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Covering the Last 40 Years

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“Greatest” Magazine Fronts Reflect Changing Times

The 40 greatest magazine covers of the past 40 years — at least as selected by the American Society of Magazine Editors — include five with African American images, with Asian representation consisting of Yoko Ono and a Life magazine cover from 1965 showing a Viet Cong prisoner with his eyes and mouth taped shut, and the cover line, “The blunt reality of war in Vietnam.”

As reported widely this week, the top ranking went to the iconic 1981 photograph by Annie Liebowitz of a nude John Lennon curled up with his clothed wife, Ono, taken hours before he was killed. It appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. In second place was Vanity Fair’s August 1991 cover featuring a naked, very pregnant Demi Moore.

The competition attracted 444 entries from 136 magazines, judged by a panel of 52 editors, designers, art directors and photography editors. Spokeswoman Cristina Dinozo said the organization does not disclose the names of the judges. She did say that Essence and Vibe magazines submitted entries, but that Latina, People en Español and other Hispanic publications did not enter.

The Essence and Vibe entries were also-rans, however. Emerge magazine, with its searing covers depicting Clarence Thomas with a handkerchief on his head in 1993 and as a lawn jockey in 1996, is defunct. Johnson Publishing Co., whose memorable Ebony covers from the ’60s include the black-and-white “The WHITE Problem in America” and a striking sketch of Frederick Douglass on an issue devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, did not enter the contest. Nor is there the April 19, 1968, Life magazine cover with Flip Schulke’s historic photograph of a grieving Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral.

If the selections “offer a pinhole camera view into the American psyche” over the last 40 years, as Bo Emerson wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, then the selections are also indexes to the changing images of people of color, as viewed by the mainstream.

In third place was the April 1968 cover of Esquire, “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” showing the heavyweight champ with arrows in his body, taken as the Supreme Court considered his five-year jail sentence for draft evasion. It later ruled in Ali’s favor.

From 1998, in 18th place, was Michael Jordan jumping against an all-white background on the cover of ESPN magazine. In 24th place, from 1972, was Andy Warhol photographing an African American woman for Interview magazine’s Christmas issue.

Tied for 29th place was Playboy magazine’s cover for October 1971, with model Darine Stern posing on a Playboy bunny chair, apparently wearing nothing but her proud Afro.

Glamour magazine’s August 1968 cover, “Best Dressed College Girls,” was tied for 37th place. It was the first time a black woman had appeared on the cover of a national women’s magazine. But black women made none of the winning covers created after 1972.

Essence magazine nominated covers from the ’90s and the new millennium: “Facing AIDS” from December 1994; “30 Years of Radiant Black Women” from May 2000; the supermodel Alek Wek from September 2000; and “Triple Platinum” from June 2004, featuring superstars Beyoncé Knowles, Janet Jackson and Mary J. Blige.

Vibe, a past National Magazine Award winner, nominated its Tupac Shakur cover from April 1995, Brandy from July 2004, 50 Cent from April 2005 and one on hip-hop murders, from May 2005.

Stern’s appearance on the Playboy cover marked the first appearance by an African American on the cover of a mainstream men’s magazine. She modeled for 17 years through the 1970s and 1980s, appearing on the covers of Vogue, Glamour, Bazaar, Ebony, Mademoiselle and Essence. She founded Darine Stern Models and served as an image consultant to Lena Horne, Michael Jordan, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin before her 1994 death from breast cancer at age 46.

On “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television last June, advertising man George Lois described how he created the Ali cover. Legendary Esquire editor “Harold Hayes came to me. I did covers for him and I — for 10 years — and I did three covers during the tough period of Ali`s life. One of them, the best known one was Ali posing as St. Sebastian pierced with arrows.

“. . He was waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision. And that kind of a nailed down the fact that I and many other people in America saw him as a great martyr. You know, what was interesting about that was when I told him to come to New York to pose for it, I told him he was going to pose as St. Sebastian. And he — when he looked at what I — at the painting of Castagno that I wanted him to mimic, he said ‘holy cat, George, this cat`s a Christian.’

“And I said, ‘Holy Moses, I’ll bet you`re right.’ And I — and he said, ‘I can’t pose as a Christian. I`m a — I’ve converted to Islam.’ So he got me on the phone with Muhammad Elijah and we had it . . .

“ROSE: With Elijah himself?

“LOIS: Yes, yes. And we had a . . .

“ROSE: Elijah Muhammad.

“LOIS: And we had a theological discussion, and he OK`ed it. Yeah.

“ROSE: Elijah Muhammad gave his approval . . .

“LOIS: It became kind of a defining statement about his greatness, I think.”

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San Jose Mercury News Drops Its Ethnic Publications

“The San Jose Mercury News is selling its weekly Vietnamese-language newspaper and closing its weekly Spanish-language publication. In addition, the paper announced it will discontinue its weekly neighborhood sections, The Guide,” the paper announced late today.

“Today’s announcement marks a major change in direction for the Mercury News, which has received national acclaim for publishing newspapers in three languages,” Michael Stoll wrote on his Bay Area Web site, Grading the News.

“Jay T. Harris, publisher of the Mercury News when Nuevo Mundo, a Spanish-language weekly, was conceived, said the ethnic papers helped the papers address one of its two major missions: diversity and coverage of technology,” Stoll continued.

“Our view was strongly that we had a journalistic obligation to all members of the San Jose community regardless of the language that they spoke,” said Harris, now a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.

In place of the Spanish-language paper, Nuevo Mundo, the Mercury News plans to import a Mexican-produced 24-page, color tabloid- size weekly with Spanish-language articles, primarily from Latin American news organizations. Fronteras de la Noticia allocates two to four pages for local content, as the San Jose Business Journal reported last year, prior to its launch.

This part of the decision immediately drew concern from the San Jose Newspaper Guild and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“This is yet another troubling example of outstanding union journalists being replaced by low wage workers,” Luther Jackson , executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, said in a statement.

“The consequences are enormous for the Latino community and for journalism,” asserted NAHJ Executive Director Ivan Roman.

“The Latino community is more than a consumer market to sell goods and products to. Spanish-language papers that cover the Latino community in the United States have a particular mission and have stronger ties to the community -? qualities that an imported paper can not fulfill. We are concerned that more newspapers will decide to outsource newsroom jobs and abandon its commitment to have locally-based journalists cover the Latino community.”

In the Mercury’s statement, Publisher George Riggs said both free papers, Nuevo Mundo, which had a circulation of 57,000, and Viet Mercury, with 35,000, are unprofitable and “unable to compete successfully with other locally based targeted pubs that serve the same audience, but operate on a lower cost structure.” Executive Editor Susan Goldberg said, “Coverage of the Hispanic and Vietnamese communities always has been and remains part of our core mission in the daily Mercury News.”

“A group of Mercury News reporters who call themselves the Latino Coalition wrote a letter on Oct. 17 urging Riggs and Tony Ridder, chairman of the paper’s parent company, Knight Ridder Inc., to keep the ethnic papers open,” Greg Sandoval reported for the Associated Press.

The Latino Coalition wrote that the papers were “among the finest examples of the commitment to diversity and excellent journalism expressed by the Mercury News and Knight Ridder,” Sandoval said.

“The thinking was that the Mercury News and its abundant resources would overwhelm the three other Spanish-language dailies: La Oferta, El Observador and Alianza Metropolitan News. But it didn’t happen,” his story continued.

The Mercury News announced last month that it would lay off 60 employees, including 52 in the newsroom, after first offering buyouts.

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Justice Department Opposes Federal Shield Law

“The Department of Justice told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday that there is no need for a federal reporter’s shield law because its rules for subpoenaing reporters have worked well for more than three decades, and creating a law could slow the department’s subpoena process in cases of imminent threats to national security,” as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported Thursday.

At the same hearing, ABC News President David Westin said “his news operation has been chilled, or at least had to adjust the cost-benefit analysis of its stories, by the Justice Department’s pursuit of journalists as witnesses in grand jury investigations,” John Eggerton reported Wednesday in Broadcasting & Cable.

And New York Times reporter Judith Miller appealed to senators for a federal law to shield the identities of news sources.

NABJ Offers “Hurricane Fellowships” for Untold Stories

Journalists who want to pursue stories about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that have been missed by the news media can do so under an “NABJ Hurricane Fellowship” proposed and approved over the weekend by the National Association of Black Journalists board of directors.

The board voted to provide $2,500 in expenses for a week of reporting to each of five journalists who together will produce “a series of packages of stories that deal with stories on African Americans on the ground, telling stories that would otherwise not be told,” NABJ President Bryan Monroe said.

The Internet is alive with Katrina-related stories about questionable government action, rebuilding concerns, unfair treatment of evacuees and the like that have yet to be professionally reported.

Meanwhile, commentary continues:

Sportswriter Freeman’s “Liar” Line “Went Too Far”

Sports columnist Mike Freeman of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville took heat from readers and the paper’s reader advocate after nicknaming University of Florida coach Urban Meyer “Urban Liar” in an Oct. 9 column.

“Freeman’s case against Meyer stemmed from Meyer’s assertion on Monday that an injured wide receiver was expected to play on Saturday, only to say after the Mississippi State game that he had known he wouldn’t play. Meyer also did not reveal that the quarterback had a shoulder injury until after the game, saying he didn’t want opponents to target the shoulder,” reader advocate Wayne Ezell wrote on Sunday.

“In the world of gamesmanship where coaches aren’t forthcoming about injuries, many consider those two instances a low threshold for criticism. Freeman’s allegation and the outrage about it reverberated through cyberspace, e-mails, chat rooms and sports bars. Derision of Freeman was almost universal. Even FSU fans screamed foul.

“Part of the back story includes Freeman’s personal history. He came to the Times-Union in April 2004 after resigning from a previous job where he admitted falsifying his resume by saying he had graduated from the University of Delaware. Freeman mentioned his own ‘dim-witted error of telling a fib’ in the column but said that wasn’t ‘as flagrant or guilt-free as what Meyer did.’ That was red meat for Freeman’s critics.”

However, Ezell noted that “Freeman is personally well-liked around here,” and said that his annoyance at the column softened after hearing from Freeman and his editor. “Ultimately, a hard-hitting column about Meyer and the issue may have been in order. But to tag the coach as ‘Urban Liar’ went too far, in my view,” Ezell wrote.

O’Reilly Seeks Boycott After Macarena Hernández Column

Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly is suggesting that “Texans might consider canceling their subscriptions and advertisers might rethink their investment” in the Dallas Morning News after columnist Macarena Hernández wrote that on “The O’Reilly Factor,” “the anchor and the callers constantly point to the southern border as the birth of all America’s ills.”

Hernández became nationally known while at the San Antonio Express-News when Jayson Blair lifted material from one of her stories and passed it off as his own in 2003. Her editor blew the whistle. Hernández moved this year to the editorial page of the Morning News.

In her Saturday column, Hernández bemoaned the lack of national attention given the Georgia beating deaths of six Mexican farm workers. She quoted as a sample comment from the O’Reilly show, “Each one of those people is a biological weapon.”

O’Reilly said on his show Wednesday night he had “videotaped evidence that proves I’ve been consistently sympathetic to the plight of poor migrants.” He called for the News to apologize.

Hernández’ colleague, Rod Dreher, assistant editorial page editor, wrote on his blog: “I just watched ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ and was floored that our own Macarena took up two segments of the program! I know I must be a jaded media guy, because my first thought was, ‘Dang, I’ve been writing opinions for print for years, and nobody’s ever gone after me like that on a national program. I’ve got to get Macarena to tell me her secret!'” However, he said, “I don’t think it was at all fair to blame O’Reilly and his callers for the murders of these immigrants, when the cops say it was not a hate crime, but a straight-up robbery.”

But Morning News Publisher Jim Moroney told a Fox producer, according to Editor & Publisher: “The Dallas Morning News supports Ms. Hernández’s op-ed article as written and her right to express her opinion of such a serious crime freely. We appreciate that the O’Reilly Factor is helping to promote this important national dialogue on issues of immigrant rights and criminal justice.”

Hernández told Journal-isms tonight via e-mail:

“Mr. Bill O?Reilly twisted my words and lied. But because of his ranting more people read about the six undocumented workers that were brutally murdered. So I think I?ve done my job, stimulated debate. We as a nation really have to take a good look at how this anti-immigration backlash fuels fear and anger, making it okay for people to talk about undocumented immigrants as if they were ailments. Or as the caller to Mr. O?Reilly?s radio show said, ‘Each one of those people is a biological weapon.’?

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Hispanic Journalists Make “Most Influential” List

Hispanic Business magazine named Veronica Villafañe, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, NAHJ Vice President of Broadcast Manny Medrano and other NAHJ members to its 2005 list of the 100 most influential Hispanics, NAHJ notes.

Included are: Alberto Ibargüen, CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author and former Los Angeles Times staff writer; Carl Quintanilla, NBC News correspondent; Jim Avila, ABC News correspondent; Felix Contreras, arts reporter and producer, National Public Radio; John Quiñones, ABC News “Primetime” co-anchor; Medrano, an ABC News correspondent; Mimi Valdés, Vibe magazine editor-in-chief; Rick Sanchez, CNN reporter; Rolando H. Santos, CNN “Headline News” general manager; Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune columnist; Villafañe, a San Jose Mercury News anchor/reporter; and Vince Gonzales, CBS News correspondent.

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Columnists of Color Not Warming to Nominee Miers

Harriet Miers, President Bush‘s nominee for the Supreme Court who is under attack by conservatives, is not finding much support among columnists of color, either. They offer their own takes on the nomination:

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Little on Neighborhoods Found on Chicago TV News

“More than half of all stories on Chicago television newscasts focus on crime, entertainment, disasters, accidents and sports, according to a study released this week by a community advocacy group,” Robert Feder reported Thursday in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Media Democracy Chicago analyzed late newscasts on six local stations for one week in June.”

“Only 16 percent of stories reported on the news ‘primarily impacted a Chicago neighborhood,’ the study concluded. “‘This study shows why people are increasingly turning off broadcast news,’ said Karen Young, president of Media Democracy Chicago.

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More Columnists Reflect on Millions More Movement

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