“Unconstitutional” Prior Review Holds Up Edition
The Grambling State University student newspaper failed to publish as planned Friday after the faculty adviser, newly instructed to “edit every story” before publication, said she could not finish the job quickly enough for Friday publication, according to the student editor, Darryl D. Smith.
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The university’s new rules imposing prior review on the student publication after complaints about poor editing met with condemnation Friday from journalism groups as unnecessary, harmful and illegal.
College Media Advisers Inc., an association of 900 advisers to college newspapers, issued a statement saying:
“It is the position of CMA that any attempt by Grambling State University administrators to control the content, for quality or otherwise, of the student newspaper by suspending publication, requiring prior approval or engaging in any other act of censorship, is patently unconstitutional and we condemn their desire to circumvent the First Amendment rights of their students.
“Furthermore, no faculty or staff adviser to the publication should be asked to engage in such censorship or be held responsible for the content decisions student reporters and editors are legally authorized to make.”
The Society of Professional Journalists urged the university “to adopt SPJ’s Campus Media Statement, which states that student media are ‘designated public forums — free from censorship and advance approval of content. Student media are free to develop editorial policies and news coverage with the understanding that students and student organizations speak only for themselves.'”
Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, joined in a statement with SPJ in which he said, “College and university officials have to understand that the First Amendment simply does not allow them to censor student publications because they are unhappy with the content decisions student editors have to make. One aberrant court decision from another jurisdiction does not undo the last 35 years of legal precedent supporting the free press rights of college students.”
The Black College Communication Association, an organization of faculty and advisers of student newspapers at historically black colleges, sent a letter to Grambling officials, and Black College Wire, a news service for black college students, posted its own statement on its Web site.
The National Association of Black Journalists invited Provost Robert M. Dixon to participate in “a special discussion on the student press, free speech and college administrations” at its Aug. 8-12 convention in Las Vegas and offered its resources to the administration “to help understand and execute the role of oversight in the student press, while encouraging a free flow of knowledge and information.” It called Grambling’s actions “in clear violation of student rights.”
As reported earlier, Dixon had sent out a memorandum Jan. 17 suspending the newspaper for the rest of January “or until administrators are content with greater ‘quality assurance’ of the paper,” as the News-Star in Monroe, La., put it. It followed complaints about a plagiarized story that the university said was not met with strong enough sanctions.
Editors defied the order and published on Jan. 18.
The ban was lifted on Thursday, but the university imposed a requirement that all of the Gramblinite’s copy be edited by a faculty adviser, and outlined 14 other steps to be taken, such as requiring all editors of the weekly paper to take a style, grammar, spelling and punctuation test before assuming their duties.
Ken Stickney, managing editor of the News-Star, told Journal-isms he was not satisfied that the paper had fully apologized for the plagiarism, but said, “we certainly don’t agree with prior restraint.”
A number of staff members at the Gannett paper, including an assistant managing editor, Eleanor Rushing, are Grambling graduates, he said. The Gramblinite performs a vital role because “Grambling has had a difficult time getting its message out.” Prior to the current Grambling spokesman, Ralph Wilson, the public relations apparatus “was almost broken,” Stickney said.
“We have used Grambling as a source of employees and hope to continue to use it as a place to recruit,” Stickney said.
Alumni also weighed in on the course taken by the administration. “Whatever the issues, shutting down the newspaper is not a wise move. Has to be a better way to work things out,” said Caesar Andrews, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press and a former Gramblinite editor.
In a message posted on the News-Star Web site, Emeri B. O’Brien of the Baltimore Sun, another former Gramblinite editor, agreed, “Standards should be set high” for the paper. “There should be no compromise on accuracy and fairness. And, the journalistic sin of plagiarism should never be tolerated. However, there is also a bigger picture here,” she said. The administration’s actions look “like a direct retaliation for the intense scrutiny that the students have placed on the powers that be.”
Smith said he hoped the four-page paper, reduced to save time, would be out on Monday.
[On Saturday, Pamela Foster of Tennessee State University, who had been asked in 2002 to exert prior review over that school’s newspaper and successfully refused, urged Grambling adviser Wanda Peters “to do as I did . . . I said no.”]
- Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed: Scrutiny for the Student Press?
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Is Michael Wilbon the Disney Co.’s $8 Million Man?
“After Mike Wilbon cut his new four-year deal with Disney for just under $8 million — which will pump up his presence on Disney-owned ESPN and ABC — he approached Washington Post chairman Don Graham and executive editor Len Downie and offered to resign as Post sports columnist,” Harry Jaffe wrote Thursday on the Web site of Washingtonian magazine.
“‘I don’t know if you want me in this capacity,’ he told them.
“Both said they wanted to keep their star sportswriter in the Post fold. But there might be less of Wilbon on the sports pages, and more of him on the washingtonpost.com site.”
ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz would not discuss Wilbon’s salary, and Wilbon could not be reached, but if the $8 million figure is true, it would surely place Wilbon in a financial stratosphere among newspaper-based journalists.
“The compensation from TV is such that it’s something I wanted to do,” Wilbon told Michael McCarthy of USA Today on Dec. 28. “A lot of the people I came into the business with, like Peter King of Sports Illustrated, have moved into TV.” The USA Today story did not report a salary figure.
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Tortured Kenyan Journalist Wins Bid to Stay in U.S.
“A Kenyan journalist, jailed and tortured in his country and later embraced by admiring American colleagues, has been granted asylum in the United States,” Scott Canon reported Friday in the Kansas City Star.
“Peter Makori, who wrote for The Star last year while on an international reporting fellowship, learned Thursday that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granted his request to stay in the country indefinitely.
“The ruling allows Makori to live here as long as the U.S. government continues to recognize the dangers he would face if he were sent back to Kenya. In another year, Makori could be eligible to apply for permanent resident status.
“In his home country, he spent several months in prison on bogus murder charges, a jailing largely seen as retribution for his newspaper coverage of the government.
“While awaiting a decision on his plea for asylum, Makori was barred from working in the United States. His last source of income dried up at the end of his fellowship in August. Since then, Makori said, he has relied on the generosity of Americans sympathetic to his plight, including his colleagues at The Star and the Committee to Protect Journalists.”
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Roland Martin Replaced as Chicago Defender Editor
Roland S. Martin, who said last month he would not renew his contract in March as executive editor of the Chicago Defender, was replaced in the job on Friday by Glenn Reedus, who most recently headed a public relations firm.
“Mr. Reedus is taking the job on an interim basis while a search for a permanent executive editor continues, Hiram Jackson said Friday afternoon. Mr. Jackson is CEO of Real Times Media — owner of the Chicago Defender. Mr. Reedus has been an onsite consultant since January 8, 2007,” a memo said.
“Roland S. Martin, former executive editor of the Defender, has been re-assigned to work with Real Times. He will assist with the transition and other assignments involving the Real Times newspapers in Detroit, MI; Memphis, TN, and Pittsburgh.”
Reedus, 54, is a Chicago native who has worked at newspapers that include the Oakland (Mich.) Press, the Omaha (Neb.) World Herald and the Toledo Blade. He took the Oakland paper online, he said, and was online editor for two years there before taking a buyout in 2001. Reedus was public information officer for the city of Pontiac and owned Reedus Communications Management in Rochester Hills, Mich.
He told Journal-isms no decision had been made on whether to reduce the frequency of the historic four-times-a-week paper, and that his 30-day goal was to increase its local content, “from stories to guest editorials to more stories about local folks and events.”
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Hollis Towns Named Executive Editor in Cincinnati
“Hollis Towns, managing editor of The Enquirer since 2004, has been named executive editor,” the Cincinnati Enquirer announced on Thursday.
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“In his new capacity, Towns, 43, will oversee The Enquirer’s transformation into a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news and information provider, with an emphasis on encouraging growth of the company’s online and print titles, the Gannett paper said.
“‘My primary responsibility will be to ensure a strong Enquirer brand, no matter the method of delivery. I welcome the challenge and the opportunity,’ said Towns, who was managing editor of the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette prior to his arrival in Cincinnati 2 1?2 years ago.
“Thomas Callinan, editor and vice president/content and audience development, made the announcement and said he now will focus largely on collaborative efforts among The Cincinnati and Kentucky Enquirers, the Community Press and Recorder weekly newspapers, CiN Weekly, magazines, Cincinnati.Com and related new-media projects.”
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Lyne Pitts Given “Strategic” Role at NBC
Lyne Pitts, executive producer of NBC-TV’s “Weekend Today,” will become NBC News’ executive producer in charge of strategic initiatives, NBC News President Steve Capus told NBC News employees on Wednesday.
In his “State of the NBC News Division” discussion, Capus said, “Lyne will report directly to me. In her new job, Lyne will help identify and drive new business opportunities, with heavy emphasis on the editorial and technical aspects of these ventures. As I’ve said repeatedly during our 2.0 conversations, NBC News is committed to reallocating resources to new growth areas. It’s Lyne’s job to help make this happen with an eye towards maintaining the editorial excellence people have come to expect from NBC News. It’s essential for us to have a structure that recognizes new opportunities, seizes chances and moves aggressively. Lyne is uniquely qualified to take on this new role.”
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Filmmaker’s Work Led to Ex-Klansman’s Arrest
The indictment this week of James F. Seale, a former sheriff’s deputy and Klansman, in the 42-year-old slayings of two African American men in Mississippi might not have been possible without the work of Canadian documentary filmmaker David Ridgen. He and his subject, Thomas Moore, brought the case back to life.
The 1964 case remained in limbo until Ridgen and Moore, the brother of Charles Eddie Moore, one of the victims, travelled to Mississippi in July 2005, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Wednesday. Ridgen discovered the case in the archives of the CBC while preparing for another documentary, the story said.
“Ridgen had been assigned by CBC Television to do a new documentary on the ‘Mississippi Burning’ case” involving the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964, according to the Associated Press. “As part of his research, he had watched a 1964 CBC piece on the murders, and noticed footage of police fishing human bones out of the Mississippi River.
“When officials determined that these were the bones of black men . . . the press turned its attention elsewhere. But Ridgen couldn’t shake the images of the discolored bones and decomposed clothes. He dug deeper.
“These were the bones, he learned, of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two young black men whose deaths had gone unavenged. And he learned that Moore had a brother.
“Ridgen searched for more than 10 months to locate Moore, who now lives in Colorado Springs, Colo.,” according to the CBC story. “Moore, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran born on the Fourth of July, had been struggling for years to come to terms with the lack of justice in his brother’s case.
“Their first trip proved very eventful. During a random stop at a Roxie gas station, Moore lamented to a local man that one of the prime suspects in his brother’s death had died.
“When Moore mentioned Seale’s name, the man informed him Seale was alive and offered to show Moore where he lived nearby.
“After visiting Dunn Lampton, the U.S. attorney for southern Mississippi, Ridgen and Moore were assured that a new look at the case would be initiated.
“‘I will never have the words to describe it. I’m just glad that I was alive to be a part of it,’ Moore told CBC.ca in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
“‘There is no way on this earth that this would have happened if it weren’t for the CBC allowing David Ridgen to go down to Mississippi.’
The Associated Press reported Thursday that this latest development was also aided by the work of Jerry Mitchell, the Jackson (Miss). Clarion-Ledger reporter whose investigative work has led to the reopening of a number of civil-rights era murder cases.
“The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents indicating that the beatings had occurred in the Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction. But the case languished until Seale was located,” the AP story said.
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Proctor Makes Times-Dispatch Into “Editors’ Paper”
“In November, a year after Glenn Proctor took the helm of the Richmond Times-Dispatch as vice president and executive editor, he didn’t so much appear the part of a Marine — bright fuchsia tie; gold stud earring in his left ear; soft-spoken demeanor. But once he got to talking about the changes he has made in the newsroom — and responding to some criticism of his actions — he sure sounded like it,” Lori Robertson writes in a 4,800-word story in the American Journalism Review.
The piece examines changes at the Virginia newspaper since Proctor, a member of the Maynard Institute board of directors, became editor in 2005, “the first top African American editor at a paper whose editorial page supported massive resistance, an effort in the 1950s to block the racial integration of public schools.”
“. . . Proctor’s management style has some questioning whether there shouldn’t be a little more carrot to go along with the stick,” Robertson writes. “‘Instead of a Marine gunnery sergeant, I would’ve preferred [former] Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki,’ Betty Booker says. ‘In other words, somebody who led, listened and led. That’s not to denigrate a gunnery sergeant. They whip the troops into shape for battle.’ But creative people, she says, ‘respond best, I think, to inspiration, clarity of goals and consistency of direction.’
“There’s no doubt the paper has undergone a dramatic culture change, transformed from a writers’ paper into an editors’ paper,” Robertson wrote.
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Short Takes
- “The crises at massive newspaper companies, the drought of advertising revenue, plunging circulation, barren foreign bureaus, withered news pages, a torrent of pink slips, the wrath of Wall Street — and yet, for all that, the number of jobs lost in 2006, at least at the larger metro dailies, was somewhat less than those lost in 2005,” Jennifer Saba reported Thursday in Editor & Publisher. “For the second year, E&P conducted an informal review of larger newspapers that made cuts and found the industry shed at least 1,000 jobs. In our 2005 survey we tallied a loss of more than 2,000.”
- NPR News Senior Correspondent Juan Williams will interview President Bush on Monday, and the conversation will air across NPR News programs and www.NPR.org, the public radio network announced Friday. It is to be Bush’s first broadcast interview since his State of the Union address Tuesday. Excerpts are to air on “Morning Edition,” “Day to Day” and “Talk of the Nation,” with the entire interview airing on “All Things Considered.”
- Sports columnist David Aldridge, one of at least nine newsroom employees on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s layoff list whose dismissals were later reversed in negotiations between management and the Newspaper Guild, has decided to return and resumes work Monday, Inquirer Sports Editor Jim Jenks told Journal-isms on Friday. “I don’t want to say too much, because there are a lot of people who aren’t as fortunate as I have been. But I’m happy to be coming back,” said Aldridge.
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- The New York newspaper El Diario/La Prensa took note of a three-part New York Times series by David Gonzalez on a Pentecostal storefront in west Harlem, home to a Dominican congregation, writing on Jan. 17, “The Times is known for setting the pace in journalism. But long after so many other English dailies began including bilingual articles and features, the Times has recognized that the future of media must reflect a Latino market.” The series was accompanied by a bilingual online presentation.
- “Minorities are underrepresented or even missing in action in discussions of public policy matters, including on issues that disproportionately impact them — and it’s ‘largely attributed’ to a lack of foundation support for minority-led organizations, according to the Greenlining Institute, the Aspen Philanthropy Letter reported. A 12-minute video publicizes the report.
- “An ABC News producer and crew visited the school in Jakarta, Indonesia, attended by Sen. Barack Obama in his youth and found it to be a normal government public school without even a hint of the extremist elements reported by various conservative news outlets in the last week,” Jake Tapper reported Thursday on ABC News.
- The Asian American Journalists Association complained Monday about a headline in the Jan. 13 Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, “Chinks in Jack’s armor.” “Frankly, we don’t know at whom to be more upset: The hedline writer who thought the double-entendre clever, or the editor(s) who gave it the seal of approval by doing nothing,” the association said. “After all . . the fourth graf explicitly talks about Kiefer Sutherland’s character suffering torture at the hands of the Chinese.”
- Thirteen students of color have been named Chips Quinn Scholars for spring 2007 by the Freedom Forum and participating newspapers. Scholars will work in paid internships at 14 daily newspapers across the country beginning in early February, the Freedom Forum announced on Jan. 19.
- In Chicago, “Telemundo Spanish-language WSNS-Channel 44 is switching to a single-anchor format for its 10 p.m. Monday-through-Friday newscast and adding interactive elements with viewers, starting in February. Vicente Serrano, news anchor at the NBC-owned station since 2003, will host the new program,” Robert Feder reported Wednesday in the Chicago Sun-Times.
- “The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Haitian authorities today to fully investigate the murder of photographer Jean-Remy Badio, who was gunned down outside his home in Port-au-Prince on Friday after receiving several death threats from local gang members,” the organization said Thursday. “CPJ is investigating whether Badio’s murder is linked to his professional work.”
- In Zimbabwe, “The High Court in Harare yesterday blocked Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede’s bid to withdraw publisher Trevor Ncube’s Zimbabwean citizenship after counsel from the Attorney-General’s Office abandoned the case,” the Zimbabwe Independent reported Friday.
- “In a rare response to a criminal incident, China’s president, Hu Jintao, has ordered a speedy investigation into the killing of a journalist who was beaten to death recently while investigating conditions in an illegal coal mine, the semiofficial China News Service reported on Wednesday,” Howard W. French reported in the New York Times. The slain reporter was Lan Chengzhang of the newspaper China Trade News.
