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After Deficit, New Director Gets Stabilizing Task

The National Association of Black Journalists announced the appointment of a new executive director last night as its president acknowledged that the world’s largest association of journalists of color ended last year with a $200,000 deficit.

The financial and management issues – undisclosed to the organization’s membership of 4,000 – led to the surprise and sudden resignation in March of Tangie Newborn, one of NABJ’s longest-serving executive directors, President Bryan Monroe told Journal-isms.

Monroe said late today, “The ship is back on course.”

But the Black College Wire, a news service for black college students that began a financial partnership with NABJ in 2004, has decided to end the alliance over the financial and management concerns, its founder and coordinator, Pearl Stewart, said.

Asked to give a funder’s view of the consequences of a grant recipient running a deficit, Eric Newton, director of journalism initiatives at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, told Journal-isms:

“The healthier an organization, the more it can help improve journalism. It’s as simple as that.”

Both NABJ and Black College Wire receive foundation grants.

The association’s new executive director is veteran association manager Karen Wynn Freeman, who “had previously served as co-executive director of APICS – The Association for Operations Management – a 45,000-member organization that specializes in production, inventory and supply chain management. An accomplished strategic planner and operational manager, she managed a $10 million annual budget and supervised a staff of 40,” a news release said.

Wynn Freeman’s appointment follows six months of turmoil in the administration of the organization, which has its headquarters on the campus of the University of Maryland outside Washington.

Jackie Greene of USA Today, a former NABJ treasurer who co-chairs a financial oversight committee established by the membership in 2001, said his committee began to see red flags late last year when revenue projections for 2005 seemed overly optimistic. Speaking of Newborn, he said, “I took all of her numbers and put them in a spreadsheet, then did a variance” between expected revenues and actual revenue. “She had numbers that were showing an 80 percent variance,” Greene said.

He and other oversight committee members alerted board members, who were reluctant to disbelieve the figures they had been given, Greene said. He added that the “Salute to Excellence” awards dinner in the fall lost $61,840.

Numbers had been placed in the wrong budget categories. “They didn’t have the skill set in the office to realize they weren’t accounting for certain things,” Greene said. The oversight committee has urged that other staff members, such as a budget analyst, be hired.

Monroe said that in January, Newborn had reported to the board a 2005 year-end surplus of about $40,000. But an investigation after her departure led by Treasurer John Yearwood – a move strongly urged by the financial oversight committee, Greene said – showed that the association ended the year with a deficit of more than $200,000.

Monroe said that “while no evidence of theft had been found, the board had serious concerns about the overall management of the finances and her disclosure to the leadership,” or lack of accurate disclosure of the situation to the leadership, “and brought those to the attention of Newborn. She resigned following that conversation in March.”

NABJ has since ordered an independent audit of the 2005 finances by the firm McGladrey & Pullen and expects results by early July, Monroe said.

A former executive director, JoAnne Lyons Wooten, stepped in as interim director for 90 days, and assisted with the search for a permanent director. However, some problems have persisted.

Stewart, of Black College Wire, said this week, “NABJ was not able to provide an audited financial statement for 2005, nor was NABJ able to provide a copy of its 2005 tax return. At least one of these documents was needed for Black College Wire to apply for a grant from the Knight Foundation to continue its programs. These documents also were needed to close out the previous grant. As a result, we found it necessary to end our relationship with NABJ, so that we might continue to maintain our strong connections with grantors.

“I think there needs to be more transparency and accountability. The members should be informed of the process,” Stewart continued. “One of the major problems has been the difficulty of getting information from NABJ about financial records. This has been an ongoing problem.”

In a “President’s Corner” message posted late this afternoon on the NABJ Web site, Monroe said “it would have been inappropriate to say much more until after conducting the investigation,” but that the finance committee had decided “that $230,000 be moved from our reserves – we didn’t touch our restricted or scholarship accounts – to cover the outstanding obligations. Within the month, all of our outstanding debts had been paid.

“Currently, let me be clear that NABJ is financially sound and has strong, positive balances and cash flow leading into the convention. The ship is back on course,” he said.

Wynn Freeman was selected from a field of more than 45 applicants during a two-month national search, the NABJ news release said.

She serves on the board of directors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Organizational Management. She earned the high-level credential Certified Association Executive from the American Society for Association Executives and studied business administration at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

For Greene, director of technology planning and fulfillment at USA Today, the system did what it was supposed to do in uncovering the deficit. “If you didn’t challenge the numbers, there was no reason to look harder. I support independent oversight. In this case, it worked,” he said.

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Reporter in Sting Operation Helps Prevent Baby Sale

Two Mexican nationals are under arrest on charges of attempting to sell a four-week-old baby boy over the Internet after reporters from the Univision station in Dallas and from Televisa Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico, filmed the attempted sale.

Andrea Rega of Univision station KUVN in Dallas told Journal-isms yesterday that the station’s involvement started after a Dallas man called the station saying that on the Internet he came across a Mexican woman who wanted to sell her baby, pleading that she had a lot of debt, was about to lose her home, and needed $50,000. “It is at times more common for working-class Hispanics to report incidents to the media instead of the police,” Daisy Pareja wrote Tuesday in her Pareja’s Media Match newsletter.

Rega said she went to the man’s home and “contacted immigration and the authorities in Mexico, and a journalist in Mexico. We filmed everything.”

The Mexican journalist, Jose Ramirez of Televisa Monterrey, pretended to be “Sergio,” the man Anna Luisa Hidalgo-Rivera had been negotiating with on the Internet, a May 18 CNN report related. “Cameras secretly videotaped their first face-to-face meeting on April 29th in Monterrey, Mexico.”

The CNN report continued:

“During a second meeting a week later, the undercover reporter asked the two how they were going to bring the baby into the United States.” Hidalgo-Rivera “and her alleged accomplice, Alejandro Hernandez, said they had taken care of the issue. The infant would be smuggled in for an additional fee.

“. . . The three appeared to have agreed to finalize the sale of the baby on May 11th in the Mexican border town” of Monterrey. “But this time, Reporter Jose Ramirez from Televisa Monterrey didn’t show up alone.

“Several Mexican agents formed a sting operation and hid nearby. Once Ramirez was face to face with the sellers, he asked them one more time to confirm their deal.

“Three Mexican federal agents surrounded and arrested” Hidalgo-Rivera “and Hernandez. And today, that tiny baby boy is in the care of a child protection agency in Mexico City.”

The report aired on KUVN as a two-part report on May 15 and May 16, Rega said, and then went nationwide as KUVN gave the story to the Univision network, CNN and others.

A May 11 news release from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico said, “The arrests of Hidalgo-Rivera and Hernandez demonstrate the importance of cross-border cooperation, and provide one more example of why democratic government depends on the press to investigate and report.â??

“We feel so great not for us, but for the baby,” Rega told Journal-isms. “He could be sold to dangerous people, and we prevented that.”

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McClatchy Finds Buyer in Akron, 4 Other Cities

The McClatchy Co. today announced “a definitive agreement” to sell the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal to a subsidiary of Black Press Ltd., a Canadian company that produces more than 100 publications in British Columbia, Alberta, Washington state and Hawaii, the company announced. Its largest paper is the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Making the announcement at the Beacon Journal, Publisher James Crutchfield said the company’s president, David Black, was “a believer in newspapers” and “wanted us badly.” Asked about leadership changes, Crutchfield said Black “wanted to look at what’s going on before making any decisions” and had mentioned a period of three months.

Publisher Crutchfield, Editor Debra Adams Simmons, and Managing Editor Mizell Stewart III are all African American.

Crutchfield’s remarks are available online.

McClatchy announced it would sell the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune and the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald to Forum Communications Co; the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel to Ogden Newspapers; and the American News of Aberdeen, S.D., to Schurz Communications, Inc. All are papers McClatchy is buying from Knight Ridder. The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., is still up for sale.

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Elizabeth Vargas Says “I Have No Complaints”

Elizabeth Vargas, who stepped down last month as anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Gail Shister, “I am not a pregnant working mother wronged. I played a crucial and active role in this decision. It’s the best thing for me and my family and my career right now. . . . I have no complaints,” Shister reported Tuesday.

As Paul Farhi noted Monday in the Washington Post, the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Council of Women’s Organizations protested Vargas’ departure as “a dispiriting return to the days of discrimination against women that we thought were behind us.”

But Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss wrote today, “There’s no shame in stepping back from a grueling schedule, especially if your future looks bright. Vargas reached the upper tier of a high-pressure, high-paying business, and now she gets a portion of her life back, too. That doesn’t sound half bad.”

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For World Cup, Reporters Write About Soccer Racism

Racism toward black players has taken its place as one of the angles for those covering the World Cup soccer matches that begin in Germany on Friday. USA Today, the New York Times, the Associated Press and the St. Petersburg Times were among the media outlets addressing the issue in the last week.

“Boorish behavior by hooligans has long been a problem in European soccer, but anti-discrimination advocates say racial slurs and racially charged incidents are on the rise because of a confluence of factors,” Kelly Whiteside wrote Friday in USA Today. “Among them: the increasing racial diversity of formerly all-white clubs, a growing resistance to immigration from African and Arab nations in several European countries, the tendency of race-related conflicts to grab headlines, and greater scrutiny of such incidents. In some areas, including rural eastern Germany, racial tension also appears to be fueled by a lack of economic opportunities for whites.”

The New York Times ran its story Sunday on the front page, citing vivid examples of racist behavior, and the St. Pete Times story added that the ugliness had a silver lining: It had spawned anti-racism projects. “About 4.5-million wristbands were sold raising more than 5-million euros (more than $6-million) for antiracism projects in 11 countries,” Dave Scheiber’s story noted.

On the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists, Joel Dreyfuss, the editor of Red Herring magazine who described himself as a longtime soccer fan and former player, said, “The situation in European soccer is more complex than just racism in the stands; there are a lot of positives: players seem to socialize more across racial lines off the field than in the U.S. Popular soap operas about soccer players on BBC and Fox Sports show interracial relationships quite casually (and reflect reality). Major teams have had black coaches and trainers for years. Frank Rijkaard, a black coach (and former world-class player) of Dutch origin, led Barcelona to the Champions League title as the best professional team in Europe last month.

“On the field, black and white players hug and kiss without self-consciousness after a goal and you’ll see hundreds of white fans wearing the shirt of Thierry Henry, the Frenchman who plays for England’s Arsenal, or Samuel Eto’o, the Cameroonian who plays for Barcelona. These two are among the best in the world.”

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Navajos Dismiss Criticism of Oprah Visit

Oprah Winfrey spent about 45 minutes with the Navajo Nation in Arizona last week for a taping of her television show, but while Winfrey’s visit “tickled and thrilled people across the reservation, some Navajo people are concerned that the filming of Navajos performing a powwow may have snowballed further stereotypes for Native Americans,” Natasha Kaye Johnson wrote Friday in the Gallup (N.M.) Independent.

That story’s theme was picked up Tuesday in a column by Dorreen Yellow Bird in the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, who wrote, “The major complaint by the Navajo people is that the powwow tradition is borrowed. It belongs mostly to the Plains tribes, and the Navajo people tried to explain that to Oprah’s company. But the Harpo companies insisted that a powwow be a part of their taping and couldn’t be persuaded into anything else, the people said. . . . The Harpo companies missed some of the beauty and wonder of this culture; the executives were guided, I suspect, by their own stereotypes.”

The criticism left George Hardeen, the Navajos’ communications director, cold.

“Navajos embrace all things Native American. It’s true the powwows came from the Plains, but so do Fords, Chevys and everything else” that Navajos use, Hardeen told Journal-isms. “It’s looking at the bad in something that’s good. We only had a few complaints. I’m perplexed about why they would find something to criticize.”

A news release (PDF) complete with photographs of the visit is on the Navajo Web site.

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Did Press Drop the Ball on Haditha Killings?

“By now, it’s clear that the U.S. military engaged in some kind of cover-up of an apparent massacre in Haditha,” Iraq, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, wrote Monday.

“Following the November killings it took months for an official investigation to begin. But even as reporters explore the story now, with impressive and detailed probes that often end up on the front page, the question must be asked: Did the press also drop the ball in probing the killings? Or was the usual roadblock – the danger of spending a lot of time in hellish Anbar province – just too difficult to overcome?”

Congressional inquiries “are expected to find that marines killed at least some of the 24 civilians slain without provocation after a roadside bomb killed a lance corporal in their squad,” the New York Times said today.

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