Maynard Institute archives

Miami Herald Honors a Pioneer

by richard0532

Newsroom Hears About Reporter Thirlee Smith Jr.

The Miami Herald on Thursday did something that few other newspapers have: It honored the man it said was its first black reporter.

“As the first black reporter at The Miami Herald, Thirlee Smith Jr. weathered racist barbs while covering news stories and ostracism from his newsroom colleagues,” Andrea Robinson wrote Friday in the Miami Herald.

“On Thursday, the newsroom attempted to right a wrong that was four decades old.

“Before Smith’s family and neighborhood friends, newspaper executives announced the naming of two $1,000 scholarships and dedicated a plaque in his honor.

 

 

“Smith, brother of state Sen. Frederica S. Wilson, died Feb. 7 of liver and kidney failure. He was 67.”

The impetus for the ceremony came from John Yearwood, the newspaper’s world editor. Yearwood, who is also treasurer of the National Association of Black Journalists, said Smith was one of those he consulted when he arrived at the Herald three years ago to learn about the town.

In February, he was shocked to hear on the radio that Smith had died, and was moved when he went to the funeral. “I said it’s amazing that the paper hasn’t recognized this guy in any way,” Yearwood told Journal-isms.

So he wrote a letter to the paper’s news executives saying the Herald needed to do something to recognize Smith’s work. Thus began a series of discussions that resulted in Thursday’s ceremony. It was important that people from the community be invited, said Joe Oglesby, the editorial page editor, and a black journalist. And, said Yearwood, “I insisted that we hold it in the newsroom, because of the way he was treated when he was here. It was one last opportunity for the man to be embraced by the newsroom.” He said Herald journalists, some of whom were near tears, heard from people who “didn’t hold back.”

The Herald reported, “Wilson implored the reporters, editors and photographers to remember the contributions her brother made `in fostering African-American history and journalism in the country.’

“Smith came to the newspaper in 1968, a few months before Miami’s first inner-city riot. He was thrust into the story.

“Wilson said her brother confided to her that some employees did not want him to drink from the water fountains. Former Miami Herald staff writer Bea L. Hines, a childhood classmate of Smith’s, recalled more subtle slights: stares, demeaning tones, the silent treatment.

“‘He would cry on my shoulder about the way he was treated,’ Hines said.

“Smith left The Miami Herald in 1969 and became a teacher in Dade Public Schools. He later developed the district’s African-American history curriculum.”

“His tenure at the newspaper was brief but significant, Oglesby said in the story.

“‘What he achieved in a short time was to open the door for everyone who was left out, and kept out,’ he said, referring to women, blacks and Hispanics.”

Yearwood said the Publisher David Landsberg and Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, though they did not know Smith, were moved to speak. The Herald was called one of the most diverse newspapers of its size in the nation, but the publisher said “we have a long way to go and we’re not going to stop now,” according to Yearwood.

Next to come is a “Wall of Honor,” Yearwood said, in which Smith and other notable Herald journalists would be recognized. He said he did not believe Smith was mentioned in histories of the Herald.

Many with the distinction of being the first black journalist at their news organization left embittered by the slights and other indignities.

But Oglesby said “I would be absolutely astounded” if other papers hadn’t similarly honored their African American pioneers. “Philadelphia, Detroit, the L.A. Times — they’ve all had very strong African American reporters.”

  • If you work for a mainstream news organization, who was its first journalist of color? Has that person been honored? E-mail Richard Prince.

 

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2 Iraqi Journalists, ABC News Employees, Killed

“Two Iraqi ABC News broadcast journalists were killed in Iraq, ABC News President David Westin announced this morning,” ABC News reported.

“Cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, were returning home from work at the ABC News Baghdad bureau yesterday afternoon when their car was reportedly ambushed and they were killed by unknown assailants.

“On ‘Good Morning America’ this morning, ABC’s Terry McCarthy said that Aziz and Yousuf were traveling home when they were stopped by two cars full of gunmen and forced to exit their car. The two were unaccounted for overnight and their deaths were confirmed this morning, McCarthy said.

“‘They are really our eyes and ears in Iraq,’ McCarthy said of the contribution each made to ABC News. “Many places in Baghdad are just too dangerous for foreigners to go now, so we have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out . . . without them we are blind, we cannot see what’s going on.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports 104 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003.

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Immigration Deal Not Necessarily Welcome News

 

 

News of a compromise on immigration reform was big news in both Hispanic and non-Hispanic media outlets, but, according to Hispanic media, many of their readers and viewers were wary.

“Most of the Hispanic organizations of the United States received with ‘fear’ the announcement in an agreement between Democrats, Republicans and the White House of a plan of immigration reform that includes a route of legalization for undocumented people who were in the United States before Jan. 1, 2007,” according to a rough translation of a news story from Univision.

From Monterrey, Mexico, Traci Carl wrote for the Associated Press, “Many in Mexico worry about the restrictions the new program could contain. Under the current guest worker program, many workers . . . spend most of their adult life working part of each year in the U.S.

“Mexican newspaper and television news broadcasts led with news of the proposal Friday, with El Universal newspaper headlines reading: ‘Immigration reform divides the United States’ and ‘Latinos: It isn’t what we hoped for.’

“The proposal, unveiled Thursday in Washington, focuses on securing the border and giving illegal residents a long, and many argue expensive path toward legal residency. Undocumented immigrants could seek lawful permanent residence once they pay $5,000 in fees and fines and their head of household returns to their home country.”

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NABJ Editor, a Candidate, Plans Election Issue

 

 

The editor of the NABJ Journal, membership magazine of the National Association of Black Journalists, plans to run stories about his own candidacy and that of his opponent in the upcoming NABJ elections. He says there is no conflict of interest because he will let others handle the copy.

Candidates for president are taking different positions on whether his stance is appropriate.

Ernie Suggs, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is running for reelection as vice president/print, opposed by Meta J. Mereday, a former associate member of the board who is senior editor/contributing writer of Black Professionals Magazine.

The unprecedented situation arose because Suggs assumed the role of Journal managing editor two years ago after NABJ President Bryan Monroe‘s choice for the job, Roland S. Martin, cited other commitments and declined. It apparently became the first time since the earliest years of nearly 32-year-old organization that a board member took an official editorial role with the publication, which reports on board activities, among other news.

As reported last August, this columnist raised the issue at the NABJ convention business meeting. The question of the role of the NABJ Journal and other means of communicating with members was referred to an NABJ committee whose members have yet to be chosen.

Suggs told Journal-isms on Friday, “I’m the editor of the magazine and I’m also running for office. We have a team of editors at the Journal, Rashida Rawls and Natasha Washington, for election coverage,” and they supervise it. “I’m on the board. That’s the way it is. If someone else wants to do it,” that is, edit the Journal, “they can do it. I would challenge anyone to give an instance” where the Journal has been unfair, he said.

Mereday, asked for comment, said, “I believe that more NABJ members should be involved with the production of the NABJ Journal to provide for fair and balanced coverage of the news and information that is vital to the whole membership. In order for that information to be fair and balanced, especially those issues relating to the Board of Directors, traditionally there was a NABJ member who was not on the Board who covered Board meetings and related actions from the meetings making sure that the members were receiving all the relevant information in a timely manner and could proceed accordingly.”

Cheryl Smith, executive editor of the Dallas Weekly, a former board member and a candidate for president, said:

“Ernie [Suggs] stepped in when others wouldn’t, to serve as editor of the NABJ Journal. For that he should be praised.

“I have the highest respect for Ernie and would never question his integrity, however, this is not as much about the individual, as it is the issue. Ethically, it is a flagrant violation. In the spirit of fairness, it would be best to avoid any perception of one person having the upper hand because even the hint of impropriety taints the entire process.”

Barbara Ciara, anchor/managing editor at WTKR in Norfolk, Va., a candidate for president and the current vice president/broadcast, said:

“Ernie has taken every step possible to remove any direct or indirect conflict regarding the Journal and election coverage. It is my understanding that Natasha Washington and Rashida Rawls are in charge of the election coverage and do not answer to Ernie Suggs.”

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Black College Challenges Rankings in U.S. News

“In the two weeks since 12 college presidents started a challenge to the way U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges, the movement has gained numbers and may also be expanding beyond its base,” Scott Jaschik reported Friday in Inside Higher Ed.

Among the latest challengers is a historically black college.

Walter Kimbrough, the president of Philander Smith College, said he joined the opposition to the U.S. News rankings because he read critiques by Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Education Conservancy and one of the organizers of the move against the rankings, of the way admissions has evolved away from education values, and because he thinks the rankings hurt black colleges, Jaschik wrote.

“The ‘best’ colleges, according to U.S. News, are those that reject large percentages of applicants, admit only those with high SAT scores, and have huge endowments to pay for the very best student services, Kimbrough said. Such a methodology ‘penalized historically black colleges for our mission,’ he said,” Jaschik reported.

“Philander Smith and other black colleges reach out to students who may have attended poor high schools and who may not score well on standardized tests. These college want to find ways to admit students, not reject them, he said.”

Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News, rejected the criticism. “We rate all colleges by the same standards,” he told Journal-isms. “Every college would like to be rated by its own methodology. . . . We don’t accept that. There is a place for broad-based ratings based on widely available data, and that’s what we do.”

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Yolanda King Bore Challenge of Family Name

“How many children have had fathers who rarely came home, not because they were out partying but because they were trying to redeem a nation?” asked David Person on Friday in the Huntsville (Ala.) Times.

“Has any other group of siblings had to lose a father to an assassin’s bullet and then, a scant six years later, their grandmother, who was shot to death while playing the organ at church?

“The miracle might be that Yolanda King lived as long and productively as she did, albeit on her own terms, far from the Atlanta base that her mother, Martin III and Bernice claimed.

Person was one of several columnists who wrote about the deaths this week of Yolanda King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and of the Rev. Jerry Falwell:

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Imus Aside, Corporate Interference Questioned

“One lesson we should not take away from the Imus debacle is how great it was that CBS pulled the plug on Imus once General Motors, American Express, Sprint Nextel, GlaxoSmithKline, TD Ameritrade, and Ditech.com threatened to yank their corporate sponsorships,” according to Diane Wachtell, writing Monday on Counterpunch.org. She referred to fired radio host Don Imus.

Wachtell is executive director of the New Press, a public-interest book publisher based in New York.

“Although the corporate cards may have been played in the public’s favor in this case, the recent dance of the corporate initials, in which GM pulls the strings and CBS jumps, is nothing to celebrate,” she continued.

“For each rare instance when media conglomerates swat down a bigot, there are dozens and dozens of examples when a different kind of censorship occurs. At The New Press, an independent not-for-profit book publisher, we were contacted a few years back by a whistleblower at a cigarette manufacturer about a box of internal memos indicating that cigarette manufacturers had long been aware of the detrimental health implications of smoking. We were ultimately unable to publish these ‘cigarette papers,’ because we were advised that the litigation sure to ensue from the cigarette companies would probably have exceeded the maximum payout of our libel policy.

“Just last month, a college in the Northeast notified The New Press that our book ‘Literature from the “Axis of Evil”‘ had been selected by a committee of professors and deans as a required book for all 750 incoming members of its Freshmen class next year, as part of a Freedom of Expression initiative. We ordered a new printing, only to learn two weeks later that the college president had vetoed the committee’s choice. He apparently was worried that the title of the book, which is an anthology of literature from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, might put off potential funders of the university.”

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Deaf Photographer, Blind Editor Overcome Odds

“When the Amish schoolhouse shooting erupted on Oct. 2, 2006, near Lancaster, Pa., photographer Andy Blackburn of the New Era was at home watching TV, hours before his usual late-afternoon shift. But when he saw a breaking news report about the tragedy— which left five girls and the shooter dead— he jumped into his car, raced to the scene, and secured the next day’s Page One photo of police removing the killer’s body bag,” Joe Strupp reported on Wednesday for Editor & Publisher.

“Back in the newsroom, Managing Editor Pete Mekeel was directing staffers from his third-floor office at the afternoon paper. “It was the hardest day I ever had,” recalls Mekeel, who has been at the New Era since 1974. In all, the 41,000-circulation daily delivered seven pages of coverage that would earn it three awards, including the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, the Eugene Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award, and the Religion Communicators Council’s Wilbur Award.

“But what makes this great reporting even more remarkable are small details about these two key players: Blackburn is deaf, and Mekeel is legally blind.”

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Short Takes

  • San Francisco Chronicle management “informed the newspaper guild Thursday that it intends to cut 80 union and 20 management positions in the editorial department, the guild said in a statement. The cuts represent roughly 25 percent of the newsroom staff of about 400,” John Coté reported Thursday in the Chronicle.
  • The nation’s “minority” population reached 100.7 million, according to the national and state estimates by race, Hispanic origin, sex and age released on Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. “The younger, diverse population that will be America will determine what resources will be spent for older Americans,” Mark Trahant said for Sunday in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “And, conversely, older Americans need to invest in infrastructure, schools and other public programs, because it’s in our long-term interest to do so. We have a bond between generations that’s unique in history.”

 

 
  • Tamron Hall, who spent 10 years at WFLD-TV in Chicago, most recently as host of the three-hour “Fox News in the Morning,” is joining MSNBC as dayside anchor and reporter, MSNBC announced on Thursday. She begins this summer.
  • “Two hundred supporters of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal protested outside a federal appeals court Thursday as lawyers challenged his 1982 conviction for the killing of a police officer,” Maryclaire Dale reported for the Associated Press. “The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing three issues in the case: whether the trial judge was racially biased, whether the judge erred in instructing jurors on the death penalty, and whether the prosecution preferred white jurors to black jurors,” Dale reported from Philadelphia.
  • Saturday, May 19, is the 82nd anniversary of the birth of Malcolm X, who was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965. Malcolm associate A. Peter Bailey wrote a remembrance for the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. City offices in Berkeley, Calif., were closed on Friday in observance of the birthday.
  • Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines and president of the National Association of Black Journalists, was to receive the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences 2007 Distinguished Alumnus award. The Seattle Times sponsored “A Conversation with Bryan Monroe,” at the Seattle Times auditorium Wednesday and wrote an editorial about him. Kim Peterson conducted a q-and-a for Thursday’s paper.
  • Leaders of the Asian American Journalists Association seconded the objections by its deputy executive director, Janice Lee, to GQ magazine Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson‘s comments in the May issue. He wrote, “All you need to do is visualize what you want (an Alfa Romeo? leather pants? an Asian whore?).”
  • Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, “whose exotic travel repeatedly has come under scrutiny, canceled a planned trip to attend a conference in Hawaii on public employee retirement systems,” David Josar wrote on Thursday in the Detroit News. “The reason: He’s concerned that he might be harassed by reporters.”
  • Not everyone was mesmerized by the visit of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth to the United States.”I don’t know how the queen has the audacity to parade around Virginia given the history of Britain there,” said Toyin Agbetu, according to Sean Yoes, writing Thursday in the Afro-American newspapers. Agbetu is founder of Ligali, an African British group that fights for the human rights of Africans worldwide. He was jailed for eight hours after confronting the queen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Westminster Abbey in March.
  • Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute, denied a statement in the Hill newspaper in Washington that “members of the CBC are pushing their leadership to withdraw from an agreement with Fox News to sponsor a Democratic presidential primary debate on Sept. 23 in Detroit.”
  • ImpreMedia, LLC, the nation’s leading Spanish-language print and online news publisher, announced on Tuesday it had completed the acquisition of Tribune Co.’s New York publication, Hoy, and its related weekend publication Fin de Semana. Both companies announced the acquisition agreement on Feb. 12.

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