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Cosby and Stone

richard

NABJ’s First Leader Stands Behind Old Friend

Bill Cosby might be taking brickbats from some for his two-year-long crusade for more personal responsibility among some black parents, but he has been able to count on longtime friend Chuck Stone, the venerated former editor, columnist and founding president of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Columnist Barry Saunders reported today in the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer that hundreds turned out Saturday night at the University of North Carolina’s Memorial Hall “to honor retired UNC journalism prof Chuck Stone and to hear The Cos talk about marriage, his childhood and his brother Russell. The only pain anyone felt was in their sides from laughing so hard.”

Stone, 81, was editor of the New York Age, the Washington Afro-American and the Chicago Defender; spent 20 years as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, where, fearing unfriendly police, 75 black or Hispanic murder suspects turned themselves in to him; and ended a 14-year run last year as the Walter Spearman professor at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Cosby flew in Saturday from Atlanta, where earlier that day his message of personal and parental responsibility received standing ovations from the thousands attending the 20th anniversary of the 100 Black Men of America convention,” Saunders wrote.

“I didn’t get a chance to talk to Cosby after Saturday’s performance. He was out the door and possibly in the air back to Philadelphia before the applause and laughter subsided.

“Professor Stone, a 40-year Cosby friend, told me Cosby is undeterred by the criticism.

“Stone said he had called Cosby ‘just to talk’ back when the chorus against him was loudest. ‘I said “Hang in there, Bill; you’re absolutely right.” I heard him call out to his wife “Hey Camille, Chuck Stone agrees with me.” ‘

“Hey Camille, so do a lot of us,” Saunders concluded.

The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill started the Chuck Stone Citizen of the World Award Fund in February,” Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan reported June 9 in the Durham (N.C.) Herald-Sun, to finance study abroad or independent international learning opportunities related to journalism or mass communication. More than $16,000 has been raised, she wrote.

“The university contacted Bill Cosby — a longtime friend of Stone — about the fund and received an offer to perform,” her story continued.

Like Saunders, Vaughan wrote that Stone had called Cosby a few years ago after some Cosby remarks about young black men.

“I called him and said, ‘Keep up the good work.’ We need to be tough love,” she quoted Stone as saying. “Too often our young brothers think being a basketball star is making it.”

“Cosby’s reason for doing the benefit show was to the point,” Vaughan continued.

“‘My admiration for Chuck Stone’s integrity as a journalist,’ he told Stephanie Gunter, assistant director of development and alumni affairs for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”

Saunders wrote one of many recent columns on the roles of black men and black fathers, most timed for Father’s Day:

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Cuban Calls Imprisoned Journalists U.S. Agents

“The head of Cuba’s parliament denied his country had imprisoned more than two dozen journalists because they spoke out against his government,” Laura Wides-Munoz wrote Wednesday for the Associated Press, reporting on a rare interview broadcast that day at the convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“‘Those reports are fairly exaggerated,’ said Speaker Ricardo Alarcón, saying those who were imprisoned were not independent journalists but were agents of the United States.”

“Alarcón waved a photocopy of what he said were declassified U.S. Department of State documents showing the CIA had paid journalists to promote anti-Cuban government propaganda for nearly five decades.

“Outside the convention, more than a dozen women dressed in black protested Alarcón’s interview with [Columbia] University journalism professor and New York Times contributor Mirta Ojito, herself a Cuban exile.”

“When speaking of black representation in Cuba’s government, which has been labeled by some human-rights groups as an apartheid-style regime that gives Cuba’s black population no real positions of power, Alarcón said, ‘you have people that are blacker than my suit’ in positions of power in Cuban institutions,” Oscar Corral wrote Thursday in the Miami Herald.

He also “warned that those seeking to overthrow Cuba’s revolutionary gains will never be welcome there,” as Alfredo Corchado reported Thursday in the Dallas Morning News.

“The problem is those Cubans who want to come back to recover their land, their homes,” he said. “I assure you. I swear to you, they will never have a role in Cuba again.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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N.Y. Times Program Targets Hispanic Students

“The New York Times announced today the expansion of its highly successful New York Times Student Journalism Institute to include a program for student members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). It will be held in January 2007,” the New York Times Co. said on Thursday.

“The Institute will be a highly competitive, 10-day, hands-on journalism residency program offered to aspiring student reporters, editors, photographers and designers who are members of the NAHJ. The inaugural program will be held Jan. 3-13, 2007, at Florida International University in Miami. In the second year the program will be held at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and thereafter it will alternate between the two campuses.

“This Institute is an outgrowth of a program The Times has offered since 2003 for students at historically black colleges and universities.” That program is held annually in May at Dillard University in New Orleans.

Plans for the institute were disclosed this winter by top newsroom managers who responded to an internal committee that warned in a confidential report that “The Times is a newspaper at risk. If it fails to diversify its work force and to make attendant changes in its corporate culture, the Times will inevitably lose stature.”

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced it again at a standing-room-only employee meeting on diversity on June 9. Spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said, “There was a good discussion of our diversity efforts and what we will do going forward,” but others said privately they were not as impressed with management promises.

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Cable Needs Help With Diversity at Mid-Ranks

“A very important e-mail went out last week to all cable multiple system operators and cable programming networks. It came from Kathy Johnson, president of the National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications, who is updating her database about industry hiring practices,” Marianne Paskowski wrote Monday in Television Week.

“She’s asking some 50 companies to update their progress, or lack thereof, with regard to minority hiring. The feedback garnered from NAMIC’s earlier surveys doesn’t show stellar performance, but the needle is sort of moving in the right direction, Ms. Johnson said. ‘Cable has a great track record in hiring women, but not necessarily minorities,’ she said.

“NAMIC, which embraces diversity in the workplace, is in its fourth year of polling companies about their multiethnic hiring practices. Yes, companies are attaining higher scores for hiring people of color, but basically most of the progress is being made at the entry level.

“And according to Ms. Johnson, study results from last year reflected a slight tick upward — from 5 percent to 7 percent — in the number of minorities at cable companies at the senior VP level or above.

“The bad news is that middle-ranked managers, mostly people of color, are fleeing cable’s ranks. Minorities are very underrepresented at that level, she said, explaining that Hispanics are poorly represented in cable’s hierarchy largely because many of them are immigrants and don’t have college educations.

“NAMIC will release its latest survey findings at its annual national conference in September in New York.”

Two online surveys, a corporate survey and a NAMIC member employee survey, were completed via e-mail by 15 cable companies and 250 NAMIC members, respectively. Cable news networks were not separated out, Johnson told Journal-isms.

According to the group’s 2004 survey results, blacks comprise 14.7 percent of the cable industry workforce, Asians 4 percent, and Latinos 8 percent.

“Overall, minorities represent over 26 percent of the cable industry workforce. . . . Minorities also represent 17 percent of employees in management positions,” reads an executive summary of the 2004 report.

“Within the cable industry workforce, however, of those employees in management positions, minorities accounted for only 7 percent of top-management positions. They accounted for 13 percent of employees in middle-management positions, and 22.7 percent of employees in lower-management positions.”

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Columnist Wants Action After Rosenbaum Report

“Colbert King, the Washington Post columnist who spent months digging up evidence that former New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum was improperly treated by D.C. emergency crews after he was assaulted in January, believes a city report released today supporting his findings is positive, but not enough,” Joe Strupp wrote today in Editor & Publisher.

“King, who wrote more than a half-dozen columns and at least two editorials about problems related to the poor treatment Rosenbaum received during the Jan. 6 incident, told E&P the report’s contention that police, paramedics and hospital staffers all erred means changes should be made and those in charge held accountable.

“‘Now the question is, ‘what will happen?’ What will the mayor do? Who will be held accountable for this?’ he said Friday, just hours after reading the report from the D.C. Inspector General’s Office. ‘There are specific things in the report that cry out for personnel changes.'”

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N.Y. Times’ Chinese Researcher Pleads Not Guilty

“A Chinese researcher for The New York Times pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of leaking state secrets in a case that rights activists say underscores Beijing’s continued rejection of press freedom,” Gillian Wong reported today for the Associated Press.

“The closed-door trial for Zhao Yan, 44, who has been detained for 22 months, ended Friday after one day with no verdict, one of his lawyers, Mo Shaoping, said.”

The Times editorialized Thursday: “If Mr. Zhao is convicted, it means that despite China’s many advances in recent years, the government and the legal system are moving backward. It means that the government is tightening control over information. And it means that China is willing to abuse its citizens’ rights and the country’s legal code when it needs a scapegoat in the name of state security.”

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Editorial Writer’s Side Dish: “Cultural Dining”

Nancy Ancrum, editorial writer at the Miami Herald, is going on the road with her business partner, Robbie Bell, in conjunction with the dining column they write in the Herald, “The Cultural Kitchen.“

“I and my business partner and fellow foodie, Robbie Bell, put on cultural dining,” Ancrum told Journal-isms. “We work with chefs to develop a meal that highlights a people, a culture, a technique, etc. The chef will give a little talk to our patrons in between courses about the cultural significance of what they are about to eat.

“It’s a lot of fun — people get to socialize, network and learn something all in one shot. We’re hitting the road to Memphis and the Mississippi Delta in September for a food and culture tour —including dinner at Morgan Freeman‘s restaurant and cocktails at his blues club.” The Memphis-born Freeman co-owns Madidi in Clarksdale, Miss.

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Maynard Was “at Least 10 Years Ahead of the Curve”

“As I’ve watched the world of journalism unfold at the Newseum and the Knight Foundation, it has become clear that in a business where most people can’t see past lunch, Bob was a true journalism entrepreneur, who lived his life at least 10 years ahead of the curve,” Eric Newton said June 10 as the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University unveiled its Bob Maynard Suite.

Newton, founding managing editor of the Newseum, the Freedom Forum’s museum of news; managing editor of the Oakland Tribune under the ownership of Bob and Nancy Maynard; and director of journalism initiatives at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said the Tribune practiced in the 1970s and 1980s what would later be called “civic journalism.”

“Then there was the matter of Tribune TV, the newsroom television program we were right in the middle of developing, and the on-line service we were considering and the magazines and books we did — all before the invention of the World Wide Web. . . .” Newton continued.

In remarks published on the Poynter Institute Web site, Newton said, “the Tribune’s newsroom diversity numbers blossomed in advance of those at other big American dailies, but more than that, Bob’s newsroom didn’t just look more interesting, it had a more interesting way of acting. We had a more open, inclusive way of doing journalism. . . .

“And finally, Bob and Nancy did something that wasn’t just ahead of their time, but transcended time. During the 20th century in America, more than 1,000 daily newspapers closed. The Oakland Tribune was not one of them. The Maynards saved it.”

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