Departures Follow Recent Exits by Journalists
The two top executives at AOL Black Voices — Janet Rollé, the vice president and general manager, and Alvin Bowles, its publisher — are stepping down, employees were told this week. Their exits follow the departure of a number of journalists at the popular Web site and complaints about morale.
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Rollé is leaving the company April 9 to join Black Entertainment Television Networks as chief marketing officer and executive vice president, the staff was told on Thursday. Bowles told employees over the last week that he was leaving for a top-level marketing position at BET. Rollé had been in the job 20 months; Bowles for a year.
AOL spokeswoman Sandra Correa did not respond to inquiries this week, and BET spokesman Tom Reynolds said Tuesday his network had nothing to announce.
In an interview last week on the new Web site Journalisticks.com, Nick Charles, the Black Voices editor-in-chief who has worked for the New York Daily News, People magazine and the old Emerge magazine, said, “When I started at BV, 20 months ago, we were #3. The space is dominated by four sites: Black Planet, BET, Black America Web and Black Voices. Now, we are #1. According to the February 2007 comScore Media Metrics Report, Black Voices reached more than 3 million unique visitors with 56 million page views and on average spent 85 minutes on the site.”
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But AOL completed a layoff of 5,000 employees worldwide in December as part of a major restructuring. And for a variety of reasons, the Black Voices Web site has seen the recent departure of a number of staffers, including:
- Tanisha Blakely, lifestyles manager, who joined New York magazine last fall as online project manager in charge of various technological developments.
- Branden Cobb, sports and news editor who left this month for another part of Time Warner in Herndon, Va.
- Jessica Green, a senior programming director who is said to have left in November.
- Tanu Henry, news and finance editor, who left in February and started this week at BET.com in a similar programming role.
- Julie Radzville, an administrative assistant who told colleagues she was leaving for family and other personal reasons.
- Tara Roberts, a former Essence magazine staff member who worked at AOL Living, who starts next week as senior editor at Cosmo Girl.
- Terence Samuel, senior programming director who had been congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. He left to fulfill a book contract, writing about the U.S. senators elected last fall.
Samuel told Journal-isms he found the work interesting, having come from the print world, and he was leaving only because he had to write the book. He said the turnover was perhaps to be expected. “There were never enough people to do what we wanted to do. Companies and publications are trying to figure out what to do on the Web, which makes these jobs really attractive,” he said.
But another former staffer, who said he could not be identified, said “I don’t think there has ever been any good cohesion with the staff. There have been some missteps. The biggest problem is people who haven’t understood what it really takes to run an enterprise like that by being able to manage a staff and meet your financial goals.” However, the Web site has been successful because “AOL has incredible resources.”
AOL Black Voices, based at AOL’s Dulles, Va., headquarters, represents a merger of AOL’s Black Focus; Africana.com, formerly based in Cambridge, Mass.; and Black Voices, founded in Orlando, Fla., then based in Chicago, then acquired by AOL from the Tribune Co.
Rollé, a former vice president at VH1 and onetime marketing and new-media director for HBO Home Video, was named to her Black Voices post in July 2005. She later assumed the additional position of vice president and general manager of AOL’s Women’s & Lifestyle Programming division.
Bowles was named in March 2006 to lead the sales and sales development efforts for AOL Black Voices. Prior to that, “Bowles served as Vice President of Divisional Partnerships in the Global Marketing Group within Time Warner. In this role, he was responsible for managing relationships within Time Warner properties including Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting, HBO, AOL, and various publishing titles in order to develop customized cross-platform solutions and integrated marketing programs,” according to a news release.
In 2001, Bowles earned an MBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, specializing in corporate strategy and general management. After graduation he worked at Sony Music Entertainment as director of business development. He is a founder of Black Diamonds, an events planning and consulting firm focused on network building between professionals of color, according to a bio.
He did not respond to telephone and e-mail inquiries.
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Editorial Writers Group Begins Diversity Census
The National Conference of Editorial Writers on Thursday began the first diversity census of the nation’s editorial writers, seeking information about the age, gender and racial composition of its members’ editorial boards.
NCEW sent its survey electronically to its 542 members. It comes two days after the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported the findings of its annual newsroom employment census. In that survey, 932 of the 1,415 daily newspapers responded, or 65.87 percent of all U.S. dailies.
The ASNE survey found that the percentage of journalists of color working in daily newsrooms declined slightly to 13.62 percent this year.
In a note accompanying the survey, NCEW President Neil Heinen, editorial director of WISC-TV in Madison, Wis., said, “In December 2001, the NCEW board approved in principle the idea of taking a diversity census of editorial writers around the nation. The idea was to see how we are doing in helping the newspaper industry reach the goal articulated by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978: to have newsrooms reflect the population of color in the nation, first by 2000, then by 2025.”
The presentation at the 2001 meeting was made by this columnist, who went on to become chair of the NCEW Diversity Committee, and Bobbi Bowman, diversity director of ASNE.
In 2002, a survey from Baruch College in New York, conducted with the support of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, found that journalists of color might be better represented on the business and financial pages than in the newsroom as a whole. The survey of 21 major newspapers found that people of color comprise 22.7 percent of business-news staffs: 7.9 percent were Asian American, 7.6 percent Hispanic and 7 percent African American.
Last June, the Associated Press Sports Editors released the “2006 Racial and Gender Report Card of the Associated Press Sports Editors” at the editors’ convention in Las Vegas.
The primary author of the report, Richard Lapchick, said in the summary, “When 94.7 percent of the sports editors, 86.7 percent of the assistant sports editors, 89.9 percent of our columnists, 87.4 percent of our reporters and 89.7 percent of our copy editors/designers are white, and those same positions are 95, 87, 93, 90 and 87 percent male, we clearly do not have a group that reflects America’s workforce.”
Heinen said in his message, “We are not yet ready to survey every editorial page, but we can report on NCEW-member newspapers, and compare our progress from year to year.”
Karen Lincoln Michel, Unity: Journalists of Color: The Truth About Watchdogs: Organizations that represent the news industry need to be honest, admit diversity efforts are failing