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Bryan Monroe to Edit Ebony, Jet

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NABJ President Awarded Newly Created Position

Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, today was named vice president and editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines.

 

 

Monroe, 40, was assistant vice president for news at Knight Ridder Inc., the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, which went out of business last week, absorbed by the McClatchy Co.

The appointment is unprecedented in that Ebony, the nation’s largest black-oriented magazine, modeled on the old general-interest Life magazine when it began in 1945, and Jet, its newsier, gossipy compact-sized sibling founded in 1951, have traditionally had separate editors and they have come from inside the company.

Monroe said from Chicago, where the news was announced to staffers at a luncheon this afternoon, “I am going to spend my initial time just learning, because I come from the newspaper side of things. I’ve got to learn a lot about magazines. I’m so excited and honored that I’ll be continuing a great legacy with Ebony and Jet and Johnson publications.”

He told Journal-isms he was especially pleased to have had dinner last night with longtime Ebony editor Lerone Bennett, author of “Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America” and numerous Ebony pieces on African American history. Bennett is now executive editor emeritus.

Monroe said he was recruited by Linda Johnson Rice, daughter of Johnson Publishing founder John H. Johnson, who succeeded her father as president and CEO of the company. Johnson, who established the company in 1942, died last August at age 87.

â??This newly created position will be integral to Johnson Publishing Company as EBONY and JET move toward an exciting future,â?? said Rice in a news release. â??Bryanâ??s knowledge and expertise will be a tremendous complement to the JPC editorial family and we are pleased to have his input in shaping the future direction of the magazines.â??

Monroe, a technology aficionado whose background is in visual journalism, said he hoped to make an Internet presence a priority. The company recently hired Wil LaVeist, formerly with the Black Voices Web site and then a columnist with the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., as director of Web development.

When Johnson died last year, observers noted that the publications’ heyday seemed to have been during the civil rights movement. Of late, Ebony and Jet have emphasized lifestyle and entertainment pieces. Jet’s most famous moment — showing the open casket of the slain Emmett Till, killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman — came 51 years ago, in 1955.

The late Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan, an observer at the trial of the suspects in Till’s killing, was quoted as saying, “the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till’s mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years. . . That picture stimulated a lot of . . . anger on the part of blacks all over the country.”

Reminded of the critics’ observations that the publications’ edge had softened, Monroe told Journal-isms that Johnson’s is “an amazing story — an amazing journalism story, and I hope it can be told in its full grandeur. There are still many stories of black America that have yet to be told, so we will be busy for quite a while.”

He said in the news release, “I look forward to making JET even more cutting edge in its news coverage and expanding even more on EBONYâ??s legacy and excellence.”

The monthly Ebony claims a circulation of 1.45 million; the weekly Jet, 954,000.

It is significant that Johnson reached outside the black press for the appointment. Until the civil rights era, the mainstream press was closed to many who worked for Johnson. When the doors opened, the supply of talent for Johnson and for the black press shrunk. Now some, such as Monroe, LaVeist and George E. Curry, formerly of the Chicago Tribune and then editor of the defunct Emerge magazine, are heading the other way. Curry edits the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service.

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White Writer Must Pay for Court’s “Waste of Time”

Only two weeks after a national survey showed newspaper sports departments to be overwhelmingly white and male, an Ohio judge threw out a sportswriter’s claim that he was denied a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer because he was white and male.

“Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge David Matia called plaintiff Marty Gitlin’s reverse discrimination lawsuit a ‘complete waste of time.’ And in a rare move Matia said Gitlin or his attorneys — or both — will have to pay the newspaper’s legal defense costs,” Alison Grant reported today in the Plain Dealer.

“The Plain Dealer is trying to recover more than $46,000. Matia set a July 25 hearing on how much he will award and how the costs will be divided,” the story said.

“Gitlin, 49, dropped his lawsuit in March 2004. He could not pursue the case after becoming unemployed and filing for bankruptcy, he said Thursday,” the story continued.

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Essence Unhappy With Houston as Festival Site

“Houston will have to address mobility problems that hampered Essence Music Festival fans before the city will be considered to host next year’s event, organizers said Thursday,” Salatheia Bryant reported today in the Houston Chronicle.

“‘It was a difficult city to navigate and that can’t be ignored,’ said Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications Inc. ‘The end result was a general lack of systems to manage the sprawl. Houston underestimated the enormity and significance of this event.

“. . . ‘Had the city or county invested more we could have had a different result. If a $126 million economic impact doesn’t register there’s nothing more that can be said,’ said Ebanks.

“Jordy Tollet, president of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, said his office did its best to address transportation concerns. . . . ‘Everything Essence asked, we did it,’ Tollet said.”

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Tribune Co. Closing Some Foreign Bureaus

“The Tribune Co., which owns Long Island’s Newsday, is restructuring its foreign bureaus, moving to have reporters write for its entire chain and curbing a tradition of each paper staffing an international post,” Brian White reported today for the Associated Press.

“The (Baltimore) Sun will close its South Africa and Moscow bureaus within 18 months, Editor Tim Franklin said Thursday. He said dramatic industry changes — led by the availability of international news online — had sparked the restructuring of overseas coverage.

“The changes also affect the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. In a memo to staff Thursday, Newsday Editor John Mancini said the paper’s bureaus in Beirut, Lebanon, and Islamabad, Pakistan, will not be staffed after the scheduled terms of reporters Mohamad Bazzi and Jim Rupert end over the next two years.

“The Sun’s Jerusalem bureau will remain, but it will join a new Tribune network of foreign correspondents by January 2008.

“Sun Foreign Editor Robert Ruby described his paper’s loss of its own correspondents as ‘a very sad development for the newspaper.’

In December, Ivan Penn, reporter for 12 years at the Sun, and the only African American reporter among 17 newsroom employees who took voluntary buyouts then, told Journal-isms the closing of the bureaus was one reason he would not return to the paper after completing a Knight fellowship at Stanford University.

“When you’re looking at the landscape, when they’re closing foreign bureaus and reducing the staffs in Washington, you start wondering about what will be available to you,” he said. He said he regretted “the loss of what a lot of young reporters saw as an opportunity” to do the big story overseas or in Washington, “at some paper other than the [Washington] Post or the [New York] Times. Why go to a place like the Baltimore Sun where the peak may be at the state level, as opposed to being in Washington, London or Beijing?”

Franklin said in the Sun that the paper would continue to cover stories overseas by dispatching reporters from Baltimore. “We’ll do significant enterprise reporting with relevance to this market,” he said.

[Added July 10: Penn said he starts today as consumer affairs investigative reporter for the St. Petersburg Times.]

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Mexico’s Winner Needs “Something That Works”

The declared winner of Mexico’s tight presidential election, Felipe Calderon, “will have to confront the same paralysis that Fox and his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, encountered, Jorge G. Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico who spoke last month at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention, wrote Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times.

“Mexico’s current institutions were designed and built for authoritarian rule, not for a real democracy; they worked while Mexico was governed by a single party, the PRI,” he wrote. “When democracy came, everyone – Zedillo, Fox, this writer and many more – thought that the same institutions would remain functional despite a radically different context.

“We were all wrong, and the challenge for the new president isn’t how to govern with these dysfunctional institutions but how to replace them with something that works. Designing and building those institutions should be his first priority: Achieving, at long last, the reelection of congressmen and senators; establishing a referendum for amending the constitution; creating a hybrid, semiresidential, semiparliamentary system that encourages the formation of legislative majorities in a three-party system; allowing independent candidates to run for office, and abolishing the U.S.-style campaign-financing system, in which the bulk of airtime is purchased instead of allotted, leading to Sunday’s election probably being, per vote, the most expensive in the world. These are the most important and urgent reforms.”

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Immigration Hearings Prompt More Commentary

“Folks say this border city has been brazenly invaded by an unsavory and disruptive element that opportunistically puts its own interests before the greater good,” Ruben Navarrette wrote Wednesday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“I never believed it – until lately. But what can I say now that America’s Finest City is crawling with Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who have come here to hold hearings on immigration reform?

“San Diego plays host today to the first of a series of public hearings on this combustible issue. . . . The real purpose of the hearings is to make the case for the views of those who organize them, and to make mincemeat of any alternate views.”

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AP’s “Black Man” Story a Hit Among E-Mailers

“Every day, African-American men consciously work to offset stereotypes about them – that they are dangerous, aggressive, angry,” the Associated Press’ Erin Texeira wrote July 1 in a story that is being widely e-mailed.

“Some smile a lot, dress conservatively and speak with deference: ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, ma’am.’ They are mindful of their bodies, careful not to dart into closing elevators or stand too close in grocery stores.

“It’s all about surviving, and trying to thrive, in a nation where biased views of black men stubbornly hang on decades after segregation and where statistics show a yawning gap between the lives of white men and black men.”

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Black Columnists Turn to Health Concerns

“Next week will mark an anniversary that bears noting,” Steve Penn wrote Thursday in the Kansas City Star. “On July 12, my brother, George Penn III, will observe the fourth anniversary of a life-saving organ donation.

“On July 12, 2002, he received a kidney transplant at the University of Kansas Hospital. He was almost 50 then. Later this month he’ll turn 54.

“I vowed to champion the need for more minority donors.”

Penn’s is the latest by an African American columnist on health concerns:

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