Johnson Publishing Co. Called “Under Siege”

Juan Williams: Obama’s Blackness Blunts Criticism

Building Mortgaged; Firm Hit With Contractors’ Liens

"Ebony owner Johnson Publishing Co. is under siege, battered by sharp drops in advertising and circulation amid the most severe downturn in its 67-year history. In the past three months, Johnson has been hit with contractors’ liens claiming the company failed to pay for work worth nearly $500,000," Eddie Baeb and Ann Saphir wrote Monday in Crain’s Chicago Business.

"In May, Johnson mortgaged its South Michigan Avenue headquarters building and parking garage to its printer, R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co. Loan documents say the deal secured previous debts to Donnelley totaling $12.7 million – another sign of financial distress for the nation’s largest black-owned publishing company.

"Johnson’s troubles, while not that different from other publishing companies’, fall on the shoulders of Chairman and CEO Linda Johnson Rice, daughter of founder John Johnson. Ms. Rice, 50, must remake her organization amid a downturn that is hitting African-American media especially hard. The slump compounds the challenge she faces in revitalizing magazines many still associate with the civil rights era.

"’They have a set of challenges that go beyond those of companies that are not black-owned,’ says Ken Smikle, president and publisher of Chicago-based Target Market News, which monitors African-American media. Advertisers are slashing budgets that already were under-allocated to black-targeted media, he says – ‘all those things coming at a time when the company had invested in upgrading their magazines,’ Mr. Smikle says. [Smikle bought Black Issues Book Review in 2006 and said in April he would have a statement soon on the future of the publication, which has not appeared in more than a year.]

"Last year, revenue at Johnson, which also publishes weekly news magazine Jet, fell 28% to $328 million, while headcount tumbled to 340 from 503, according to the company, which is privately held but provides some financial data for Crain’s list of Chicago’s largest private companies," the Crain’s story continued.

"Ms. Rice declined to be interviewed, but in an e-mail the company called the mortgage and a $2.6-million trade credit from Donnelley a ‘prudent’ move. It acknowledges the liens and says ‘we fully intend’ to pay the contractors.

"’It’s no secret that the entire publishing industry, including Johnson Publishing Co., is feeling the pressure of the current economy,’ the statement says. "And, like any conservatively managed company, we’re taking whatever precautions we believe are prudent to give us the necessary resources to weather the current economy.’"

As previously reported, Ebony has asked freelancers to write for free, and undergone upheavals in personnel. The Johnson Publishing Co. Web site shows it is still seeking an editor in chief for Ebony, a photo editor for Jet, an art designer for Ebony and a copy editor/writer for Jet.

Ebony Considers Asking Readers for Old Copies

Johnson Publishing Co. may soon ask longtime readers to search their basements for early copies of its magazines, according to Eric Easter, the company’s vice president of digital and entertainment.

At a panel at a "Blogging While Brown" conference in Chicago over the weekend, Easter mentioned a deal that Johnson Publishing made last year with Google to transform the archives of Ebony, Jet, Black World and Ebony Jr. magazines into digital, searchable formats. He said that only magazines after 1960 were used, because transforming them requires a process that destroys the original copies.

Not enough extra pre-1960 issues were available to surrender to Google, he said, so soon the company may ask readers to search their basements for them.

["It could be a fun way to engage longtime readers," Easter told Journal-isms on Tuesday. "There’s no concrete plan to do it, and it’s not an immediate priority. We probably will do it as part of a marketing campaign soon, but have not started considering the best way to approach it so we’re not inundated with copies we don’t need or are in poor condition.

["I get calls all the time from people who parents or grandparents have moved or passed on and they have very early copies in great condition somewhere in the house. I figure it’d be a great way for folk to involve older people in the whole digital revolution in a concrete way they can relate to."]

The archives are searchable by cover and content at books.google.com. [Updated June 23.]

• Blogging While Brown conference (Part 4)¬†

Sandy Clark Promoted to AME/Features at Inquirer

Sandy Clark, arts and features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, has been promoted to assistant managing editor for features, editors told staffers on Friday.

"Leading a talented group of editors, reporters and critics, Sandy directs the Inquirer’s nationally-honored entertainment and features coverage and has overseen some of the Inquirer’s most outstanding work and some of its most innovative initiatives," Mike Leary, managing editor, and Tom McNamara, deputy managing editor/Sunday, wrote.

"The list of her and her department’s achievements is long. Among recent highpoints: a prestigious National Headliner Award for Innovation for the Please Touch Museum special section and on-line presentation; Stephan Salisbury’s Rosey-award winning ‘Sacred Ground’ reporting; Inga Saffron’s Pulitzer-finalist columns.

"She also directed the successful launch of ‘I’ magazine and produced widely-praised special sections on the Academy of Music, the Kimmel Center and the Perelman."

["I’ve worked at the Inquirer since 1983, except for a 6-year stint in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, cross-cultural trainer, and consultant and administrator for Africare/Guinea-Bissau and Africare/Mozambique," Clark, 48, told Journal-isms on Tuesday. "At the Inquirer, I’ve been a copy editor, news editor, Deputy Features, Senior News Editor and department head for Arts & Features.¬†

["One of my more proud endeavors: I’m Metro columnist Annette John Hall’s editor. She recently was named best in Pennsylvania" in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association’s Keystone Press Awards, "and is an NABJ commentary finalist."] [Updated June 23]

President Obama discusses developments in Iran with Harry Smith in a clip from CBS-TV’s "The Early Show" on Monday. (Video)

Juan Williams: Obama’s Blackness Blunts Criticism

"The problem here is he’s not being treated as a politician," Fox News commentator Juan Williams said on "Fox News Sunday" during a discussion of whether President Obama has a "cozy relationship" with the mainstream media.

"The press is not being sufficiently adversarial, which is its role, to hold him accountable. And part of this, I think, goes back to the campaign," said Williams, the only black journalist on the major networks’ talk shows on Sunday.

"I think a lot of people think, ‘Well, he’s a black man. He’s the president of the United States. This is unbelievable. This is historic. We better get on the bandwagon. We better get on the right side of history.’

"But that’s not the role that the press should play. And just the way that you can condemn someone because of their race or because of difference, I fear that they’re now celebrating him and hold him ‚Äî holding him and Michelle up to unreasonable standards and that they will jump off."

Williams’ fellow panelists ‚Äî Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, Byron York of the Washington Examiner ‚Äî offered other reasons: that Obama is "breaking barriers," there is an "ideological affinity," that the president sells magazines and boosts television ratings; because of his overall popularity.

Obama joked about the subject during the Radio-Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington Friday night:

"It wasn’t easy coming up with fresh material for this dinner. A few nights ago, I was up tossing and turning, trying to figure out exactly what to say. Finally, when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought," Obama said of the "NBC Nightly News" anchor, who hosted a successful two-part series, "Inside the Obama White House."

The conservative Washington Times reported on Friday, "According to an analysis of campaign donations by the Center for Responsive Politics, conducted at The Times’ request, ABC employees in several divisions donated $124,421 to the Obama campaign, compared with $1,550 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain."

But Felix Gillette, analyzing the same information for the New York Observer, wrote, "A brief look at the data makes one thing clear: The vast majority of the donations given to Obama from ABC employees came from individuals who have nothing to do with the news division and its political coverage."

Let’s Honor the Committed African American Fathers

"Committed fathers of color are everywhere throughout my life and they are virtually nowhere in the media," Dori J. Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, wrote in the Oakland Tribune on Sunday.

"Their invisibility does us all a disservice," wrote the daughter of the journalist, publisher and namesake of the institute.

"By failing to recognize them we paint a distorted picture of African-American life. Equally importantly, we rob ourselves of important role models. If we want to change behavior it might be helpful to point out some positive examples."

"As the legendary journalist Earl Caldwell tells his students at Hampton University, ‘You shouldn’t only dig for the ugly; you also need to hold up the beautiful. That is one of the best ways to point out all of life’s possibilities.’

"He is right. It is so much easier to aspire to that which we know is possible.

"This Father’s Day, as fate would have it, my brothers and I will be sorting through the remnants of our father’s life. Each book we shelve, each award we pack away and each family picture we catalog will be a reminder of the values he worked to pass on to us ‚Äî scholarship, professional accomplishment and a great deal of family love.

"Our father was unique to us but he was hardly the lone example of a good father of color.

"On Father’s Day 2008 we heard about what was wrong with black fathers. I hope Father’s Day 2009 marks the date we begin to celebrate African-American fathers.’"

• Monroe Anderson blog: Everlasting memories of a great father
• Merlene Davis, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader: Celebrations of fatherhood still needed
• Jarvis DeBerry, New Orleans Times-Picayune: A son looks at himself and sees Dad
• Michel Martin, "Tell Me More," National Public Radio: The Dents In My Father’s Helmet
• Courtland Milloy, Washington Post: Obama Leads Conversation On Fathering by Example
  

No "Tiger Effect" for Black Journalists at U.S. Open

Despite the lure of Tiger Woods and South Africa’s James Kamte, the man some hailed as the Tiger Woods of South Africa, the press corps at the U.S. Open had few black journalists, according to reporters who were there. Woods lost to Lucas Glover, a 29-year-old former Clemson University star who had failed to make the cut in his three previous U.S. Open appearances.

"Not many of us. Probably about the same percentage as Tiger and James represented in the field," one black journalist said of the press contingent at the Bethpage, N.Y., event. "There were a great number of journalists of Asian and Latin descent, and accordingly, there were far more players of Latin and Asian descent in the field." Those journalists were represented in print, video, radio and online.

Sprinkled among the array of journalists— about 2,000 press credentials were issued, according to the U.S. Golf Association — were black journalists Damon Hack of Sports Illustrated, Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com, Pete McDaniel of Golf Digest, Farrell Evans of Sports Illustrated, Rob King of espn.com, William Rhoden of the New York Times and George A. Willis of the New York Post.

"And don’t even get me started on crowds," Freeman told Journal-isms. "Easily 99 percent white. The Tiger effect is a myth."

Short Takes

• "In the day after a career racist named James von Brunn took a rifle into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and fatally wounded a guard, The Plain Dealer handled the story with a paragraph at the top of the one-column ‘News Minute’ on Page One, directing readers to a story and photo on page A6," Public Editor Ted Diadiun wrote Sunday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The play was justified, Diadiun said, because "by the time people read their papers the next morning ‚Äî 18 to 20 hours after it happened, and after it had dominated the electronic news reports and newspaper Web sites for almost a day ‚Äî the story was no longer stopping people in their tracks."
• "If you‚Äôre . . . reading this and sitting in the comfort of your home and watch the Lakers /Magic NBA Finals game on ABC, then you had a much better view of the game than the African American media contingent at Staples Center," Kenneth Miller, managing editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel, wrote. "The NBA is a league where more than 80 percent of its players are Black. About a third of its coaches are Black. However, only about two percent of the media are people of color. . . . [There] was nothing wrong the seats, [except] that I could not see the game."
• "Fox Broadcasting has created a new executive position devoted to boosting diversity in its programming and has tapped former UPN executive Ron Taylor to fill it," TV Week reported. "Taylor will serve as VP of Diverse Programming and Content for the network. He’ll be charged with ‘developing scripts that feature diverse themes or are written by diverse writers, and will provide input on other Fox scripted projects,’ the network said.
• Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, jailed for four months in Iran on charges of espionage, has a book deal. Saberi, 32, "is working on a memoir that HarperCollins will publish in March 2010. Saberi‚Äôs book, currently untitled, will tell of her arrest in January, her initial sentence to eight years in prison and her release in May after being granted a two-year suspended sentence," the Associated Press reported.
• Michelle White Lafitte, an anchor at KSLA-TV in Shreveport, La., from 2000 to 2006, is returning to television as co-anchor of the 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts at KTAL-TV in that city, the station announced on Monday. In 2007, Lafitte joined Christus Schumpert Health System as Louisiana Children’s Health Insurance Program marketing specialist, working to increase the enrollment of eligible children.
• The Asian American Journalists Association is supporting a community-wide gathering from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday in solidarity for the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the American journalists sentenced to 12 years in labor prison after being convicted of illegally crossing the border into North Korea and ‚Äúgrave crimes‚Äù against North Korea. The gathering is at Lee’s alma mater, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.