Time to “Focus on the Future,” Paper’s Editor Says
Newsday Editor John Mancini, who announced in September that the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper would cut 45 editorial positions and trim New York City coverage, today said 49 newsroom employees had taken buyout offers, including columnists Katti Gray and Sheryl McCarthy, and reporters Patty Hurtado, Daryl Khan, Tomoeh Murakami, Reggie Thomas, Indrani Sen, Nedra Rhone, Theresa Vargas and Monty Phan.
[Added Nov. 8: Gray said she would remain at the paper on a contract basis continuing her column for the paper’s Part II features section every other week, going weekly in January. But she said Tuesday she also wanted to write and teach: “I want to do some things that are impossible for me to do at most newspapers. I leave with the expecation that I might be in a newsroom again. It’s a crazy time” everywhere now, she said.]
As reported Friday, columnist McCarthy, who worked in the New York office, said the paper offered her a contract that would place her column “in the drastically cut New York pages. I’m not pleased about that.” However, McCarthy said she had made no final decision.
Those on the Newsday list, distributed to staffers late today, are:
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Arnie Abrams |
Jeanne Murphy |
Mancini told Journal-isms today before the list was circulated that it was time to “focus on the future” and that the departures were part of a fundamental shift in the way news was disseminated. At Newsday, that means a shift away from New York City, where Newsday had once hoped to expand, back to its Long Island roots.
The buyouts were only the latest at the paper, which is under orders from the parent Tribune Co. to cut costs, and is reeling financially from a circulation scandal. In September, Newsday let go the two deputy managing editors, including Lonnie Isabel, the second-highest ranking African American in the newsroom, who oversaw the health and science department and national, foreign and state coverage
Mancini then named veteran Newsday editor and columnist Les Payne to direct the national and foreign desks as associate editor, an “attempt to stabilize the national and foreign coverage,” Payne told Journal-isms at the time, “which at the moment needs stabilizing.”
“Diversity is an initiative at Newsday,” Mancini told Journal-isms then. “We want to continue that tradition. It’s very important to us, and to me,” Mancini said. Payne is the paper’s highest ranking African American editor.
“I don’t see other things we can cut and be true to our mission,” Mancini said in September.
John Hope Franklin Blasts “Lying” News Media
John Hope Franklin, the venerated 90-year-old historian, told African American columnists today, “I didn’t know how many ways people could lie until I heard the lying about me.” He said he was speaking about newspaper editors, reporters and columnists.
Franklin was expanding on comments in his new memoir, “Mirror to America,” in which he assails the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe for their reporting on his tenure as advisory chair of President Bill Clinton‘s Initiative on Race in 1997 and 1998. He also expressed disgust with the Fourth Estate as represented by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, describing the sparse turnout for his presentation on the race commission when he came to the ASNE convention in Washington in April 1998.
“They stayed away in droves,” he told the Trotter Group over breakfast at Fisk University in Nashville, though the editors were at the convention “in enormous numbers.”
In 1997, Clinton called for a national dialogue on race and appointed Franklin, a retired historian and educator who served as professor of legal history at Duke University Law School from 1982 to 1992, to head its advisory board.
The idea was criticized almost from its inception.
“From the time that the op-ed by Ward Connerly and Newt Gingrich appeared in the New York Times the day after the announcement of the president’s creation of the advisory board, to the board’s disbanding in September 1998, the communications industry reported what it wished to report and not what actually transpired,” Franklin writes in his memoir.
“From the outset, it was clear that the media defined ‘conversation’ on race as a ‘debate’,” he continued. “If there were no fireworks, that was clear evidence that nothing of importance was being accomplished. If there were, then necessarily something was amiss.”
A New York Times reporter “willfully and regularly distorted my positions,” Franklin wrote, and that paper’s reporting was picked up by others, including the Chicago Tribune, “which sent no reporter to attend board meetings, accepted as fact The Times reportage and decried my supposed misconduct,” Franklin said.
The misconduct? “It was widely and inaccurately reported that I had said that conservatives would not be invited to meetings because they had nothing to contribute. I denied this numerous times and repeatedly sent corrective letters to editors who had attributed such a statement to me. None of them printed my letters,” Franklin wrote in the book.
Citing a front-page story in the Boston Globe on June 14, 1998, “Year dialogue on race ending with a whisper,” the historian repeated the Globe’s statement that “for his entire year as chairman, Franklin never met face-to-face with Clinton.” Replied Franklin in the book, “This was, of course, stunningly inaccurate.”
He told Trotter Group members that he passed along the Globe statement to Clinton, who had awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. Clinton replied, “All the times we were on Air Force One?”
[Added Nov. 8: Ann Scales, the Boston Globe reporter who wrote the June 1998 story, told Journal-isms, “If John Hope Franklin would have called me and asked for a correction, and he turned out to be right, I would have written one. My recollection is that the first I heard of this was today.”]
At the breakfast meeting, Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson asked how Franklin would rate President Bush. “President Bush is not even on the ratings scale,” he replied. “There’s no evidence that he has any interest in the public weal.” He noted Bush’s lack of travel outside the country before he became president and his publicly stated decision not to read newspapers. He compared him with his father, George H.W. Bush, who traveled extensively, and said, “I don’t see anything to talk about when you talk about George Bush.” Asked later which presidents were acceptable, he named Clinton, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson as he autographed copies of his book for the journalists.
Franklin also said, in response to a question from Donna Britt of the Washington Post, that he was in favor of reparations for slavery, “not for your sake, or for my sake, but for the nation’s sake — so the country can face up to its sordid past.”
And the author of the classic “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans” also criticized the lack of “critical judgment” in the country. “Who’s objecting to Halliburton for those no-bid contracts?” he asked.
- John Hope Franklin puts a ‘Mirror to America‘ (National Public Radio)
- Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Figures of history still have things we must hear
[Added Nov. 8:
- Adrienne Washington, Washington Times: Vote today to show you haven’t lost your way ]
[Added Nov. 9:
- Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: Bush’s failing grade on racial issues
- Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press: Rosa Parks 1 of 1,000s ]
Student-Athletes’ Fate Called More Than Sports Story
The media “was pretty negative toward us” but now seems to be singing a different tune, another speaker at the Trotter Group conference, David Williams, Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor and general counsel said today.
Williams was talking about a sea change in the university’s attitude toward the place athletes and athletics should hold at Vanderbilt. In 2000, all the black males who graduated had come from the athletics program. [Added Nov. 8: And partly due to the lack of black-male distractions, he said, black women are the group on campus with the highest grade-point average.]
In 2003, the university abolished its athletics department, decided to treat athletes the same as other students, and assured students and parents that “you are going to get an education here and that education will take you a lot further than sports ever will,” in Williams’ words.
Vanderbilt tackled a system in which, at some schools, student-athletes brought glory to their school but never actually graduated. At least one NFL player went back and got an education after his NFL career was over, he said, speaking at the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute.
The stories about the 2003 restructuring were all written by sportswriters, Williams said, when “it really was a people story”: Students who breathed athletics were now able to go on study-abroad programs like everyone else and integrated into the rest of the student body.
And on Sunday, a follow-up story by Vanderbilt beat writer Bryan Mullen in the Nashville Tennessean ran in the “Issues” section. It began: “Chicken Little has had little to say.
“The sun still rose, the tides still flow, and Vanderbilt University is still standing.
“That’s not what critics portended two years ago when one of the most radical decisions in Division I college athletics history was enacted by Vanderbilt administrators.
“. . . There are two ways to gauge the success of the program’s first two years: It hasn’t been a failure because most of the athletic programs are still winning, recruits are still coming, and coaches are staying put. But it also has yet to permeate into other universities, a theory Vanderbilt administrators espoused when unveiling the model.”
After hearing Williams, the columnists, who mostly write for opinion and Metro pages rather than the sports columns, applauded the initiative. Some said they wished more administrators shared his attitude.
