Maynard Institute archives

“We Intend to Keep Printing the Paper”

by richard0459

Reassurance on Future of Times-Picayune

The president of the company that publishes the New Orleans Times-Picayune said categorically today that regardless of the ability of the hurricane-soaked presses to publish, “we intend to keep printing the paper now and in the future.

“There are no plans at all to not publish the paper, absolutely none,” Donald Newhouse, president of Advance Publications, told Journal-isms today.

“There is going to be a city of New Orleans and there is going to be a marketing area and we will continue to publish and meet its needs. Based on the response of my fellow publishers, we can seek help from many, many different newspapers. We’ll be able to find the press capacity that we need.”

Newhouse spoke as the Times-Picayune resumed publication with a limited circulation of 50,000 today, printed at the plant operated by the Courier newspaper in nearby Houma, a paper owned by the New York Times Co.

A staff meeting Thursday in Baton Rouge, where many of the Times-Picayune staff are working, left many with a different impression. Staff members were told that “During the months of September and October all Times-Picayune employees will receive regular paychecks, regardless of whether they perform work,” as a news release announced.

But after that, the employees were told, the future was uncertain, especially given the unknown condition of the presses.

“There are a lot of people that have been there a long time, it hit them pretty hard,” Freddie Willis, a copy editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune who is president of the New Orleans Association of Black Journalists, told Journal-isms Thursday night. “Some people like myself — it’ll be 12 years in September — I’m one of those taking it pretty hard. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.” But “for a lot of folks that have been there, it’s been their life,” he said, speaking of the paper.

Meanwhile, Times-Picayune managing editor Peter Kovacs sent this message about a missing black journalist, posted to the Romenesko Web page at the Poynter Institute:

“The Times-Picayune has lost contact with Leslie Williams, a reporter who was to cover the hurricane on the Mississippi Coast. Because our phones failed in New Orleans, we were unable to communicate with Leslie and he may not know that we are in Baton Rouge at LSU. If anyone ran across Leslie, please contact me at 225-578-9880. My cellphone is 504-352-5550 but it is still balky. My email is kovacs70003@yahoo.com. Leslie is experienced at covering hurricanes and is a native of the Mississippi coast. His mother still lives there and he sometimes stays with her.”

Late today, Kovacs e-mailed to Journal-isms:

“We are in touch with members of Leslie’s family who tell us that he and his mom are still missing. Being missing around these parts is not as dire as it sounds. One of my son’s friends just had his dad turn up yesterday. We have a reporter in Mississippi dedicated to hunting Leslie down.”

 

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Author, Columnist Hugh Pearson Found Dead at 47

Hugh Pearson, a former editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of a controversial book on his Black Panther namesake, Huey P. Newton, among other work, was found dead last month in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. He was 47.

A friend called police to the apartment on Aug. 19, police said, where Pearson’s body was found lying on its side. The medical examiner’s office said an autopsy was inconclusive and that a determination of cause of death would await further study. Friends said it appeared that Pearson took his life by ingesting drugs and had been dead for three weeks.

News of the death has been circulating slowly, with virtually the only media attention a family-placed notice in the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph.

Services were held Aug. 27 in Dublin, Ga., where Pearson had relatives. In 2000, the Free Press published Pearson’s book “Under the Knife,” about a great-uncle, Dr. Joseph Griffin, who became the first Negro surgeon in south Georgia.

The book dramatized “the struggles of other successful men in his family, charting his forefathers’ rise from slavery to ownership of large Georgia farms and flourishing businesses in Jacksonville, Fla., and the accomplishments of his own father, who became the first person of any color in his rural Georgia county to earn a medical degree,” according to the dust jacket.

“I don’t think anyone who knew Hugh could not feel tremendous sadness,” said Sandy Close, executive editor of Pacific News Service, where Pearson was once an associate editor and writer. “Whatever his demons, his sense of injury and wounds that clearly went very deep, he was a fighter. He was so ambitious to be a writer. He struggled and fought and was really determined to be a writer. The books he published and the essays he wrote certainly demonstrated that he accomplished that,” she told Journal -isms today.

Born Huey Lawrence Pearson, Jr., in Fort Wayne, Ind., Pearson was a Brown University graduate who majored in biomedical ethics, graduating in 1979.

“He entered Meharry Medical College but after two years of study, decided against a medical career,” according to the death notice in the Aug. 26 Macon Telegraph. “His adventurous spirit led him to endeavors that included the study of urban planning at the New School of Social Research in New York and positions in urban development. However, he realized that his calling was writing. His first professional piece was published in New York Newsday. After a freelance career, he signed on with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, California. In the summer of 1989, the shooting of Black Panther Huey Newton in Oakland, California rekindled a boyhood interest in Newton, leading to Hugh’s first book, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America.”

That 1994 book, critical of the man with whom Pearson said he once felt a special bond because of their shared names, became a calling card. In December 1994, after four and a half years at Pacific News Service, Pearson became the third African American editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal.

A football-player-sized man who wore dreadlocks before they had become ubiquitous, Pearson left the Journal in 1997, telling Journal-isms then he was tired of working for “dinosaurs.” Speaking of then-editorial page editor Robert Bartley, he said, “Even though I told him I’m not a conservative, but an independent thinker, he thought I would be so grateful just to be there.”

“In my first piece, they tried to slip in some conservative B.S. It got to the point I stopped going to the editorial meetings. They just sit around and kiss Bob Bartley’s . . ..”

He started work as a columnist at the Village Voice in December of that year but disappeared from the masthead on Jan. 21. He said he was fired after his regular editor took a vacation and he got into “a big argument” with the substitute.

In 2000, “Under the Knife” was published, and in 2002, he followed with “When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” a short book on a little-remembered incident.

More recently, he teamed with a friend he had met in 1989 at Pacific News Service, economist Louis E.V. Nevaer, to collaborate on a Web site that would simultaneously present African American and Latino views. That was short-lived, and he next paid tribute to the landmark black newspaper the New York Age by setting up the Web site NYAge.net. He continued to freelance, writing on topics from disgraced reporter Jayson Blair in the Washington Post to Condoleezza Rice, the then-national security adviser who, he argued in the New York Press, should wear her hair in dreadlocks. At his death, he was working on a biography about James Weldon Johnson, author of the lyrics for “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” known as the Negro National Anthem.

In 1997, Pearson became the father of twins. They survive, as does his wife, Nancy, from whom he was separated. “He had alienated so many people by being argumentative. . . He went into depression,” Nevaer told Journal-isms.

Former Atlanta newspaperman John Head discussed his book “Standing in the Shadows: Understanding and Overcoming Depression in Black Men” last year in this column.

He called it “a plea for black men with depression to walk out of the shadows, to stop suffering in silence, and a plea for our people to remove the stigma attached to mental illness. . . our culture and our history in this country make black men especially vulnerable when depression strikes. We are less likely to seek the help of mental health practitioners. When we do seek help, we are more likely to be misdiagnosed, improperly medicated, and/or offered treatment that lacks cultural sensitivity and therefore is less effective than it could be.”

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Columnists of Color Angry, Thoughtful on Hurricane

More to come over the holiday weekend

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