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Vicki Mabrey Offered “Nightline” Job

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Ex-BBC Producer Assembling His Own Team

Vicki Mabrey, the CBS News correspondent who was dropped from that network when CBS canceled “60 Minutes II,” has all but signed on to join the revamped version of ABC-TV’s “Nightline,” Mabrey told Journal-isms Thursday night.

“I’ve been offered the job. We’re just working out the details and the contract,” she said.

“It’s a new show. It’s a start-up. That’s always exciting.” She compared it with starting on “60 Minutes II” when it first aired in 1999.

Mabrey said she had no information on the status of Michel Martin, a correspondent currently assigned to “Nightline” and the black journalist most identified with the program. Martin told Journal-isms, “I have no comment on any of this.”

“As the Nov. 28 launch date for the brand-new Nightline looms, incoming executive producer James Goldston is assembling a team of four correspondents to help carry out his plan to reinvent the single-anchor, single-topic news program as a multi- anchor, multi-topic, late-night television event,” Rebecca Dana wrote Wednesday in the New York Observer.

Goldston, a former producer for the BBC, was appointed in July to take over “Nightline,” replacing longtime producer Tom Bettag, who is leaving the show with founding anchor Ted Koppel, as Variety reported then.

Goldston was producer of the now-famous Martin Bashir documentary “Living With Michael Jackson,” and last week ABC announced that Bashir would be one of three anchors for the show.

Mabrey said she met with Goldston over breakfast the same day, Oct. 17, and had a “very good conversation.” He was attracted to Mabrey, she said, because of her time as a London correspondent and because she had reported foreign news. The producer was looking for an African American and someone with network experience, she said. Mabrey’s contract with CBS News expired at the end of August, and she was not one of the “60 Minutes II” correspondents absorbed into the original “60 Minutes” when the spinoff was cancelled in the spring.

“I’ve done hard news and done quick turnaround, and also long form. The new ‘Nightline’ will include the best of both,” Mabrey said.

The others on the team are longtime “Nightline” correspondents John Donvan and Chris Bury and Lisa Ling, a correspondent for the National Geographic Channel and “Oprah” and a former co-host of ABC’s “The View,” as Dana reported in the New York Observer.

“Nightline” is known for its willingness to tackle racial issues and for its appeal to African Americans. As reported in February, “Nightline,” ran third in the overall ratings behind “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on NBC and “Late Night with David Letterman” on CBS. But it rated first with African Americans.

Martin joined ABC News in 1992 after spending more than a decade covering politics and policy for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, according to her bio. On “Nightline,” “she has contributed a number of reports for the ongoing series ‘America in Black and White.’ One report in this series was nominated for an Emmy Award, cited by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for excellence in coverage of racial and ethnic issues, and it received special notice from TV Guide in its ‘cheers’ column for its candid look at racial stereotyping in news coverage,” the bio says.

Mabrey’s bio notes she was named a correspondent for “60 Minutes II” in November 1998. She “had been a London-based CBS News correspondent since August 1995. She covered stories throughout Europe and the Middle East, including the United Nations arms inspection crisis in Iraq, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the continuing investigation of the death of Princess Diana.”

“Mabrey joined CBS News in 1992 as a Dallas-based correspondent, where she reported on the Branch Davidian stand-off near Waco, Texas, the great Midwest flood of 1993, and the uprising in Haiti, among many other major events.”

In 1994, a survey by Joe S. Foote, dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, found Mabrey to be the most visible correspondent of color on the nightly news programs.

Goldston did not return telephone calls from Journal-isms.

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Little Rock Paper Plans Finally to Put Parks on Page 1

One of the few papers not to put the death of Rosa Parks on the front page on Tuesday was the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, published in Little Rock, home of the infamous 1957 battle to desegregate Little Rock High School. The story was placed instead on page 2.

“It was a decision that wasn’t made lightly,” City Editor Alyson Hoge told Journal-isms today. “In hindsight, we would have put it on the front page.” (PDF).

The Democrat-Gazette actually missed two opportunities to have Parks out front. On Wednesday, the paper ran a story about her death for the state edition, serving outlying areas, but the story did not make it into the city edition.

“We don’t put as many obituaries on the front page as other news organizations do. When it happened, that was the thought. Generally, if you’re a head of state, that is what puts you on the front page. Celebrities die, we don’t put them on the front page,” Hoge said.

Arkansas native John H. Johnson, the publisher of Ebony magazine who talked often about his roots in the state, received B- section treatment in the Democrat-Gazette when he died in August. Three months earlier, the paper had covered Johnson’s return to Arkansas City, where he grew up in the 1920s, and where his hometown and state helped turn his childhood home into a museum.

“It’s a territory thing,” deputy editor Frank Fellone told Journal-isms then. “It played there where we publish obituaries. Even though he was born here, he left these parts about 72 years ago, so that all-important element of local connection was tenuous and distant.”

Hoge said Parks will finally be on the front page Saturday for all editions. The paper is planning an over-the-nameplate reference to a story inside about Congress’ decision to allow Parks’ body to be viewed in the U.S. Capitol building Sunday and Monday — the first woman and second African American (the first was a slain U.S. Capitol policeman) to be accorded that honor.

[Added Oct. 29:

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In Error, N.Y. Times Includes Paper in Black Press

“Because of an editing error,” the “For the record” item began in Wednesday’s New York Times, “a front-page obituary of Rosa Parks in late editions yesterday referred incorrectly to The Montgomery Advertiser, which printed a front-page article on Dec. 4, 1955, that publicized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses the next day. It is a general-interest newspaper, not a black one.”

“That is TOO funny,” Executive Editor Wanda Lloyd, the first African American to edit the paper, told Journal-isms when informed of the Times’ faux pas.

She added later, “My ‘TOO funny’ reaction is because we have readers who criticize us for having too much black news in the newspaper. Some of our white readers don’t like the diversity we bring to the community, especially this week with all the Rosa Parks stories. Some of our black readers say we ignore too many black stories. We try very hard to strike a diversity balance. I’m sure other newspapers, especially in the South, hear the same reactions.”

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Achieving College Diversity With Little to Start From

Tom Barton, editor of the Iowa State Daily, had a question. His campus is “2 percent multicultural.” He’d like to have a diverse staff. “How do you draw from a student body that doesn’t have a lot of diversity?”

His question, raised at a workshop at the annual conference of the College Media Advisers, meeting through Sunday in Kansas City, should resonate with many campus editors.

A survey in the winter 2003/2004 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education showed that, “there are no blacks whatsoever on the editorial boards of the student newspapers at 13 of the 19 highest-ranked universities that responded to our survey.”

On the second tier, at the 17 universities with accredited undergraduate journalism programs that responded to the survey, there were 181 student editors — of whom eight, or 4.4 percent, were black.

Barton and others received a variety of answers at one of several sessions addressing diversity at the conference, which attracted 2,301 people, about 400 of them faculty members, according to organizers.

Have reader advisory boards. Solicit opinion pieces. “A statement of purpose is a good place to start,” Gene Policinski, executive director of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center and co-facilitator of “Recruiting a Diverse Staff,” said. Create an ombudsman position. Do an audit of the paper to see how well it’s doing on diversity.

Another attendee said her school sent 10 students to the Annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education.

Think of the diversity success stories. “Too often we focus on the negative — who’s not being hired because someone else is,” said Policinski, a former editor at USA Today. “Focus on the office of equal employment opportunity. What are they doing and where have they succeeded?”

“A lot of them are not thinking outside the box,” Phetsamone Chanthavong, executive editor of Diversity, the student paper at Wright College in Chicago, co-moderator of the session, said afterward. “It’s getting to know your student body — getting to know them and looking at what’s in front of you.” For example, she said, students should be interviewing faculty members, security guards and other support staff, whose institutional memory of the school can be invaluable.

As for student complainers, tell them to join the paper instead of merely complaining, Chanthavong said. Reach out to people interested in free expression, Policinski added. “Go to the music department and say, ‘who would be a good writer, or somebody we could interview about music.'”

In a session called “Step Up to the Plate: Student Leadership and Diversity,” Emily Morganstein, managing editor of the Triton at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., said a colleague had criticized the idea of “affirmative action recruiting,” and wondered what others thought.

Pearl Stewart, who teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi and is founder of the Black College Wire, asked Morganstein what the reaction would be if the staff were all athletes or all fraternity members. Of course there would be no question about looking for non-athletes or non-fraternity members, Stewart said.

“What it boils down to is not extending the same courtesy to people of color that they’ve extended to people who are not members of sororities,” Stewart said.

Questions about creating diverse staffs also extended to integrating the large number of international students on some campuses and creating gender parity among increasingly female-dominated campuses and newspaper staffs.

Among the answers: printing some stories in the native languages of some foreign students, and recruiting at the fraternity houses.

One List of Ways “Not to Offend Black People”

For a Thursday session on “How Not to Offend Black People,” Valerie White brought a list of 12 points to the College Media Association conference. White teaches journalism at Florida A&M University and chairs the Black College Communication Association, an organization of student media advisers at historically black colleges and university. Her recommendations:

“The bottom line is get to know the culture you’re covering,” said Nikki G. Bannister, a student at Southern University at Baton Rouge, who co-facilitated the session and is editor of the campus paper, the Southern Digest.

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Managing Editors Discuss How to Cover Hip-Hop

“An APME panel on hip-hop in the mainstream media attempted Thursday to explain to a room filled with mostly white executives how and why newspapers can better cover the 30-year-old, $10 billion dollar genre,” Cheeto Barrera wrote in The Gazette, the newspaper of the Associated Press Managing Editors, meeting though Saturday in San Jose, Calif.

[Added Oct. 29: In elections for the APME board, Everett J. Mitchell II, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, Hollis Towns, managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, and Joseph Garcia, editor of the Daily Times in Farmington, N.M., were among the winners, Anna Molin reported Saturday. Richard Luna of the Ventura County Star in California was among those who ran.]

“Coverage of hip-hop, the panelists agreed, has been confined mainly to the negative aspects of the industry — such as rappers who are involved in shootings and other hip-hop artists who find themselves arrested.

“. . . Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and assistant vice president of news for Knight Ridder, which owns the Mercury News, added that editors need to look at themselves and the newsrooms they are in and see what can be changed.

“Look at yourselves and where you spend time,” Monroe said. “Look at who you spend time with. Look at who you have in your office. Look at whose desk you visit. Look at the dynamic of a meeting. Are you being a dominant alpha male or are you allowing others to be involved?”

“. . . But covering hip-hop brings up the issue of how to write about it without losing readers unfamiliar with that genre.

Marian Liu, pop music critic for the San Jose Mercury News, “said she balances that problem by adding extra information in boxes to quickly summarize the different terms.

“‘The way to do it is the put it in context,’ Liu said. “You have to make sure you educate the grandparents without losing the fans. (The boxes) act as a tutorial for the grandparents who had no idea about this.”

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Newark Officials Pay Weekly to Print “Good News”

Mayor Sharpe James of Newark, N.J., and his city council “have devised a new way to get their message across: paying a weekly paper $100,000 to print ‘good news’ about themselves and their city,” Jeffrey Gettleman reported Tuesday in the New York Times.

“This month, the city hired Legacy Media Group, the parent company of Visions Metro Weekly, a free tabloid with circulation of 25,000, to publicize ‘positive aspects of the city.’

“City officials say there are all sorts of upbeat stories and city-run initiatives that do not get enough coverage, like free flu shots, street hockey leagues and the Adopt-a-Block police program, which assigns police officers to specific blocks in some of the city’s tougher neighborhoods,” Gettleman wrote.

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