the opportunity to learn leadership skills that they can take back to their news organizations, he said.
The session took place on the first day of a conference that eventually drew 3,210 registrants, according to Tangie Newborn, NABJ’s executive director.
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More Convention Coverage
- Tom Baxter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Parties renew contest for black voters at convention
- Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg Times: Panel fears backsliding on voting rights
- D. Aileen Dodd, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Black journalists’ group debates ‘down low’ coverage
- Courtenay Edelhart, Indianapolis Star: Voting law called Jim Crow-like
- Martin C. Evans, Newsday: Black journalists cite pride, concerns
- Alexander Ford, Black College Wire: From Texas Penitentiary to NABJ’s Student of Year
- Joi Gilliam, Black College Wire: Clinton Sounds Alarm on Obesity Among Black Youth
- Errin Haines, Associated Press: Bill Clinton talks with black journalists
- Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: Can GOP peel off the black vote?
- NABJ student online, print, TV and radio coverage
- Add Seymour Jr., Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Clinton, in Atlanta, defends Voting Rights Act
- Angela Tuck, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Black journalists should have more presence at table
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