Herbert Lowe Leaves; Keith Herbert Arrives
Herbert Lowe, a seven-year reporter at Newsday and president of the National Association of Black Journalists from 2003 to 2005, is joining the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation as communications director, bringing to nine the number of journalists of color to leave the Long Island newspaper since December.
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However, the paper has hired Keith Herbert, immediate past president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, who was among those laid off in January at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Herbert has joined the Long Island desk as a reporter. “Most recently, Keith covered courts for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has worked at the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., The Reporter in Lansdale, Pa., and The Times Herald in Norristown, Pa. Keith holds a journalism degree from Temple University,” editor John Mancini told the staff.
Mira Lowe, Herbert Lowe’s wife and formerly Newsday’s associate editor for recruitment, left Newsday in March to work in Chicago for Johnson Publishing Co., where she is assistant managing editor.
Herbert Lowe said the couple plans to buy a house in Chicago, though his new job is in Washington.
The hemorrhaging of journalists of color, and others at the paper has been attributed to cutbacks, diminished opportunities and uncertainty over the ownership of the Tribune Co. publication. The others of color to leave were John Gonzales, J. Jioni Palmer, Errol Cockfield, Wil Cruz, Walter Middlebrook, Ray Sánchez and Curtis Taylor. On April 2, the Tribune Co. board agreed to sell the company to Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell. But the direction Zell will take his new properties remains uncertain.
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“I had to think long and hard about this,” said Lowe, 44, who has been working on a team providing breaking news to the Newsday Web site. “My wife will be in Chicago. . . .I know it will be said that I’ll be leaving journalism. That is really, really meaningful to me. I’m conflicted,” he said. But “I see myself as following my passion. Anyone who knows me knows how much I’ve enjoyed working with a nonprofit organization,” NABJ, “and this will allow me to do that which I feel I’ll be really good at.”
The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is best known for its fall legislative weekend of policy discussions and partying. It also issues policy papers on education, public health and economic development and offers fellowships and internships, according to its director, Elsie Scott.
“We are excited and very pleased to get an experienced journalist and somebody active in the field, who knows a lot of people and can hit the ground running,” she said of Lowe, saying he would help both in communications and in raising the foundation’s “branding ability.”
“The foundation does a lot of work, but not a lot of people know about it,” Lowe said.
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Trahant Sees Circulation Decline as the Wrong Story
“Paid circulation figures will again show decline. So what. That’s an old narrative. The better story is the evolving nature of journalism and community discourse,” Mark Trahant, editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote on Sunday.
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His column anticipated this story: “U.S. newspaper circulation fell 2.1 percent in the six months through March as the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lost readers, the Newspaper Association of America said,” as Leon Lazaroff reported on Monday for Bloomberg.com.
“Circulation at 745 daily newspapers was 45 million, down from 45.9 million in the same period a year earlier, the association said today in a statement, citing data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Subscribers fell 2.6 percent during the same period a year earlier.
“Customers are canceling subscriptions in favor of getting news and information from the Internet, dragging down revenue from circulation and advertising. Subscriber losses, historically around 1 percent every six months, accelerated to more [than] 2 percent in the past two years.”
Trahant, who is also board chairman of the Maynard Institute, wrote that “This is a time for optimism. . . . I think about how much my job has changed in the past year.
“These days our role is more of a conversation starter than a court. We gather with friends, in person or online, and engage in discourse. We never have the final say; we leave that to readers posting comments at seattlepi.com’s SoundOff. Our editorial from last Sunday about the Iraq war is now a full debate among folks who care enough to post their words, a growing thread nearing 400 ideas.”
“Another significant change from a year ago is the growth of Editorial Board podcasting. We’re now scheduling as many sessions as we can accommodate because it’s a way to give our readers more access to newsmakers. Just last week we heard from Gov. Chris Gregoire and House Speaker Frank Chopp about the just completed legislative session. The conversation lasted more than an hour, a rich opportunity to hear details of two leaders’ views.
“I’m struck by how many people download the podcast — the polar opposite of a political sound-bite. It takes time and patience to listen to the whole conversation.”
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Extraordinary Year for Florida A&M Newspaper Staff
“Florida A & M students who are graduating today will leave behind a school that has faced a year of financial scandals, shootings, labor strife, criminal trials and student mischief worthy of a TV melodrama,” Noah Bierman wrote Sunday in the Miami Herald.
“Capturing it all: FAMU’s newspaper staff, students who became an integral part of the story when they went on strike as the school’s financial crisis left hundreds of employees without paychecks and drew the attention of state lawmakers.
“The most poignant story came from the heart of The Famuan newsroom: The news editor, an outspoken 19-year-old named Nefertiti Williams, was killed over Thanksgiving in a murder-suicide that devastated the staff.
“. . . On campus, the year has been extraordinary — with constant student protests over budgets and jail beatings; statewide criminal trials that tested a new anti-hazing law; the search for a new campus president; state audits; a homecoming king removed for bad grades; a famous marching band caught pilfering from Detroit hotel rooms; and a sense among some that deepening financial troubles are threatening the historically black college’s very existence.”
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Public Editor Praises Media in Atlanta Shooting Case
“From the start, the official version of the events surrounding Kathryn Johnston’s death didn’t ring true. A 92-year-old woman is killed in a shootout with police in the midst of an alleged drug bust? No way,” Angela Tuck, public editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote on Saturday.
“Narcotics officers claimed a man they arrested on drug charges promised to lead them to a house where they would find a kilo of cocaine. They contacted an informant and arranged for him to make a controlled buy at the house on 933 Neal St. They told a magistrate judge they purchased $50 worth of cocaine from a man named Sam at the Neal Street address. The magistrate issued a no-knock warrant for them to search the house.
“When they returned to bash in the front door of Johnston’s home, the grandmother who lived alone behind burglar bars, fired on them. They fired back — 39 times — killing her.
“Immediately after the shooting, Johnston’s family and neighbors cried foul. The woman lived in constant fear. There was no evidence of drug activity at her home.
“Television and newspaper reporters, including several who worked the story for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, did what journalists are supposed to do. They asked questions, applying pressure to police and city leaders. They kept the circumstances of Johnston’s death — and the investigation surrounding it — in the public eye.
“Since Johnston’s death,” Tuck noted, “the AJC has written more than 80 stories on the investigation into her death and the community’s resulting outrage. The case underscores the divide between law enforcement authorities and the communities they serve.”
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Are Latinos White? A History Lesson
“Even though the U.S. Supreme Court answered the question in 1954, people still ask: ‘Aren’t Mexican Americans “white”?’ And few realize that the answer forever changed Latinos’ legal status everywhere,” Carlos Guerra wrote Saturday in the San Antonio Express-News. “Yes, Hernandez vs. Texas (PDF) remains little known as its importance is underappreciated.
“‘I didn’t learn anything about this case in University of Chicago (Law School),’ says Carlos Sandoval, an inactive attorney who began making a documentary about it in 2002, when he realized that it wasn’t until the 1950s that Latinos were afforded equal rights protections.”
Guerra recalled the story of Pete Hernandez, who killed another farm worker in Edna, Texas. He was quickly indicted, tried and convicted by a jury that included no Mexican Americans.
“As a Mexican American, Hernandez was denied his 14th Amendment right of equal protection, the lawyers argued. But that protection applies only to blacks and whites, the state responded, and being white, his conviction should stand.
“But no Latinos had sat on any Jackson County juries for at least 25 years, the young lawyers showed. That was a coincidence, the state’s attorney replied.
“But in a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court justices disagreed.
“‘The evidence in this case was sufficient to prove that persons of Mexican descent constitute a separate class, distinct from whites,’ wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, before adding that when ‘laws single out that class for different treatment, the guarantees of the Constitution have been violated.’
“This monumental ruling knocked out an important linchpin in the notion that ‘separate’ could still be ‘equal’ — in treatment, facilities and opportunities — and it became an underpinning that helped broaden protections for other groups in a wide variety of areas.
“But this Latino story, and the story of these Latino lawyers, has gone virtually untold, Sandoval says. And because of it — and others like it — Latinos are misunderstood and remain invisible to many Americans.”
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Nominate Educator Who Has Helped J-Diversity
The National Conference of Editorial Writers annually grants a Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship — actually an award — “in recognition of an educator’s outstanding efforts to encourage minority students in the field of journalism.” The educator should be at the college level. Nominations, which are now being accepted for the 2007 award, should consist of a statement about why you believe your nominee is deserving.
The final selection will be made by the NCEW Foundation board and will be announced in time for this year’s NCEW convention in Kansas City, when the presentation will be made.
Since 2000, an honorarium of $1,000 has been awarded the recipient, to be used to “further work in progress or begin a new project.”
Past winners include James Hawkins of Florida A&M University (1990); Larry Kaggwa of Howard U. (1992); Ben Holman of the U. of Maryland (1996); Linda Jones, Roosevelt U., Chicago (1998); Ramon Chavez, U. of Colorado, Boulder (1999); Erna Smith of San Francisco State (2000); Joseph Selden of Penn State (2001); Cheryl Smith; Paul Quinn College (2002); Rose Richard, Marquette University (2003), Leara D. Rhodes of the University of Georgia (2004), Denny McAuliffe of the University of Montana (2005) and Pearl Stewart of Black College Wire (2006).
Nominations may be e-mailed to Richard Prince, NCEW Diversity Committee chair, rprince(at)maynardije.org, The deadline is June 15.
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Short Takes
- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, met with photographers and reporters from Vietnamese, Latino, Chinese, Korean, Iranian and other ethnic publications in Los Angeles for a question-and-answer roundtable, Daffodil Altan, reported on Friday for El Tecolote in the San Francisco Bay area.
- Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho is exposing the players in Cancun-based sex rings, and risking her life for it, R.M. Arrieta reported Sunday for New American Media. “Her awareness led her to a life of activism and journalism. She started a high-security shelter for abused women in Cancun where children opened up to her about the dark underworld of child porn rings and prostitution. As a result, she says, ‘I’ve been taken to jail for telling other people’s stories. No one imagines that Cancun has this dark side.'”
- Twelve staff members at Reznet, “online student newspaper for Native America,” have been selected for internships this summer at newspapers — including the New York Times and the Washington Post — and at a bureau of the Associated Press, Sports Illustrated magazine and CBS News, the Web site reported. “Ten are graduates of the American Indian Journalism Institute (AIJI), an intensive program for college students sponsored by the Freedom Forum for the past six years at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.”
- Leoneda Inge of North Carolina public radio station WUNC and Jose Eduardo Teixeira Costa of VOCÃ? S/A, a monthly business magazine based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, are among 10 Knight-Bagehot Fellows in economics and business journalism named by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for the 2007-2008 academic year.
- Neil Foote, who has worked for the Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Washington Post and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is leaving Tom Joyner’s REACH Media Inc. after seven years “to work for the toughest boss I know: Me! As of May 2nd, I’ll be devoting my efforts full-time to my own content development, public relations and web consulting firm: Foote Communications LLC,” he told colleagues on Monday. Foote, who is based in Dallas, is also vice chair of the National Association of Minority Media Executives, known as NAMME.
- Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who was viewed as one of the African American stars in the Republican Party when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, has joined Fox News Channel as a political contributor, Fox announced.
- Democratic candidates have declined to participate in two presidential debates sponsored by Fox News Channel. The first, co-sponsored with the Nevada Democratic Party, was canceled. The second, co-sponsored with the Congressional Black Caucus, is scheduled for Sept. 23. Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” is “surprised that the media’s not outraged by what he describes as presidential candidates playing to the extreme left in their party,” Tim Cuprisin wrote Thursday in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “How would the mainstream media react . . . if right-wing Republican groups were insisting that Republicans couldn’t . . . do a debate with the New York Times or MSNBC,” Wallace was quoted as saying. “They’d view it as selling out to the right-wing nuts.”
- Bernard McGuirk, a 20-year producer and on-air jester for the “Imus in the Morning” radio program who was fired a week after his boss for the banter in which members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team were called “nappy-headed ho’s,” said he “didn’t get the memo” that the phrase ‘ho’s’ had reached the level of the n-word in offensiveness. In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” McGuirk sharply criticized the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was among those who campaigned to get them fired. “It seemed like he terrorized broadcast executives,” McGuirk said. “It seemed like they were in a fetal position under their desks sucking their thumbs on their Blackberrys, trying to coordinate their response.”
- “Little did I imagine when longtime ’60 Minutes’ newsman Ed Bradley passed away last fall, that five months later I would be marching in the ‘second line’ of his jazz funeral in New Orleans,” Greg Mitchell wrote Monday in Editor & Publisher. “It happened on Friday at the annual Jazzfest. Bradley, a frequent attendee of the fabled event in the Big Easy, was honored with a typically raucous funeral procession on opening day. Apparently he asked for this in his will.”
- “In an effort to broaden its reach to the Tri-State’s Spanish-speaking population, WKRC-Channel 12 said it will begin daily newscasts in Spanish on its Web site,” the Cincinnati Business Courier reported on Friday. “Local 12 News En Español will make its debut May 26, the station said in a news release. It will include video webcasts, as well as written content, and will be available on the Local12.com Web site.”
- Journalists monitoring the Nigerian elections “stumbled on some polling stations where some malpractices were being perpetrated,” the Daily Champion in Lagos, Nigeria, reported on Sunday. “Attempts by the newsmen to question the sharp practices irked party loyalists who swooped on them. ‘But for the quick intervention of the Police Commissioner and God, we would have been killed by the mob,’ a journalist who preferred anonymity told the News Agency of Nigeria.”