Norfolk, Va., Anchor Wins Over Cheryl Smith, 310-278
Barbara Ciara, managing editor and anchor at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va. and vice president/broadcast of the National Association of Black Journalists, was elected president of the association on Friday, defeating black press advocate Cheryl Smith, 310-278.
Ciara, who has worked as an investigative reporter, photographer, producer and assignment editor in a career of more than 25 years, said her top priorities would be hiring, retention and professional development.
It was the third run at the job for Smith, executive editor of the Dallas Weekly and a former NABJ board member. The race provided a clear contrast in styles between Ciara, the television anchor and member of the current board, and Smith, who touted her grass-roots ties and said she had been described as “the Harriet Tubman of NABJ,” the nation’s largest organization of journalists of color.
In other contested races:
- Ernie Suggs, the incumbent vice president/print and a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, defeated New York-based Meta J. Mereday, a former associate member of the board and senior editor of Equal Business Publications, 414 to 165, to win reelection.
- Kathy Times, investigative reporter at WVTM-TV, Birmingham, Ala., won over Shannon Powell, reporter/anchor at WAVY-TV in Portsmouth, Va., 419 to 142, for vice president/broadcast.
- For secretary, Deirdre Childress, weekend editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, defeated Russell LaCour, copy editor/paginator at the Tulsa (Okla.) World and a regional representative on the board, 333 to 236.
- For parliamentarian, Tonju Francois, editorial producer at CNN en Español in North Miami, Fla., beat Victor Vaughan, national photo editor at the Associated Press in New York and a regional representative on the board, 306 to 246.
- Christopher Nelson, a communications major at Loyola College of Maryland in Baltimore, defeated Charles Taplin, a communication major at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., to become student representative on the board, 69 to 47.
Gregory Lee Jr., senior assistant sports editor at the Boston Globe, a former board secretary and chair of the NABJ Sports Task Force, ran unopposed for treasurer.
Some 32 percent of the organization’s 1,798 full-time members voted, and 9 percent of the 1,213 eligible students cast ballots, according to the elections committee. The election saw the organization’s most extensive use of the Internet, allowing members to vote online until 5 p.m. Pacific time on Friday.
After the results were announced at the end of a banquet at the association’s convention, which continues at Bally’s hotel in Las Vegas, Ciara hugged Smith, who was seated on the dais, and told members that toward the end of the campaign, the two women made a pledge “to work together to make a better NABJ,” regardless of who won. “We were both ladies during the process, we didn’t have to get witchy, and now we’ll be like sisters,” Ciara said.
As vice president/broadcast, Ciara often took the lead in formulating the organization’s position on broadcast matters.
In 2006, when a survey from the Radio-Television News Directors Association showed that an increase in minority journalists in TV newsrooms came almost entirely from an increase in Hispanics and Asian Americans, she said in an NABJ statement, “The question is, what will the radio and broadcast industries do with these numbers. I hope this survey is not an indication that the broadcast industry is just trading one race off for another instead of making a true effort to really diversify our nation’s newsrooms.”
During the campaign, Ciara said she had improved ties with the Meredith Corp., the company that in 2005 fired the head of its broadcast operation, Kevin O’Brien, for remarks criticizing African Americans. At the time, Ciara called O’Brien the true definition of “a power bigot.”
After Ciara worked with Paul Karpowicz, who succeeded O’Brien as president of Meredith’s Broadcast Group, more than 100 student NABJ members applied for a Meredith program in which students spend a week working in the newsroom of KPHO-TV in Phoenix, she said. The students spend time with reporters, producers, editors, videographers and instructors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Ciara also said at a candidates forum in Washington that “the stats went up, up, up” on black professionals employed at Meredith.
Asked then for her overriding vision for the organization, she answered, “For me, it’s training for the new technology.”
Ciara will preside over an organization that moved from a deficit of $468,249 last year to a projected surplus this year of $100,215, outgoing president Bryan Monroe and Treasurer John Yearwood said earlier Friday at a business meeting.
Monroe said membership, which had declined, had rebounded to more than 3,714, and that attendance at the convention exceeded 3,000.
Among those inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame Friday night was John L. Dotson Jr., a board member of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and former publisher of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, who in 1974 ran the Michele Clark Program at Columbia University, a precursor to the Maynard Institute.
There, one of his students was Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post who was slain on Aug. 2. “Chauncey was always feisty, looking to challenge whatever he was exposed to. Now he’s dead, evidently for getting too close looking into gang violence in California. I hope there will be others to take up this mantle,” Dotson said. He said he hoped “NABJ will find a way to honor him.”
Dodson also offered this advice: “Don’t let the same thing happen to news on the Web that happened to newspapers. There is still time to get on that elevator going up. Do what you can do to get on that elevator.”
Others inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame were Xerona Clayton, an Atlanta broadcaster who is founder, president and CEO of the Trumpet Awards Foundation Inc.; Mervin Aubespin, the first African American news illustrator at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, its first black reporter and a former NABJ president who was described as mentor to thousands; and Jim Vance, longtime anchor at WRC-TV in Washington.
- Renita Burns, NABJ Convention Online: Ciara Elected President
