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Strike Threat for Asian Journalists

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Airline Workers Could Walk Before Meeting Ends

The Asian American Journalists Association began its convention in Minneapolis Wednesday as a strike threat by Northwest Airlines mechanics loomed as a major inconvenience for planning to use the airline to return home. Minneapolis is a major hub for Northwest.

The White House said Monday that President Bush did not plan to use an option available to him to avert such a strike, the Associated Press reported.

“A 30-day cooling-off period that mediators declared between the nation’s fourth-largest airline and its mechanics ends at 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturday. If no agreement is reached beforehand, a strike could then begin or the airline could lock out the mechanics,” the AP story continued.

AAJA spokesman Keith Kamisugi told Journal-isms that the association was making contingency plans, such as arranging to extend hotel stays in the city and advising attendees on how to rearrange return flights. Some 927 people had preregistered for the convention, many flying via Northwest.

“Northwest Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration say travelers don’t need to worry about their safety if Northwest mechanics go on strike this week,” the AP reported, noting that “Northwest is prepared to deploy about 1,500 replacement mechanics, mainly in the hub cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Detroit.”

However, the story added that, “officials with the union that represents aggrieved mechanics said that the replacement workers brought in by Northwest are unfamiliar with the fleet and will be learning on the job.”

Meanwhile, the convention’s online student paper, AAJA Link, reported that, “For the first time, the nonprofit organization will charge employers for job postings aimed at its members.

“Recruiters will be notified this week of the fee, which will be $75 for a four-week listing. A start date hasn’t been set, but it could be this year, said Rene Astudillo, AAJA executive director,” according to the story by Chris Lau.

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Amy Barnett Out as Teen People’s ME

“Amy Barnett, managing editor of Time Inc.’s Teen People for the past two years, will be leaving her post to work on magazine development as well as an advice book for young adults, Time Inc. announced today,” Stephanie D. Smith reported for Mediaweek today.

“Insiders say Barnett, who will report to corporate editor Isolde Motley, may be developing another teen magazine.

“Succeeding Barnett will be Teen People vet Lori Majewski, currently executive editor of Wenner Media’s Us Weekly. . .

“Barnett had been recruited from Honey magazine to reenergize Teen People, though she did so with mixed results. Teen People’s paid circulation for 2005’s first half rose 2.5 percent to 1.55 million, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations; single-copy sales fell 15.8 percent. Rival Hearst Magazines’ Seventeen saw paid circ fall 5.3 percent to 2 million for the same period; newsstand sales grew 4.5 percent.

“Barnett’s move comes less than a month after executive editor Angela Burt Murray left Teen People to become the editor in chief of Essence, also under the Time Inc. umbrella.”

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“When Someone Dies, We Don’t Have an Obituary”

The Wall Street Journal’s print edition covered the Aug. 8 death of publishing pioneer John H. Johnson with just one line because “as a policy, we don’t have an obituary” when someone dies, Dow Jones Co. spokesman Robert H. Christie told Journal-isms today.

However, he said, “there are special circumstances,” particularly when the person led a publicly traded company, when the newspaper will examine the subject’s legacy and policies. For example, Christie said, if media czar Rupert Murdoch died, the Journal’s story would be “how is it going to affect News Corp.”

Businessman Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines and the first African-American to be named to the Forbes 400, is credited not only with paving the way for today’s crop of magazines geared toward African Americans, but with single-handedly creating the black consumer market. He had to demonstrate to Madison Avenue that such a market existed.

Christie added that while the Journal did not produce a story on Johnson’s legacy and policies, an Associated Press obituary ran on the paper’s Web site, where the news operation has more space. The print edition had a one-sentence mention at the bottom of the front-page daily “What’s News World-Wide” column.

Ironically, Jon Friedman, in his CBS MarketWatch column today headlined “Media ignores death of a pioneer,” speculated “Perhaps Johnson was overlooked because the media — which lamentably love to compartmentalize everything — categorized him as a publisher — a businessman.”

Writing in the Chicago Tribune today, columnist Phil Rosenthal did just the kind of legacy-and-policies article on Johnson that Christie said might be done on someone like Murdoch.

The story quoted George E. Curry, editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, among others, on Johnson’s magazines. “There are a lot of ways that they can exploit their brand and they have not done that,” Curry said.

“Now that Mr. Johnson is no longer around, they can do that, increase their revenue stream and still keep it family-owned.”

Meanwhile, ABC News’ “World News Tonight,” which had not reported on Johnson’s death, instead devoting the Aug. 8 broadcast to anchor Peter Jennings‘ Sunday death and moving on to other news after that, caught up with the news on Monday. Anchor Charles Gibson called Johnson “one of the most influential black Americans of his time” and noted his funeral that day.

Over the weekend, “On the Media,” the weekly public radio show on media criticism, did separate pieces on Jennings and Johnson, with the Johnson segment featuring Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, Essence Magazine founder Edward Lewis, and journalism professors Pamela Newkirk, Jannette Dates and Phillip Dixon.

The “Reliable Sources” media show on CNN, however, devoted its entire show to Jennings and ignored Johnson.

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Two Major Deaths at Once? It Happens

One reason given by some for the undercoverage of John H. Johnson’s death was that it happened in close proximity to the death of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, though for many outlets, Jennings’ death Sunday night came during a different news cycle than Johnson’s passing on Monday.

It wasn’t the first time the news media have had to cover two prominent figures dying closely together. Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and ‘Muppets’ creator Jim Henson both died on May 16, 1990. With those deaths, however, the media managed to give both prominence.

“It was a tough call, as they say, which was reflected in the way some in the media featured Davis more prominently than Henson, others favored Henson and still others gave them equal billing,” Thomas Collins wrote the following Sunday in Newsday.

“Henson, it was argued at news meetings, spoke to a generation raised on Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, and had educated millions of youngsters through his ‘Sesame Street’ characters. Besides, the hard fact was that Davis’ death was not unexpected, whereas Henson’s came as a shock; thus it was thought by some to have more news value.

“On the other hand, Davis was a legend, a superb and amazingly versatile performer whose 60-year career was seen as all the more significant because of the obstacles he had surmounted as a black entertainer.”

“. . . Some local television news programs led off their evening reports with Henson or twinned out both figures, a pattern repeated by the networks. ABC’s ‘World News Tonight’ gave the first few minutes over to Henson, followed by the Davis obit. CBS ‘teased’ with a reference to Davis but then put Henson’s obituary at the top of the program, signing off with Dan Rather doing a complete rundown on Davis’ life,” Collins continued.

“‘NBC Nightly News’ opened with a still shot of Henson but referred to both entertainers in its introduction. It ran the Henson obit first, followed by Davis.”

Not all media outlets managed the balance. The Chicago Tribune printed this from reader Theodore Naron:

“Jim Henson’s death on page 1 but Sammy Davis Jr.’s on page 9 of Section 2? The surprise of the former is the only possible justification. By every other criterion, it was insultingly bad news judgment. Perhaps you were guided in your decision by the demographics of your readership,” he wrote.

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Fired by Johnson but Teaching at His Namesake

The Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds, former columnist for USA Today and onetime journalist with the Chicago Tribune and Ebony magazine, will be teaching a course in journalism and religion at Howard University, she told Journal-isms.

“It is interesting and ironic that I will be teaching religion at the John H. Johnson school of communications,” she said via e-mail. “Johnson has the distinction of firing me first (there would be a long line of others) in 1969, after about eight months as an assistant editor of Ebony. But that was a pretty lengthy career there in contrast to some others. Nevertheless he personally pushed for me to become a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and he allowed friends to have a party for me when I left to move to Washington.

“So when I walk into the building at Howard, our relationship is always on my mind. I will be teaching Contemporary Issues: The Role of Faith and Spirituality in American Journalism and Mass Media. The opportunity allows me not only to teach but to mentor as an ordained minister, which brings together my two loves: religion and journalism. This is a one of the first major efforts to prepare religion journalists at a black college.”

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Nebraska an Eye-Opener for Native J-Student

For California’s Terria Smith, writing in the student newspaper of the just-ended Native American Journalists Association convention, going to meeting in Lincoln, Neb., was fun, but there were a few eye-opening incidents, including an encounter at a karaoke bar.

“For the first time in my young life I was faced with going someplace where nearly everyone besides me was white,” she wrote. “All of a sudden we were hit by a drive-by slur aimed right at someone’s lifestyle choice. The slur knocked the wind out of me. It was a total buzz-kill.”

“You might be thinking, ‘Doesn’t discrimination exist in California?’ Of course it does,” Smith wrote in the Native Voice.

“California is the home of the Los Angeles Police Department. I have no problem taking a slur from them and I don’t get riled up or raise a fuss. I just sit in my car, with my hands on the steering wheel and hope someone with a camera is nearby in case the cops got ready for some good ol’ brutality. I guess I’ve grown used to that sort of institutional discrimination. Other than that, most of the discrimination I face in California is because people don’t like my outfits, my politics, the type of car I drive or my revolutionarily superficial ideas (or because they believe what the governor says about natives).

“But here, in Lincoln, I learned something I wasn’t expecting to be taught. I learned prejudice is everywhere, in different shapes and forms. I learned it can be scary and you must be brave to rise above. I will be brave and I will leave my state again, because hate cannot keep me from bettering myself or informing my people. Am I ready for a NAJA experience in Tulsa next summer? You bet.”

Kim Baca, interim executive director of the association, said 18 students participated in the college Student Project, which consists of print, TV, radio and online.

“There were three editions of the paper from the college students, and we had one paper from the high school students. We had 9 students participate in Project Phoenix, our high school project,” she told Journal-isms.

“Our membership is nearly 600, which consists of about 50 percent students.” Convention attendance was about 250 and the registration was about 230.

T.D. Jakes, Black Press Spar Over Advertising

“The nation’s premier preacher, Bishop T.D. Jakes, reacted swiftly and sternly to a published report where the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) censured him for not advertising with Atlanta’s Black Press prior to his hugely successful Mega-Fest 2005, one of the largest religious conferences ever,” Maynard Eaton wrote in the Aug. 11-17 issue of the Atlanta Voice.

“Every time I don’t spend money now I am a bad guy?” Jakes is quoted as saying. “You don’t resolve a business conflict with ‘yellow’ journalism.”

In an earlier Atlanta Voice story by Eaton, “which was subsequently re-printed in dozens of Black-owned papers across the country – NNPA President John Smith, Sr. lamented that much to his chagrin not one single dime was spent with Atlanta’s Black press by Jakes’ Mega Fest extravaganza that drew some 150,000 people to Atlanta,” Eaton’s story continued.

“All they had to do was talk to Ofield” Dukes, his public relations person, “and it would have been fine. I just resented the fact that the way Black people in America do business is done in the press and not in person,” Jakes was quoted as saying.

“Jakes now says, ‘I’ve discussed this with NNPA President John Smith, and I’ve concluded that the whole matter is largely a misunderstanding,” the latest article concluded.

Meanwhile, Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, wondered aloud about Jakes’ explanation at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Atlanta about the need for megachurches. Jakes’ Potter’s House congregation in Dallas boasts more than 30,000 members.

Robinson noted that a questioner said she lived in Dallas and regularly attended services at Potter’s House, but was having her first conversation with Jakes at the Atlanta convention.

GM Says Emery King Flap Not Factor in Exit

Joe Berwanger has resigned as VP and general manager of WDIV-TV, Post-Newsweek’s NBC affiliate in Detroit, as Michele Greppi reported Tuesday in Television Week, but Berwanger told Journal-isms that the community uproar over his firing of anchor Emery King in March had nothing to do with his decision.

Fifteen weeks after the firing, the station and King reached an agreement under which King would rejoin the operation not as an employee, but as a producer and host of documentary specials and as host of town hall meetings.

“Emery had nothing to do with the decision,” to step down, Berwanger said, “although I am happy about his documentary ideas. We hope to have the first one on the air before too long.

“This idea was born from my wife and me talking about our future plans, now that we are recent empty nesters. We gave it a lot of thought, took a hard look at our finances, and decided to go for freedom while we figured out the future . . . or, at the very least, the next step! I am truly excited about the possibilities looking ahead. In fact, the staff here informed me that the broad smile on my face the past two days is fast becoming an annoyance!”

Short Takes

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