New Savoy Magazine Goes on “Hiatus”

Underfinancing Halts Black Lifestyle Monthly

The new Chicago-based incarnation of Savoy magazine, which debuted in February, is on “hiatus” and unable to pay its contributors, but plans a Web edition in December, publisher Hermene Hartman told Journal-isms.

“I was underfinanced from the get-go,” said Hartman, Publisher of the Chicago weekly N’Digo. “I’m waiting on some dollars to come in.” Savoy’s last issue was dated June/July.

“I can’t pay writers and I can’t pay staff. Advertising is wonderful; reader response is wonderful,” Hartman said Sunday. The lifestyles publication had an unaudited circulation of 325,000, she said.

Savoy, which aspired to be a “black Vanity Fair,” was the flagship publication of Vanguarde Media, whose publications were auctioned in bankruptcy proceedings last year. Others in the Vanguarde stable were Heart & Soul, a health and fitness magazine, and Honey, which described itself as “a fashion and entertainment magazine aimed at stylish urban women.”

Hartman bought Savoy for $600,000 from the Jungle Media Group, a small New York publishing house that won the magazine at auction in May 2004 for $375,000 plus the assumption of consumer liabilities. Hartman hired as editor Monroe Anderson, a Chicago-based veteran journalist who had worked at Ebony, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago’s WBBM-TV.

Hartman said the publication ran into higher-than-expected postal expenses when it failed to qualify to mail at magazine postal rates. “We missed it by a month. We were out of publication for a full year,” she explained. “We were mailing out at full postal rates, and magazine status is half of that.”

Hartman’s debut issue in February featured Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and his wife, Michelle Obama. It ran 116 pages and carried 14 articles, features and columns. It planned to publish 10 times a year, with combined issues for June/July and December/January, as Target Market News reported then.

Anderson is editing the online edition of Savoy, which will be posted at http://www.savoymag.com, Hartman said. Writers who are owed money will be paid when “some dollars come in,” and subscriptions will be honored, she said.

Of the other Vanguarde products, Honey was bought at auction in May 2004 by a company headed by Philmore Anderson, a former record company executive who has not yet relaunched the magazine, and Heart & Soul reappeared on Oct. 7. [Added Nov. 17: Anderson said he was still assembling financing for the magazine and “we’ll be publishing in ’06.”]

The health and fitness publication had been purchased at auction by Baltimore-based Twenty-First Century Group. Publisher Edwin V. Avent told Journal-isms Sunday that “we had similar issues” as Savoy with its postal costs, but “you have to have enough capital to deal with it. It’s something you have to budget.”

The next Heart & Soul issue is scheduled for February/March, and after that it will publish every other month, Avent said. As reported last month, Yanick Rice Lamb has returned to the publication as editorial director.

Posting of material below was delayed until Nov. 16:

Some Journalists of Color Denied San Jose Buyout

Some 52 reporters, copy editors, photographers and newsroom support staff at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News accepted buyout offers or agreed to retire, the paper announced Friday, but some journalists of color were upset because their requests to share in the buyout cash were turned down.

“The paper didn’t want its already pathetic [diversity] numbers to go lower,” one staffer told Journal-isms today. Another said, “I know of at least three minority staffers who were told don’t even consider applying.” Neither journalist, still employed at the paper, wished to be identified.

By the second person’s calculation, of 42 people from the Mercury News newsroom who received the buyout, 86 percent were white, though one-third of those who wanted the buyout were people of color. Some had already accepted jobs elsewhere, so the buyout offer would have been a bonus.

This staffer conceded that the paper might have turned down journalists of color to maintain newsroom diversity, but said, “it looks just as bad that you’ve given a golden parachute to white members of the staff.”

Editor Susan Goldberg did not respond to a telephone call from Journal-isms.

The Mercury News announced plans Sept. 23 to cut about 15 percent of its news staff “to combat an industry-wide slump in revenue.

“The paper will offer buyouts to all union employees in its newsroom, including those who write for the editorial pages and two affiliated publications, Nuevo Mundo and Viet Mercury,” a Mercury News story said on Sept. 24. “The goal is to reduce the current editorial staff by 52 full-time positions, from 332 to 280.”

But “as time went on, it seemed the criteria got more” restrictive, a staffer said. “A lot of the minority staffers were told you don’t fit the criteria,” which were not clearly defined.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 21, the paper announced it was selling its weekly Vietnamese-language newspaper, Viet News, and closing its weekly Spanish-language publication, Nuevo Mundo.

The Viet News employees were included in the list of 52 distributed Friday. These other Latino, African American and Asian American journalists were on that list: Nora Villagran, Pat Lopes Harris, Thaii Walker, Marina Hinestrona, Reynaldo Barrioz, Maria Consuelo Alba-Speyer, Guadalupe Gervas, Glenda Queensbury and Eugene Louie.

Larry Olmstead, Knight Ridder’s vice president/staff development and diversity, told Journal-isms on Oct. 24, “everybody in San Jose is very aware that we live in a multicultural community that needs to be served.” The Mercury News “does as good a job as any newspaper in the country” in reflecting the ethnic communities of its circulation area, he said, and would continue to do so.

• San Jose Newspaper Guild comments, reports
• Knight Ridder says it will consider selling the company (San Jose Mercury News)

Black U.S. Journalist Sees Parallels in French Rioting

How rare is it for a black American journalist for a major news organization to have been assigned to Paris for five years, and to be available for perspective after France erupts in ethnic strife?

Keith B. Richburg, now the Washington Post’s foreign editor, the No. 2 foreign job, was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent from August 2000 to May 2005. On Sunday, the Post published his “The Other France, Separate and Unhappy.”

“If it was obvious to me that France was ripe for a social explosion – it may be because I’d seen it before,” Richburg wrote. “I grew up in 1960s Detroit, where the growing black underclass remained similarly invisible, and the police force in black neighborhoods was similarly viewed as an occupying army.

“The French can take a lesson from what we learned in this country after the 1960s riots. They can start by correcting the national phobia against anything that smacks of an American-style affirmative action program, and embrace some method of bringing its minority populations into the mainstream.”

Richburg’s Post colleague, columnist Eugene Robinson, a former foreign editor himself, made a similar point. “The failed French experiment proves that you can’t make differences and disparities disappear simply by ignoring them,” Robinson wrote Friday. “Other countries have tried that approach and likewise have failed. When I covered Brazil in the late 1980s, I was struck by how residents of the violent, desperate shantytowns were mostly black and the powerful people who ran the society were almost all white – yet people insisted there was no racism. Now, belatedly, Brazil is beginning to try to redress more than a century of unacknowledged discrimination.”

On the public radio show “On the Media,” Susan Caskie of The Week magazine noted that for many in the media, the story was not the condition of the people who were rioting, but the effect of the rioting on French politics.

• Denise Rolark Barnes, Washington Informer: Someone’s Always Watching Us
• David Crary, Associated Press: Riots in France and Hurricane Katrina Have Forced Sparring Nations to Confront Race
• Elaine Ganley, Associated Press: French Media Using Less Rioting Footage
• Paul Jaffe, Popandpolitics.com: The Suburbs Are Burning
• Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Riots in Paris offer lessons at home
• Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: No riots here yet, but …

Ron Harris, Ex-Marine Face Off Over Atrocities

As noted here Friday, Ron Harris, formerly embedded with U.S. troops for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote this on his paper’s front page Nov. 5: “For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

“In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians. . . . Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated.”

The story quickly found an audience. On Sunday, David Holwerk, editorial page editor of California’s Sacramento Bee apologized to readers for publishing a piece by Massey and set out to explain why he had.

The Sacramento Bee’s sister California paper, the Modesto Bee, which also ran a piece by Massey, published an explanation by Opinions Pages Editor Judy Sly, who told readers, “We failed to check out adequately the information that appeared in our publication. . . . We want to assure you that we have learned from this experience and will beef up procedures to prevent a painful repeat.”

Conservatives were happy to latch on to the story. In a commentary that ran Saturday in the Washington Times, syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin denounced the mainstream media as Massey’s “enablers.” The New York Post asked, “How much more proof is needed that the mainstream media are nothing less than shrill propaganda outlets for the Bush-bashing anti-war crowd, willing — almost eager — to undermine the efforts of America’s fighting men and women?”

Massey defended himself with a piece, “Is Ron Harris Telling the Truth?” for the Sacramento Bee, and Harris and Massey faced off today on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!“

Downside of Pressure on Asians to Achieve

“As much as the mainstream press wants to applaud Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing ‘down the whole race’ with ‘a B,’ as one Asian student said to our reporter, we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure,” Monica Eng wrote Sunday in the Chicago Tribune. She was responding to a New York Times story about “two Korean sisters flogging their book ‘Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers – and How You Can Too.'”

“Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders and most sadly,” Eng continued, “Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates in the nation among women age 15 to 24 – an American age category that holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.”

“. . . This isn’t big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our dirty little secret.”

Short Takes

• Greg Stanford, editorial writer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, helped ignite the wrath of conservatives by writing an editorial that said, in an aside, that as far as diversity is concerned, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas deserves an asterisk because his views lie outside the mainstream of African American thinking. Stanford returned to the subject in a column Sunday, saying he had analyzed the feedback and concluded, “it is inapt colorblindness that helps keep the nation stuck on race and apt racial consciousness that leads to progress.”
• “Univision Communications announced Monday that it has named Michael Wortsman as president of the Spanish-language broadcaster’s television group,” Jay Sherman reported today in Television Week.
• Deborah Mathis, syndicated columnist and former White House correspondent for Gannett News Service, said that many reporters who cover President Bush no longer trust White House spokesman Scott McClellan, according to Mark Hand, writing today in PR Week.
• Lori Wilson, who left Atlanta’s WGCL-TV after having been a reporter and anchor there since fall 2002, joins Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV on Nov. 28, Dan Gross reported today in the Philadelphia Daily News.
• “Sunniya Marquez, an unpaid intern at Chicago Public Radio’s WBEZ-FM (91.5), has received a $1,500 stipend from the Chicago Headline Club Foundation,” Robert Feder reported today in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The Southern Illinois University graduate is working with ‘Worldview’ host Jerome McDonnell during her three-month internship.”
• Robert Jamieson, columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, argued Saturday that playwright August Wilson deserves a fitting memorial in the city, such as an “August Wilson Boulevard.” A public memorial service for the Pulitzer Prize winner, who died in October of liver cancer, is planned for Nov. 21 at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. In the other Washington, Howard University plans a celebration this Thursday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Cramton Auditorium.
• The Record in Stockton, Calif., asked some African Americans to sit with staffers and watch the new “The Boondocks” television series. Reaction was mixed, reported Ian Hill on Thursday. In the New York Daily News today, columnist E.R. Shipp wrote, “Good luck with your TV show, Aaron. But if you remain true to your pledge to bombard us with the N-word, I don’t think there is enough Botox in the world to keep me watching and wincing and still keeping it together. I’ll tune out.”
• “Tensions along the Mississippi Gulf Coast are surfacing between contractors and immigrant workers who’ve arrived to repair roofs, clean up debris and tear down destroyed property” as a result of Hurricane Katrina, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported Nov. 6. The story by Julie Goodman, cited by the Gannett Co. on its diversity page, said, ‘”the mostly Hispanic workers, many of whom support families in their native countries, are reporting a pattern of being short-changed on payments, unfairly arrested and subjected to subtle threats of deportation. One Mexican worker who has lived in the United States for 14 years said a colleague of a contractor waved a gun in his face.”
• Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, told NABJ’s Kansas City chapter that its annual Urban Student Journalism Academy is “a model for others on how to reach back and lift up,” Diane Carroll reported Sunday in the Kansas City Star. Her story listed the journalism awards the chapter bestowed that day.
• “Nepal’s Supreme Court today rejected media petitions for the suspension of a draconian new law that bans FM radio news broadcasts and curbs critical newspaper coverage,” the Committee to Protect Journalists reported.
• Kwame Kilpatrick won re-election as Detroit’s mayor after a race in which “The black bourgeoisie was pitted against the working poor, the darks against the lights, the intellectuals against the street fighters,” Desiree Cooper wrote Thursday in the Detroit Free Press.