Maynard Institute archives

Hurricane!

by richard0560

Journalists Try to Do Jobs Yet Avoid Danger

When Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast at daybreak today with what the Associated Press called “shrieking, 145-mph winds and blinding rain, submerging entire neighborhoods up to the rooflines in New Orleans, hurling boats onto land and sending water pouring into Mississippi’s strip of beachfront casinos,” journalists had to figure out how to both do their jobs and avoid danger.

“The side of the Times-Picayune building facing the Pontchartrain Expressway has taken enough damage to cause some extra discomfort among those sheltered here,” the paper reported at 8:24 a.m. in a running blog on its Web site. “Windows blown out in the third floor executive suite have [led] to flooding through the ceiling into the company cafeteria – Chez Picayune.”

At midday, Metro columnist Lolis Eric Elie e-mailed to Journal-isms: “I evacuated to my grandmother’s home town near Baton Rouge. It’s called Maringouin. I’ll probably be filing some bits and pieces here. Don’t know if I have a house to go back to. But I’m doing fine.”

He had filed a column that ran on the paper’s Web site this morning, “N.O. has no monopoly on trouble,” about previous floods and preparing for the hurricane. “Things will be better here, if we can only make it through Hurricane Katrina,” he concluded.

Others remained in the newsroom to put out the news report.

“At least six New Orleans stations (WWL, WDSU, WPMI, WLOK, WKRG and WJTV) are streaming live coverage, according to TV industry blog Lostremote.com, but video is spotty due to power outages across the region,” Allison Romano wrote today in Broadcasting and Cable.

“Several local stations, including KHOU and WPMI, are blogging about the storm. One posting on Lost Remote says that WLOX is being hit hard, with parts of its roof blown off and Internet access down.

“As Katrina careened toward New Orleans on Sunday night, many reporters moved inland, to Baton Rouge and points north, and east to Biloxi, Miss., and Mobile, Ala., all of which are feeling the 100+ mile-an-hour winds, too.”

Among those who left for Baton Rouge were anchor Michael Hill of WGNO-TV, an ABC affiliate, along with two reporters, a meteorologist and the WGNO news director, who were all at Baton Rouge’s ABC affiliate, WBRZ-TV. Hill was anchoring there.

Bryan Monroe, assistant vice president/news at Knight Ridder’s corporate offices in San Jose, Calif., and president of the National Association of Black Journalists, was heading to Biloxi last night to assist Mississippi’s Biloxi Sun-Herald, a Knight Ridder paper.

Others on the Knight-Ridder team were to be Mike McQueen and Nick Oza from the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph; Gary Reyes of the San Jose Mercury News; David Ovalle of the Miami Herald and Khampa Bouaphanh of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas.

They “are in Montgomery, Ala., ready to move in to help. They are also rounding up generators and chainsaws,” the Sun Herald reported today on its Web site. “The building is without power and phone service, and cell phone service is out,” but water did not reach the building, the story said.

[Added Aug. 30: In a note early today to NABJ members, Monroe said he had arrived late Monday in Biloxi. “While New Orleans has been getting most of the early attention, let me tell you that the real story is here in South Mississippi, which absorbed the full force of Katrina on Monday morning as it veered east of New Orleans,” he said. “The devastation is overwhelming. Homes are gone, roads destroyed, infrastructure in shambles. At least three staff members from the paper here have lost their homes. The publisher is trapped in his and can’t get out.”]

The hurricane also affected the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., though not as seriously. “At this point (12:30 p.m.), we’re getting some wind and a lot of rain,” Managing Editor Don Hudson told Journal-isms. “We expect sustained winds of up to 65 mph in our area by this evening. We have reporters stationed in McComb, Meridian and Ocean Springs. They’re having trouble simply calling in. Our phone lines are down at the paper.”

He added that power was out in Hattiesburg, Miss., “but the paper is running.”

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Exec Denies N.Y. Times Co. Plans “Black” Papers

The Gainesville Guardian, the weekly paper published by Florida’s Gainesville Sun that debuted Thursday, is not part of a New York Times Co. plan to publish newspapers aimed at black communities, according to Steve Ainsley, president and chief operating officer of the New York Times Co. Regional Media Group.

Charlotte Roy, who guided the paper until she was fired last week, at first described the Guardian as “the first New York Times-owned black newspaper,” but amid criticism from the black press, the Times Co. backed away from that description.

Sun Publisher James E. Doughton has since described the Guardian as “a community publication designed to serve both east Gainesville and the African-American community.”

“At all of our markets” under his jurisdiction, Ainsley told Journal-isms Friday, “we let our publishers and our management teams determine how they can best reach them. In terms of mandates from on high, we don’t do that. Jim [Doughton] called me and made me aware of his decision and gave me the rationale behind it,” he said of the determination to publish the Guardian.

Likewise, he said, the decision to let Roy go was “an autonomous local decision.” The Regional Media Group includes the Times Co.’s 15 newspapers in California and the South.

Elinor Tatum, publisher of the New York Amsterdam News, told Journal-isms she had mentioned her opposition to the Guardian in June at one of her regularly scheduled luncheons with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Co., but she said he did not seem aware of the project then.

Meanwhile, Doughton said today of the new weekly: “The racks were totally empty and you couldn’t find a copy in town after about Friday,” according to reports from his staff. Despite the first-week success, Doughton said he did not plan to increase the press run of 10,000.

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Columnists of Color Find More Fodder in Iraq

The dip in President Bush’s approval ratings—down to 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll —and the antiwar protest by Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas, have given columnists of color new reasons to write about Iraq.

“The Bee’s record the last several months is decidedly mixed,” public editor Armando Acuña wrote Sunday in California’s Sacramento Bee. “It is one of missed opportunities locally and of being on autopilot about developments in Iraq, resulting in a failure to provide a multi-dimensional view that is seen more often in other large newspapers.

“For some time, the paper’s stories from Iraq have been overwhelmingly about the internal politics of drafting an Iraqi constitution and about the casualty count. . . . My frustration, and that of a sizeable number of readers, is that the paper seldom puts a human face on the war.”

Other perspectives:

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Papers Mark 50th Anniversary of Emmett Till Murder

Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi after he allegedly whistled at a white woman.

In the Chicago Tribune, columnist Dawn Turner Trice has been accompanying 30 Chicago students who are African American, Hispanic, white, Asian American and Arab American, part of a summer internship program.

“They spent the last six weeks working for local politicians while studying race and segregation in Chicago, with a special emphasis on the 14-year-old Chicago boy whose death helped spark the civil rights movement,” Trice wrote, and on Sunday the group took part in a church service in Ruleville, Miss., about 25 miles west of the general store where the alleged whistling took place.

“On Saturday, as the tour bus made its way across the flatlands of the Delta to the Sumner courthouse, some of the students said they felt they had been plopped down in a different world and a different era,” Trice wrote today.

“When the summer began, some of the 16- to 18-year-olds had never heard of Till,” she said Sunday in a column from Money, Miss.

In the rival Chicago Sun-Times, four of the students are keeping journals and sharing them with readers.

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Hispanic Journalist-Activist Imprisoned in Fla.

The chairman of a Hispanic advisory board in Fort Myers, Fla., is being criticized for requesting a federal investigation into the imprisonment of local Hispanic journalist Victor Valdes.

“Valdes is the editor of the Spanish-language newspaper Las Naciones and a self-described community activist who was imprisoned for 20 months for perjuring himself during a lawsuit against Collier Sheriff Don Hunter,” David Plazas wrote in the Fort Myers News-Press on Friday.

“Valdes proclaims his innocence and said he was the target of the sheriff’s office for speaking out against polic[e] brutality.”

County Commission Chairman Fred Coyle criticized a letter written by board chairman Ernesto Labrador on June 2 requesting the investigation because the commission had not approved the letter, Plazas wrote.

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Writer Asks Where Are Serious Black Magazines

After reading the tributes to Ebony and Jet publisher John H. Johnson, “I felt, at least fleetingly, a modicum of guilt for having abandoned Ebony, the magazine that had been a comforting if sporadic presence in my family’s home since childhood,” Amy Alexander wrote Sunday in the Washington Post. “At the same time, in purely pragmatic terms, the 42-year-old me has little use for feature stories about celebrities (black or otherwise), or service stories instructing me on a range of lifestyle subjects (two staples of Ebony and its younger, more woman-focused counterpart, Essence).

“Meanwhile, the Harper’s on my coffee table has an eye-opening story by Mark Crispin Miller about the fishy problems at Ohio polling places during the last presidential election. Many of the precincts where suspicious activity occurred served primarily black voters. And I’m left wondering whether a black-oriented magazine with top-notch investigative reporters might have approached the story differently, with a stronger emphasis on the troubled history of American blacks and voting rights. Which leads me to wonder why black-oriented magazines are not filling in the gap.

“. . . Of course, a stalwart like the Crisis, published by the NAACP and once famously edited by W.E.B. DuBois, does offer sober examinations of some of the subjects that interest me, including a recent issue devoted to the looming expiration of parts of the Voting Rights Act. Yet the Crisis, as Emerge did, suffers from spotty resources that limit its ability to offer consistently smart, in-depth coverage of politics, education and culture.”

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Columbus, Ohio, Gets Black Anchor Team

WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio, will have a black anchor team when Jerry Revish and Angela Pace anchor “10TV Eyewitness News” at 6 p.m. the station announced Friday.

Revish will anchor the news at 5 p.m. and 5:30 with Andrea Cambern until a permanent anchor is found, and all three — Cambern, Pace and Revish — will be on “10TV Nightbeat” at 11 p.m.

The new team was chosen because longtime anchor Dave Kaylor retired as anchor on Aug. 18, the station said.

Revish started his 33-year career in journalism in 1972 as a radio news reporter at WBBW-AM in Youngstown. Pace already co-anchors the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts.

Jim Vance and Sue Simmons are believed to have become the first black co-anchors nationwide when they co-anchored the weeknight news on WRC-TV in Washington in 1979.

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Va. Minister Tipped AP to Pat Robertson Story

“In Virginia Beach a religious broadcaster spewed terrorism from his studio,” Wil LaVeist, columnist for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., wrote Sunday.

“In Gloucester a minister sitting at his computer read it online and was shocked.

“And had not the Rev. Fred Carter contacted the Associated Press immediately, Pat Robertson‘s outrageous and sinful call for the assassination of Venezuela’s president may have remained a buried news item.

“Carter was surfing the Web Monday on vheadline.com, Venezuela’s Electronic News, where he read: ‘ “Christian” Robertson calls for assassination of Venezuela’s President Chavez.’ Robertson’s ‘The 700 Club’ had aired hours earlier.

“‘I said, “Well, this has got to be news,” so I clicked on it,’ said Carter, pastor of Shepherdsville Baptist Church. ‘It had the whole transcript of what he said. I Googled everybody and nobody had it.’

“He called the AP’s Richmond bureau.

“Dena Potter, the night supervisor, said she answered Carter’s call around 6 p.m. He faxed her the transcript and she tried to track down a Christian Broadcasting Network spokesperson for confirmation and a response. With no luck after three hours, she got approval from AP’s national office and posted the brief story to the wire service about 10 p.m.

“‘I don’t know if we would’ve found out about it personally,’ Potter said. ‘Maybe the local paper there may have. It’s always special (and rare) when a normal everyday person tips us off to a big story like that.'”

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Short Takes

  • The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation reports that of 710 regular series roles on broadcast television this fall, 16 are characters who are gay, lesbian or bisexual. The study also finds that 76 percent of all characters are white, while African Americans represent 14 percent, Latinos 6 percent and Asians and Pacific Islanders 3 percent. The study cites reality TV as most inclusive and representative of the gay community, according to TV Week.
  • Bennie Ivory, executive editor and vice president/news of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, and Ward Bushee, editor and vice president/news of the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, are the first two winners of a new Signet Award for Gannett executives who have been cited 10 times as President’s Ring winners, Phil Currie, Gannett Co. senior vice president/news, told colleagues. Ivory won his first President’s Ring in 1994 and his 10th for work in 2004. He was Editor of the Year in 1994 while at Florida Today in Brevard.
  • “For Jeanne Mariani-Belding, editorial and opinion editor at The Honolulu Advertiser, providing relevant news coverage for diverse Asian-American cultures means this: ‘You have to be engaged in the community,'” George Benge, Gannett news executive, wrote to Gannett employees in a roundup of Gannett participation in the Asian American Journalists Association convention. Mariani-Belding is AAJA’s new vice president-print.
  • Kansas City Star columnist Steve Penn discussed Dee Griffin, Carlton Houston and Gerald Jordan this month as examples of black journalists who continued to prosper after leaving Kansas City.
  • Columnist Lewis Diuguid of the Kansas City Star Friday ruminated over the implications of this question posed by journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists convention this month: In correspondence and phone calls, should they conceal “the fact that they are African-Americans from agents, publicists, publishers, the media and others to generate interest in their work”?
  • “According to every study or poll taking the pulse of Hispanics in the last decade, this is a population that takes seriously the issue of illegal immigration,” Ruben Navarrette wrote Wednesday in the San Diego Union-Tribune, in a column headlined, “Faulty Assumptions About Hispanics.” “That includes Mexican-Americans, the one subgroup that you might think ­ because of their ancestors’ experience ­ would be most sympathetic to immigrants, even those who come illegally,” Navarrette said.
  • “What does it mean if those groups that were once in the numerical minority become the numerical majority?” asked Nick Jimenez, editorial page editor of Texas’ Corpus Christi Caller-Times on Sunday. “I think it means we need to accelerate our programs for increasing the number of Hispanic college graduates. It means that the issue of having an under-educated, under-prepared population just got bigger.”
  • Knight Ridder announced today it had closed on its acquisition from Gannett of the Idaho Statesman in Boise, the Olympian in Olympia, Wash., and the Bellingham (Wash.) Herald. In return, Gannett received from Knight Ridder the Tallahassee Democrat and cash.
  • Alexander Rivera Jr., 91, who after World War II reported and took photos for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading black newspapers of the time, returned Thursday to his Greensboro, N.C., high school after the main building was saved from demolition, Jim Schlosser wrote Friday in the Greensboro News & Record.

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