“We Won’t Miss an Edition”

Papers in Houston, Galveston Prepare for Rita

Orders to evacuate as Hurricane Rita approaches have left Galveston, Texas, “pretty much of a ghost town,” Editor Heber Taylor of the Galveston County Daily News said tonight, but “we’ll publish — we won’t miss an edition.”

Meanwhile, at the Houston Chronicle, published farther inland, “we’re as prepared as we can be,” reader representative James Campbell told Journal-isms, with rooms rented downtown for the staff, an emergency generator in place, and food, portable toilets, showers and other survival tools ready.

“We learned a lot of lessons from Katrina,” said Campbell, a onetime board member of the National Association of Black Journalists. “It’s almost prophetic, what happened. It got us prepared.”

“Gaining strength with frightening speed, Hurricane Rita swirled toward the Gulf Coast a Category 5, 165-mph monster today as more than 1.3 million people in Texas and Louisiana were sent packing on orders from authorities who learned a bitter lesson from Katrina,” began an Associated Press story today on the Chronicle Web site.

“Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys and began drawing energy with terrifying efficiency from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 2 a.m. and 4 p.m., it went from a 115-mph Category 2 to a 165-mph Category 5.”

“I’m the last one here,” Taylor told Journal-isms from his office about 7:30 p.m. Central time. “Most of us will go to Houston to set up a copy desk. Reporters and photographers will use laptops. We’ve got two teams with emergency [equipment] in bunkers . . . they’ll report till the storm hits, then they’ll crawl out.

“We’ll publish at our sister papers” in Texas — the Baytown Sun and the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise — and online.

While there will be no customers to read the print edition, the paper will be there “when they get back — it’s almost like a vacation package,” Taylor said.

Journalists of color at the Galveston Daily News, with a 30,000 circulation, include Brandon C. Williams, sports editor, and Carolina Anengual, lifestyle editor. Taylor said he did not believe any of the broadcast outlets to be operating.

In Houston, “We’ve been told to make time today and tomorrow for our own families and get them out of the city,” Campbell said. Sports Editor Fred M. Faour went to the San Antonio Express-News, also owned by Hearst Corp., to start a backup newsroom, and Dwight Silverman, online editor, prepared to move the online edition there.

“We can put a lot of useful information online that people can use as a resource,” Campbell said. The paper also has a number of blogs, he added. “Bloggers have information that we don’t have.”

As with Katrina, the hurricane preparations are both personal and professional. “I have three people at my house who evacuated from New Orleans. They’re going, ‘what the hell is going on?'” Campbell said.

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Cuts Could Make Philly Papers Elitist, Guild Says

Plans by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News to eliminate a combined 100 newsroom jobs could “move the papers into elitist publications” whose staff’s attention “is going to where the newspaper’s money is,” the leader of Philadelphia Newspaper Guild, Inquirer business writer Henry Holcomb, told Journal-isms today.

The plans by the Knight Ridder papers to offer buyouts to achieve the budget cuts were announced Tuesday, the same day the New York Times Co. said it would cut about 500 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force. The reductions come atop another 200 jobs that were cut earlier this year, as the Associated Press reported.

Both Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis and Barry Lipton, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, said it was too early to gauge the effect on diversity. Lipton said today it depended on who volunteered for the buyouts, and that the Guild planned to meet next Wednesday with Times management. “At this point, we are not able to provide any specifics on who will be affected,” Mathis said Tuesday.

But Bill Keller, executive editor, said in a memo to the staff Tuesday, “As a first step to protect the loyal, hard-working staff we have, we are closing the door immediately on new hiring. This freeze will last at least until the end of the year. Of course, we will honor commitments to people who have been offered jobs and have accepted. And, of course, I reserve the right to make exceptions for cases of high priority to the paper. But you should expect the exceptions will be few, if any, and they will be made in consultation with the department heads.”

In Philadelphia, Joe Natoli, publisher of the Inquirer and Daily News, “said the company will lay off employees if there are not enough people taking buyouts voluntarily. Asked whether he thought enough people would leave to make layoffs unnecessary, Natoli said: ‘Probably not,'” according to a story in the Inquirer. The Inquirer plans to cut its editorial staff by 15 percent from 500 to 425, while the Philadelphia Daily News will cut its editorial staff 19 percent, from 130 to 105.

Holcomb, who is president of Newspaper Guild/CWA Local 38010, blamed the situation on bad management decisions, particularly on the business side, by people not based in Philadelphia. The Inquirer had 630 people in the newsroom in 1998, he said.

“If fully implemented,” he said of the company’s plans, “it would take us down to the level we were in the ’70s, when the city was dominant” in the region. Today, however, most of the office space is in the suburbs, along with “roughly 70 percent of readers,” who are both black and white.

“To cover a truly diverse community in all of its facets is a time-consuming job and to try to understand things and explain things requires a great deal of talent and persistent work. Our worry is that our obligation to do that is going to take a big hit.”

What’s needed is a restoration of advertising and circulation professionals, which is taking place, as well as “a good aggressive newspaper, to be sure that the minority community participates, and [which] treats us as a whole community, and not focuses on just part of it. It’s doable,” he said.

At the Daily News, editor Michael Days told the staff Tuesday, “With a smaller staff we will have to refocus our priorities and restructure our operations. That process is already underway, and I welcome your suggestions. I am not suggesting it will be easy, but I’ve been here long enough to know that our collective DNA forbids us from doing anything other than quality work.”

• Rem Rieder, AJR: Black Tuesday — The axman cometh to Philadelphia?s newspapers
• Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher: Guild Leaders Hit Newspaper Staffing Cuts — and Question the Timing

 

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Attention Paid to Latinos, Black Middle Class

Media attention turned to two areas critics said had been undercovered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — the plight of Latino immigrants and of the black middle class — as others issued warnings about threats to the participation of people of color in the reconstruction.

“While blacks are busy ‘looting’ and whites are ‘finding,’ (to drudge up the most over-played image-war thus far), what no one is mentioning is that Latinos are ‘hiding,’ mostly in churches where they at least feel protected,” Marissa Kantor, a New York writer, wrote Tuesday on the Revealer Web site, “a daily review of religion and the press.”

In fact, E. Eduardo Castillo of the Associated Press wrote the story, “Illegal immigrants afraid to get storm aid,” on Sept. 9, but the issue was overshadowed by the rest of Katrina coverage. The same day Kantor’s piece was posted, the Washington Post ran reporter Darryl Fears‘ story from Baton Rouge, La., “For Illegal Immigrants, Some Aid Is Too Risky; Fears Abound as Government Won’t Promise Immunity From Deportation.”

On the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists, members agreed that the images of African Americans in New Orleans seemed uniformly of the poor, after one editor posted a letter from a New Orleans resident pleading that authorities not be allowed to bulldoze the homes of black middle class residents.

Today in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, reporter Steven Gray, a native of the Crescent City who has been covering the Katrina aftermath, wrote “Reporter’s Notebook: For Black Middle Class, Home Is Gone.” “Many of the black families who lived in this thriving community weren’t in the images flashed on the news,” Gray said of eastern New Orleans.

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Jesse Jackson urged Congress to overrule President Bush and reinstate wage guarantees for those rebuilding the Gulf Coast, as Rhoda A. Pickett reported in Alabama’s Mobile Register. First priority in rebuilding should go to residents of the hurricane zone, he said, people who were being denied a chance to “work their way out of poverty.” “He cited billion dollar, no-bid contracts for relief and recovery awarded to companies including Bechtel Corp. and a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.,” as the Associated Press reported. Other leaders, such as Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., spoke out similarly.

Meanwhile, writing in the Village Voice, Sydney H. Schanberg said that a “press caste system” meant that larger news outlets “had pretty much ignored the year-in-year-out reporting by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which kept warning that a hurricane tragedy of this magnitude was certain to befall the Gulf city.”

• Barbara Bernier, law professor, Florida A&M University: Minority-Owned Businesses and Minority Employees Should Be Recruited, And Use of the Eminent Domain Power Must Be Scrutinized
• EURWeb: Oprah Pledges 10 Mil to Katrina Rebuilding Effort

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2 Black Networks Plan Limited Katrina Coverage

TV One and the Black Family Channel, two African American-oriented cable networks, lack the resources to compete with the major cable networks in covering the Hurricane Katrina aftermath but plan to cover the catastrophe in their own ways, network officials said today.

Johnathan Rodgers, CEO of TV One, told Journal-isms there was “no excuse for not doing more and not making it our story,” but “we tried to do what we could do.” That involved running commentaries by Roland S. Martin, commentator and executive editor of the Chicago Defender, raising money to fund people who were taking care of evacuees, joining the fundraising campaign of radio host Tom Joyner and blackamericaweb.com, and developing a close relationship with the syndicated show “America’s Black Forum,” where commentators will discuss developments. TV One airs the show on Sunday afternoons.

Black Family Channel created a public service announcement called “Begin the Healing,” and employees have housed evacuees, said Lisa Morgan, vice president for marketing and promotion. News director Greg Morrison said the network planned a six-part documentary series, also called “Begin the Healing,” that would follow up on those affected by the storm. The first would air in late November or mid-December. “It’s a long-term process of healing,” Morrison said.

Black Entertainment Television responded Monday to concerns about its Katrina programming.

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Hannah Allam Wins Knight Ridder’s Gold Medal

Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder’s Cairo bureau chief who served nearly two years as head of the company’s Baghdad bureau, today was awarded the top prize, the John S. Knight Gold Medal, in the company’s James K. Batten Excellence Awards competition.

The competition is designed to recognize and celebrate the successes of Knight Ridder employees.

In a news release, Knight Ridder Chairman and CEO Tony Ridder said of Allam, who was the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2004 Journalist of the Year: “She assembled a remarkable staff of Americans, British and Iraqi (including Sunnis and Shiites) who regularly out-report and out-write the competition. She has also, as her nomination said, ‘mastered challenges few of us will ever face. She has run down a street with bullets pinging off the pavement to cover the siege of a mosque. She has felt the concussion from a roadside bomb. She saved a colleague from assassins. She has comforted sobbing employees grieving the loss of a staffer who drove into an intersection where a military operation was under way and was killed by an American bullet.’

“It is rare that this award goes to someone without a long record of achievement within the company. In Hannah’s case, she has squeezed into two years what many others don’t experience in a lifetime.”

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Journalists of Color Among 2,000 Honoring Jennings

Veteran broadcaster Connie Chung was just about the only journalist of color mentioned in news coverage today of the two-hour Carnegie Hall memorial service for ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who died Aug. 7 at age 67 of lung cancer.

But other journalists of color were present, according to ABC “World News Tonight” spokeswoman Cathie Levine and other attendees, though one said privately, “the New York media elite is so overwhelmingly white, it’s times like these that make it abundantly clear.”

Besides Chung at the invitation-only event, attended by 2,000, were anchors Ed Bradley of CBS and Robin Roberts and Elizabeth Vargas of ABC; ABC News reporters Pierre Thomas, John Quinones and Deborah Roberts; anchor Leon Harris of WJLA-TV in Washington; ABC weatherman Tony Perkins of “Good Morning America”; ABC News producers Vinnie Malhotra, Eva Freeman, Robe Imbriano and Deanna Lee; ABC News business executive Derek Medina and A’Lelia Bundles, ABC News director of talent development.

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NPR, PBS Ending “Newsbrief” Update

“NPR and PBS have decided to conclude production and distribution of the PBS NPR Newsbrief. Stations are being alerted today that since the contract expires in November, the last feed will be Sunday, October 30,” Ken Stern, executive vice president of NPR, wrote to staffers today.

“We are very proud of what was accomplished and appreciate the hard work of everyone here associated with them, including anchors Beverly Kirk and Sheilah Kast, substitutes Danyell Irby, Bebe Crouse, Allison Aubrey and Julie Rovner, Greg Peppers, and Peggy Girshman, who coordinated the entire project.”

NPR spokeswoman Andi Sporkin told Journal-isms: “Regarding the staff who?ve worked on the NPR side of the Newsbrief, some of them actually added Newsbrief duties to their existing regular jobs within NPR News, so they?ll be continuing with those other responsibilities. There are a handful of people who worked exclusively on Newsbrief and who are terrific journalists, and we are hoping that they consider other openings and opportunities within NPR News.”

The Newsbrief “was created to provide public television stations with a timely NPR News update throughout their primetime schedules, build on the natural relationship between PBS and NPR stations, create cross-promotional opportunities for stations and extend the presence of NPR News,” Stern wrote. “Ultimately, while the Newsbrief was carried in roughly half the major markets, this reach was insufficient for PBS to justify using national programming funds to support continued production. Additionally, PBS? planned move to new facilities would require them to install additional lines and other technology specifically to keep this project going,” he continued.

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Clint C. Wilson Sr., Cartoonist, Dies at 90

“Clint C. Wilson Sr., the editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Sentinel for more than 45 years, has died. He was 90,” Mary Rourke reported today in the Los Angeles Times.

“Wilson died Sunday of kidney failure, according to his son, Clint Wilson II, who said his father died at Hawthorne Convalescent Center in Hawthorne.

“Using a lean drawing style, often adding shading for atmosphere, he took up local and national issues including affirmative action, gang violence and police brutality.

“. . . ‘His cartoons were humorous, but they struck at the heart of the matter from a black perspective,’ said his son, a journalism professor at Howard University who has written extensively on the history of the black press.”

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Short Takes

• Ed Bradley will replace Mike Wallace as the first face viewers see when CBS’ “60 Minutes” begins its new season on Sunday, “a further indication of a changing of the guard at television’s first and still most popular newsmagazine,” the Associated Press reported.
• BET co-founder Sheila Johnson, 55, will wed Arlington Circuit Judge William T. Newman Jr., also 55, Saturday in front of 700 guests in a “transformed” horse stable at her Middleburg, Va., property, Salamander Farms, the Washington Post reported today. She has been called the nation’s first black female billionaire.
• Vanessa Gallman, editorial page editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, was elected treasurer of the National Conference of Editorial Writers at the group’s convention last weekend in Portland, Ore. The election puts her on the ladder to become the group’s president in 2008.
• “The Source magazine has appointed a new Editor-in-Chief in Dasun Allah, who will replace former EIC Joshua “Fahiym” Ratcliffe,” C. Costanza reported Monday on AllHipHop.com: “Allah told AllHipHop.com that he would help usher in a new era for the rap magazine, which has recently experienced several personnel changes.”
• Everett J. Mitchell II, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, announced the paper was expanding its efforts in investigative journalism with the addition of Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Melvin Claxton to its investigative projects desk.
• The story of Nada Selameh —”among the unveiled majority of Muslim women in the West who are less visible than those in burkas,” and “a Muslim woman seeking to undo centuries of patriarchy . . . is a good one. But there are lots of smart, opinionated Muslim women in the United States with equally good stories, if only the media drops their veil of preconceptions,” Omar Sacirbey, an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, wrote Sunday in the Los Angeles Times.

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