A year in the quest for a news media that looks like America:
1. More Than 2,000 Newspaper Jobs Lost
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More than 2,000 newspaper jobs had been eliminated by November, according to a tally in Editor & Publisher based on news reports, and with the job cuts went a number of veteran journalists, journeymen who could have been in the next generation of top leaders. Diversity programs likewise were affected.
Newspapers attributed the cuts to declining circulation resulting from competition from other media, and demands at publicly traded parent companies for greater profits, among other reasons. Among those lost amid the buyouts and other cuts: Lonnie Isabel, a deputy managing editor at Newsday and the second-highest ranking black journalist at the paper; Roy S. Johnson, assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated; Kenneth J. Cooper, national editor at the Boston Globe, whose department was eliminated; and Frank Sotomayor, 35-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times.
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With Sotomayor went the L.A. Times’ Student Journalism Program, which was training 28 high school students and 40 college journalists annually. Sotomayor was editorial director of the program.
As the San Jose Mercury News cut 52 newsroom jobs, it closed its weekly Vietnamese-language newspaper, Viet Mercury, and its weekly Spanish-language publication, Nuevo Mundo.
Television was less affected than newspapers, but 17 broadcasters of color lost their jobs as two Tribune Co. stations, KSWB-TV in San Diego and WPHL-TV in Philadelphia, closed their news departments. There were also cuts at magazines, including U.S. News & World Report and Essence.
2. Hurricane Katrina
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The response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, whose 20-foot surges reached downtown New Orleans on Aug. 29 and wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, exposed racial divisions in the country and presented challenges for news organizations, which endured hardships along with other hurricane victims.
“I’m just happy to be talking to you,” Freddie Willis, a copy editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune who is president of the New Orleans Association of Black Journalists, told Journal-isms then. He and other Times-Picayune staff members had evacuated to makeshift offices in Baton Rouge, La., and the paper published over the Internet instead of from its flood-soaked plant.
No sooner had the hurricane hit than news media terminology became an issue. Were the victims “refugees” or “evacuees”? Did they “loot” for goods or did they “find” them? Some saw racial implications in the choice of words, and photos from two different wire services — one with a caption of black people “looting” and the other of white people “finding” — were widely circulated.
A month later, news organizations acknowledged that “the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know,” as Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell put it in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
The National Association of Black Journalists established “NABJ Gulf Coast Fellowships” to tell the overlooked stories of African Americans, and today named the five NABJ Gulf Coast Fellows.
3. Firsts
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It might be 2005, but there remain barriers for journalists of color to break. Dean Baquet, Michael Days and Glenn Proctor became the first African American editors at the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Daily News and Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch respectively.
Elizabeth Vargas, named to co-anchor ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight” after the death of Peter Jennings, has a Puerto Rican father and was quickly claimed by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists as the first Latina to regularly anchor the weeknight network evening news; Martin Bashir, named as a co-anchor of ABC-TV’s “Nightline” after the
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departure of Ted Koppel, is the son of Pakistanis; and Ketan N. Gandhi, an Indian immigrant, became president and publisher of the Gannett Co.’s Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, N.J., becoming the first South Asian publisher of a U.S. daily newspaper.
Dele Olojede, former Newsday foreign editor who revisited the Rwanda genocide 10 years later, became the first African-born journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize.
4. Notable Deaths Test Page One Editors
In addition to what the loss of these cultural touchstones meant to the black community and to the nation, the deaths of actor Ossie Davis, lawyer Johnnie Cochran, singer Luther Vandross, publisher John H. Johnson, playwright August Wilson, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and comic actor Richard Pryor tested the news media’s understanding of these notables’ significance.
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Parks’ passing came closest to being universally judged a Page One story. In many cases, as with the death of Johnson, some papers with African American editors underplayed the story as much as many white editors.
However, some news organizations seized upon these opportunities to shine, including the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, which had Parks stories on its front page for more than a week; papers in Seattle and Pittsburgh, which gave extensive coverage to Wilson, who lived in both places; and Pryor’s hometown paper, the Peoria (Ill.) Journal-Star, which like Scripps-Howard’s Florida Treasure Coast papers, filled much of its front page with his obituary.
5. Essence Sold to Time Inc.
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Like the sale of Black Entertainment Television in 2000 to Viacom, the January announcement that Time Inc. would buy a controlling interest in Essence magazine signaled the end of black ownership of another media company.
Time. Inc. praised the cross-pollination that would result; Essence executives extolled the added benefits that would accrue; and Earl G. Graves of Black Enterprise argued that black entrepreneurs should have had the chance to preserve Essence as a black institution.
Meanwhile, in February, the Essence spinoff Suede was placed on “hiatus,” prompting comments on the Journal-isms message boards that still continue. Later, the Spanish-language Cristina and the latest version of Savoy also went on “hiatus.” However, Heart & Soul, which like Savoy was owned by Vanguarde Media, which went bankrupt, returned in October.
6. Armstrong Williams Becomes Household Name
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Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams became the personification of Bush administration efforts to influence the news media covertly when it was disclosed that the Education Department paid him to help promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
Although Williams said many times that he was not a journalist, journalists were tainted by the brush. He received the Thumbs Down award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
7. Numbers, numbers, numbers
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In its annual newspaper newsroom survey, the American Society of Newspaper Editors announced in April there were 7,267 journalists of color in 2005, compared with 7,016 in 2004. Journalists of color represented only 13.42 percent of the newsroom workforce, up slightly from 12.95 percent the year before.
An analysis of figures from 1990 to 2005 showed that “Newsroom diversity is below its peak levels at most daily newspapers in the US, including three-fourths of the largest papers,” according to a June study for the Knight Foundation by Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig.
However, the nation’s largest newspaper operation, the Gannett Co., announced in September it had set company records, reporting that 19.4 percent of all journalists at its newspapers were people of color. The previous record was 18.6 percent.
The Washington Post demonstrated what a concerted effort could accomplish. Ten months after racial rumblings followed the appointment of a white managing editor, the number of full-time professionals of color stood at an all-time high of 151, Executive Editor Leonard Downie said in September. “More than half the newsroom professionals who were hired this year have been journalists of color,” Downie said.
On the broadcast side, the Center for Media and Public Affairs reported in March that correspondents of color were 23 percent less visible on the broadcast networks’ evening news programs in the 2004 election year than they were in 2003.
At local stations, the Radio-Television News Directors Association reported in July, “The percentage of minorities working in local television news last year was largely unchanged. The percentage of minorities working in local radio dropped.”
8. New York Times Co. Denies New Weekly Is “Black”
The New York Times Co. produced a weekly newspaper in Gainesville, Fla., but only after firing the editor who created a firestorm by calling it a “black” newspaper.
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Charlotte Roy, who guided the development of the Gainesville Guardian, was let go in August, a day before the first issue was due. Editors of the parent Gainesville Sun insisted the paper was actually a “community” newspaper.
The concept of the paper as black-oriented was criticized as an affront to the black press after plans for it were disclosed in June. The experiment indicated that although mainstream newspapers have produced products for the Hispanic community, it would not be so easy to do for African Americans.
Roy said today she is in New Jersey “at another dream job” — working with an ad agency spreading the word about a breakthrough drug that will help people with sickle cell disease.
9. More Ethical Problems
Detroit Free Press star columnist Mitch Albom received unspecified disciplinary action after describing an event that had not yet occurred. Television critic Ken Parish Perkins of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was forced to resign after using a paragraph of background material from Entertainment Weekly without attribution.
At the Sacramento Bee, Diana Griego Erwin resigned in May amid an investigation into whether she fabricated some of the people she mentioned in several columns.
On the other hand, syndicated Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry told Washington Post readers in December he was ending the column he has written since 1966.
Raspberry’s reason: He started an early childhood education initiative in his hometown, Okolona, Miss., for which he needs to raise money, and said he believed it a conflict of interest for him to try to raise funds while writing his column, at the Post or anywhere else.
10. Unity Forces Change in Law
In May, Unity: Journalists of Color prompted Massachusetts to repeal a 1675 statute that barred Indians from entering Boston.
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Although the law was not enforced, Native American journalists said they would not support Boston as a choice for the 2008 Unity convention as long as the law remained on the books. Despite the repeal, Unity chose Chicago.
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Mae Cheng |
The five-year strategic plan (PDF) for the alliance of black, Hispanic, Asian American and Native American journalist associations indicates such activism might be a harbinger of things to come. It calls for Unity to “participate in national policy debates involving journalism before federal and state regulators, and other institutions, in collaboration with other media organizations when appropriate,” and to “organize and host a presidential debate during the 2008 election cycle.”
Unity President Mae Cheng, an assistant city editor for Newsday, said,”We will also play a greater role in working with communities of color across the country to learn how we can better cover them and their issues – as well as to ensure that news products better serve them.”
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