Girlfriend Connection Raised Eyebrows

Andrés Martinez Quits as L.A. Times Opinion Editor

Andrés Martinez, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Thursday after 18 months on the job following questions about his assignment of a guest editor for a weekend opinion section. Martinez was dating the publicist for the guest editor.

Amid the controversy, the weekend section was canceled.

Despite Martinez’s departure, the deputy editorial page editor, Michael Newman, told Journal-isms that Martinez’s recent changes in the paper’s lineup of columnists, including the scaling back of its only African American, Erin Aubry Kaplan, would remain. Martinez announced March 9 that Kaplan was among those losing their weekly slots who would join a rotating stable of “contributing editors.”

No replacement for Martinez was named. It was previously announced that Newman was joining the Washington Post as online opinion editor.

As James Rainey reported in the Times on Thursday, “Martinez took control of the opinion and editorial operation 18 months ago, when Michael Kinsley left The Times. He said he conceived of the ‘guest editor’ idea to bring new voices to the Current section and to give readers an unusual insight into the prominent individuals who would serve in that role.

“The opinion section tried to enlist investor Warren Buffett, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs and movie director Steven Spielberg as the first outside editor, according to an individual familiar with the process.”

Hollywood publicist Allan Mayer said he received a call a couple of months ago from Martinez, who was hoping to land an entertainment industry figure, Rainey reported. Mayer said he proposed Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, producer of “A Beautiful Mind,” as a “terrific” possibility because of his curious mind and “tremendously wide and eclectic interests.” Mayer supervises public relations executive Kelly Mullens, who is dating Martinez.

“Many reporters and editors in The Times’ newsroom said they were unhappy about how readers might perceive the decision to let an outsider — with the appearance of a special inside connection — hold sway over the Sunday opinion and editorial pages,” Rainey reported.

“Several journalists recalled how the newspaper’s reputation for impartiality suffered in 1999 when it was revealed that The Times had shared profit from a special magazine edition with the management of Staples Center.

“On Wednesday, reporters registered their dismay to Times Editor James E. O’Shea, who is the top editor for news and features in The Times but has no responsibility for its opinion pages.”

The section was killed, and on Thursday, Martinez wrote on his blog: Publisher “David Hiller’s decision to kill the Brian Grazer section this Sunday makes my continued tenure as Los Angeles Times editorial page editor untenable. The person in this job needs to have an unimpeachable integrity, and Hiller’s decision amounts to a vote of no confidence in my continued leadership.”

“How we come about this decision when 24 hours ago the managing editor of this newspaper was assuring me he didn’t see a story after I walked him through the facts, and while Hiller maintains we did nothing wrong, is a bit perplexing. In trying to keep up with the blogosphere, and boasting about their ability to go after their own, navel-gazing newsrooms run the risk of becoming parodies of themselves,” Martinez continued, noting he was proud of the separation between news and opinion pages at the Times.

Hiller issued a statement later Thursday saying, “We believe that this relationship” betweeen Martinez and Mullens “did not influence the selection of Brian as guest editor. Nonetheless, in order to avoid even the appearance of conflict, we felt the best course of action was not to publish the section.”

Martinez, who is soft-spoken and laid-back, was viewed as an antidote to Kinsley, the syndicated columnist who edited the section from Washington state, home of the online magazine Slate, which Kinsley had edited.

According to his bio, Martinez previously served as assistant editorial page editor and a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, where he was a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. He also won the National Association of Hispanic Journalists award for print commentary while in New York.

Martinez was an editorial writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Born in Mexico, he practiced communications law in Washington and served as a law clerk for a federal district judge in Dallas. Martinez studied history at Yale, Russian history at Stanford, and graduated from Columbia University Law School.

His L.A. Times pages featured provocative commentary.

Under the new lineup, these columnists are in the regular rotation: Gregory Rodriguez, Niall Ferguson, Meghan Daum, Jonah Goldberg, Ron Brownstein, Patt Morrison, Rosa Brooks and Joel Stein.

The Times is to have the following “contributing editors”: Kaplan, Jonathan Chait and Max Boot, who were formerly weekly columnists; Gustavo Arellano, a staff writer with O.C. Weekly, who writes the nationally syndicated “Ask a Mexican!” column; Timothy Garton Ash, author of eight books on European politics; Ian Buruma, who spent a decade working as a journalist in Asia; Denise Dresser, political science professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; Adam Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine; Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online Huffington Post; Tamar Jacoby, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer/performer; Rob Long, a writer and producer who wrote for TV’s “Cheers,” Sergio Muñoz, executive editor of La Opinión; Bill Stall, former Pulitzer Prize-winning Times editorial writer; Lawrence Summers, former Harvard University president; and D.J. Waldie, public information officer for Lakewood, Calif.

• Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher: Full Disclosure: Conflict at ‘LA Times’ Shows Why It’s Needed, Experts Say

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Asian Journalists in the Black; NAHJ Posts Deficit

The Asian American Journalists Association, which faced a projected $57,000 deficit as it met for its annual convention last June, ended the year with a surplus of $242,112, executive director Rene Astudillo told Journal-isms on Thursday.

However, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists ended the year with a $20,000 deficit, said executive director Iván Román. NAHJ was able to cover it from a surplus of about $140,000 it posted for 2005, he said.

The Native American Journalists Association also ended the year in the black, according to Kim Baca, interim executive director. She was traveling and said she did not have the exact figures.

The executive directors were asked about the status of their organizations’ finances in light of the unaudited $641,500 deficit recorded for 2006 by the National Association of Black Journalists, which resulted in NABJ dipping into its reserves two years in a row.

Astudillo said AAJA was able to reverse its fortunes with unexpected contributions, by trimming expenses and by chapters volunteering to fund some programs that had been supported by the national organization.

Among the unexpected contributors were the McClatchy Co., which gave $20,000 toward a high-school journalism program, and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, which spent $50,000 for AAJA’s Executive Leadership Program.

The anticipated deficit was the focus of a membership meeting at the organization’s convention in Hawaii last summer. Before the convention, AAJA’s 11-member national governing board decided unanimously in March to adjust the profit-sharing ratio so that starting in 2007, AAJA local chapters that host national conventions will get only 10 percent of the profit instead of the 25 percent they were receiving, as the AAJA student newspaper reported. The new policy also required the host chapter to raise at least $50,000 toward the convention.

For financial reasons, the association also voted to withdraw from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the primary council that accredits college journalism programs. Annual dues are $5,000.

NAHJ did not realize it was heading into a deficit until late in the year, Roman told Journal-isms. It then began cutting spending and putting systems in place to more carefully track its revenues. Not all income can go toward operating expenses, for example, he said; some may be used only for scholarships. The organization gave out $20,000 or $30,000 more in scholarships in 2006 than it had planned to, he said, for total grants of about $190,000.

This month, as a cost-saving move, the NAHJ board eliminated its journalism boot camp for college freshmen, the Student Campus program, from its 2007 convention in San Jose, Calif.

The Native American Journalists Association, which in 2003 faced a financial crisis that forced it to move its headquarters into space owned by the Freedom Forum, benefited from a successful convention in Tulsa, Okla., that “had a lot of local support,” Baca said. The Cherokee Nation, the host tribe, donated in-kind contributions and about $10,000, she said. In addition, the Annie Casey Foundation, the Chicago Tribune Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation made grants.

At NABJ, the organization’s finances could be an issue in the upcoming election campaign at the organization’s convention in Las Vegas. The only certified presidential candidate so far, Cheryl Smith, a past board member who is executive editor of the Dallas Weekly, gave Journal-isms this statement:

“News of the deficit is definitely distressing, but not surprising. Just as we must be aware of the issues of the day, we must pay close attention to what is going on with NABJ — especially those expecting to assume leadership positions.

“For the past several years, I have said that NABJ must diversify its revenue streams, provide professional development for our members and continue the role of advocate, in order to remain a viable organization.

“With my graduate training in business and years of management experience, as well as having received training from United Way; graduating from their Blueprint Leadership Program, I understand the significance of fiduciary responsibility and governance.”

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5 Journalists of Color Taking Globe Buyout

Five journalists of color and two others of color in clerical positions are among the 24 staffers whose buyout offers were accepted by the Boston Globe, a 6 percent cut that the Globe said “included several of its most prominent and longtime journalists, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, columnist Eileen McNamara and investigative reporter Stephen Kurkjian.”

Included is Indira Lakshmanan, most recently the Globe correspondent in Latin America, based in Bogota, Colombia, an Asian American, the story by Robert Gavin reported. Journal-isms confirmed that African Americans Judy Jackson, a copy editor who had been at the paper for 34 years; Shirley Jobe, a 23-year veteran who works with the New York Times News Service, Diane Lewis, a business reporter who has been on medical leave, and Cynthia Taylor, longtime secretary in the Globe’s Washington bureau, are also taking the buyout.

As reported last month, Ann Scales, the Globe’s style editor who has spent 12 years at the paper, is taking a buyout and expects to leave journalism.

In a note to the staff on Wednesday, Editor Martin Baron said:

“Because the buyout was oversubscribed, we were able to avoid layoffs, which would have affected talented people recently recruited to the Globe. The applications of some staffers were not approved. They included certain individuals with special skills and those in difficult-to-fill positions that required immediate replacement. No applications from those who hold the formal titles of section editor, department head, or above were accepted.”

Globe spokesman Alfred Larkin Jr. told Journal-isms on Friday that a journalist of color was among those whose request for a buyout was turned down, as one of the “reporters who were performing functions critical to the paper.” He said the newspaper weighed diversity concerns in deciding whether to offer buyouts of impose layoffs. Had it imposed layoffs and had to lose 21 people according to seniority, nine of the 21 would have been of color, Larkin said.

He added that those whose buyout offers were accepted have until 6 p.m. Monday to change their minds.

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Cherokee Coverage Said to Favor Freedmen

Media coverage of the Cherokee Nation’s vote to expel the descendants of slaves, known as the Cherokee Freedmen, was slanted toward the Freedmen, according to an analysis by the American Indian Policy and Media Initiative at Buffalo (N.Y.) State College.

“In general, this was reported as a classic clash between oppressor and victim,” Communication Professor Ron Smith, principal researcher for the content analysis, said in a news release on Thursday. “Missing were nuance, historical perspective, and a context within which to understand the contemporary significance of the story.”

The study found that:

• ” Spokespeople on both sides of the issue had their say in the news stories, but the Freedmen opponents to the amendment generally were quoted before news sources associated with the Cherokee Nation.
• ” Both issues of racism and self-determination were discussed, but the racism theme figured more prominently (that is, sooner) in the story than the tribal governance or sovereignty theme.
• ” Few reports gave details or context to the vote itself, either the voting numbers or the voter turnout.”

The news release continued: “Most of the articles highlighted the slave-owning history of the Cherokees, but fewer explained the incorporation of former slaves into the tribe or the confusion created by the Dawes Commission,” a reference to the agency commissioned by Congress a hundred years ago to distribute land to tribal members. It decided who was Indian and who was not for land-distribution purposes.

“Smith said that the media coverage, because it lacked a historical context, covered the story as an example of an Indian nation versus African Americans. ‘Some of the reports used terms such as “kick out” and “disown.” Several headlines screamed ‘racism,’ such as one that read: ‘Cherokees Accused of Racist Plot as Sons of Slaves Are Cast Out,’ he said.”

A number of Native columnists have portrayed the issue as one of Indians’ right to govern themselves.

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Short Takes

• “Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelpia journalist and former Black Panther activist who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, will finally have his appeal of his conviction heard by a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which set a date of May 17,” Counterpunch columnist Dave Lindorff wrote on Friday. “At that session, Abu-Jamal will argue that his original trial for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was fatally flawed because of racial bias by the prosecutor in jury selection. The hearing will also hear a claim by the district attorney that Abu-Jamal’s death sentence — lifted by a Federal Judge in 2001 — should be reinstated.”
• James N. Crutchfield, who stepped down as publisher of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal last year when the Knight Ridder paper was sold to Black Press Ltd., a Canadian company, will become director of Student Media at Arizona State University and the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the school announced on Friday.
• Depending on whom you ask, 13 to 15 editorial employees have left the Univision station in Sacramento, Calif., in the past 2 1/2 years, from a newsroom that employs 30, Sam McManis of the Sacramento Bee reported on Tuesday. “And they point to a lack of leadership by news director Pedro Calderon as the cause.”
• Richard P&eacuterez-Peña, a metro reporter at the New York

• Times, “will become the new publishing beat reporter in Business Day, with the mission of covering the revolution sweeping the newspaper and magazine industry, replacing Kit Seelye, as she returns to covering politics,” New York Times business editor Lawrence Ingrassia told staffers on Wednesday, referring to Katherine Seelye.
• Norman Parish, metro reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last 10 years, is returning May 21 to his Chicago hometown as a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.
• Ann Curry’s appearance on NBC’s “Dateline” as she was a world away in the Sudan, her third visit in 12 months to a region torn by ethnic warfare, “provided a fresh reminder of the distinctive niche Ms. Curry, 50, has been carving out for herself at NBC News these days: stealing time away from her day job as the news reader on “Today” (and her night job as co-anchor of ‘Dateline’) to satisfy what she describes as a fierce ambition to bear witness to human suffering on a mass scale,” Jacques Steinberg reported Thursday in the New York Times.
• “Viewers of Lou Dobbs’s nightly CNN program are used to its regular diet of stories claiming that illegal immigration is out of control and that ‘corporate America’ has hijacked the nation’s trade policy. However, Tuesday night, Mr. Dobbs took his invective to a new level, accusing pro-immigration groups of ‘lying.’ He even questioned their loyalty to America,” the New York Sun’s national correspondent, Josh Gerstein, wrote Wednesday on his blog. “I find it curious that Fox News keeps its journalists off of Bill O’Reilly’s theatrical, viewpoint-driven TV show, but CNN still lets its reporters appear on Mr. Dobbs’s program.”
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• Wendy Tokuda, an anchor/reporter at KRON-TV in San Francisco, joins rival KPIX-TV as 5 p.m. co-anchor with Allen Martin beginning April 9, the station announced on Thursday. “Tokuda will continue to work on her series, ‘Students Rising Above’ profiling low-income, at-risk Bay Area teenagers. This nationally recognized series has won the Peabody Award, a National Emmy for Public Service, the national Sigma Delta Chi Public Service Award, and the [National Association of Broadcasters] Education Foundation’s ‘Service to America’ Award. It has raised more than 3.8 million dollars in scholarship funds to help send these students to college,” the station said.
• “Remember the name Darian Trotter. You’ll probably be hearing a lot about him — for better or for worse,” Robert Feder wrote March 13 in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Staffers at Fox-owned WFLD-Channel 32 are buzzing about their newest colleague, who was hired last week as a reporter for the station’s 10 p.m. newscast, which debuts April 9. Since 2003, when Trotter joined WSMV-TV in his native Nashville, he’s attracted as much attention to himself as to the stories he reports. In one infamous example, he made headlines when he paid a male prostitute for an interview and failed to disclose that he was a reporter until after the prostitute had exposed himself on the street.” The Meter, the student newspaper at Tennessee State University, reported on Monday that Trotter and his crew ignored requirements that they be accompanied by police escorts before entering the campus, and then reported on an underground male sorority that is actually at Texas Southern University. He left the impression that the group was at Tennessee State, which shares the “TSU” initials.
• Director and producer Spike Lee is to appear at the Washington convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, joining a discussion at the convention’s closing luncheon next Friday with three residents of New Orleans whom he encountered during production of his film, “When the Levees Broke.”
• “Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country say that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men,” Patricia Cohen wrote March 15 in the New York Times. “The obvious solution, at least to Catherine Orenstein, an author, activist and occasional op-ed page contributor herself, was to get more women to submit essays. To that end Ms. Orenstein has been training women at universities, foundations and corporations to write essays and get them published.”
• Somali government troops arrested a reporter and a driver of a leading independent broadcaster in the capital Mogadishu on Wednesday as they arrived to cover an official press conference at the city’s airport, according to local journalists and the National Union of Somali Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. Al Jazeera’s bureau in Mogadishu was ordered to close in a letter from the national security agency, the network reported on Thursday.
• In Peru, two hooded gunmen shot and killed popular radio commentator Miguel Peréz Julca in front of his wife and children on Saturday night, according to news reports, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on Monday. Peréz, 38, had covered local crime and allegations of government corruption.