Appointment Comes 2 Weeks After Cartoon Flap
Two weeks after the Cleveland Plain Dealer angered many in the black community over a cartoon for which Editor Susan Goldberg later apologized, Goldberg named Debra Adams Simmons, a black journalist who had been editor of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, as managing editor.
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Goldberg “announced the decision to the staff this afternoon,” according to an article on the Plain Dealer’s Web site. “‘Debra is a wonderful journalist, blessed with an analytical mind, a knack for understanding readers’ interests and an enormous capacity for problem solving,’ said Goldberg, who arrived at the paper recently from the San Jose Mercury News.
“Adams Simmons, 42, worked as deputy managing editor and metro editor at The Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, Va., before working at the Beacon Journal. She has also worked at the Detroit Free Press, The Hartford Courant and the Syracuse-Herald Journal,” the article continued. She is also a graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Management Training Program.
While Adams Simmons’ appointment was said to be in the works before the cartoon controversy, the incident highlighted the racial composition of the staff. The paper had become bereft of news managers of color, though it once had an African American top editor in Thomas Greer and helped forge the careers of such black journalists as Denver Post Editor Gregory Moore, Orlando Sentinel Managing Editor Mark Russell and the late Bob McGruder, the Detroit Free Press executive editor who had been Plain Dealer managing editor.
Goldberg apologized last week to the parents of 12-year-old shooting victim Asteve’ ‘Cookie’ Thomas over a drawing by staff cartoonist Jeff Darcy that many considered offensive and insensitive. Darcy and his editors said the cartoon was intended to jab at Mayor Frank Jackson’s lack of personal responses to a string of killings in the city, but many in the community took it as a tasteless portrayal of the victim, who was killed by a stray bullet during a shootout in her neighborhood.
Members of the anti-crime group Black on Black Crime Inc., the NAACP, New Black Panther Party and other organizations called off a protest in front of the Plain Dealer, and instead met privately with Goldberg and Editorial Page Editor Brent Larkin last week, according to the newspaper.
Goldberg said then, “Having a diverse staff is important, and that’s something we need to work on in The Plain Dealer’s newsroom, This is an area in which we need to improve so we can better reflect and cover the diverse community in which we live and work.”
About 10 percent of the Plain Dealer’s professional editorial staff is black, and about 14 percent are people of color, including African Americans, Latinos and Asians, Goldberg said in that story.
The appointment is not likely to please all of the Plain Dealer’s African American critics. “Nine times out of 10, when we put people in positions,” the job goes to an “Uncle Tom,” Ken Bender, a spokesman for the Black Contractors Group, told Journal-isms.
That group, which he said has 477 members, brought about 150 people to protest in front of the Plain Dealer building Sept. 14 to demand that the editor who approved the cartoon, as well as the cartoonist, be fired. The Plain Dealer “depicts us as uneducated, a bunch of thugs and hoodlums,” Bender said.
[Adams Simmons replied to Journal-isms on Sept. 22, “It’s unfortunate that the black contractors and others are dissatisfied with the newspaper and I will work to try to mend the differences, but I’d say we’re starting out on the wrong foot if the only response to my arrival is that I’m probably a ‘tom’. Clearly, they don’t know me.”]
Simmons left the Beacon Journal, where she was vice president and editor, in November 2006 when that former Knight Ridder paper decided to restructure its senior management team, publisher Edward R. Moss said then. Her job remained unfilled until Deputy Managing Editor Bruce Winges, a 25-year veteran of the newspaper, was named vice president and editor in May.
Simmons left the Beacon Journal, where she was vice president and editor, in November 2006 when that former Knight Ridder paper decided to restructure its senior management team, publisher Edward R. Moss said then. Her job remained unfilled until Deputy Managing Editor Bruce Winges, a 25-year veteran of the newspaper, was named vice president and editor in May.