- A year in the quest for a news media that looks like America
1. More of “More With Less”
You don’t have to ask the journalists now working as consultants or college professors, starting other second careers or enjoying the proceeds of their buyout offers to name the year’s top story inside the news business. The transformation from traditional old media to some combination of old and new continued apace, with shrinking old-media newsrooms one byproduct. New media — chiefly the Internet — hadn’t yet become profitable enough to absorb all the exiled journalists, yet the need for journalistic content remained. That meant doing, as managers echoed across the country, “more with less.”
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On Jan. 3, the parent company of the Philadelphia Inquirer laid off up to 71 newsroom employees, or about 17 percent of the editorial staff. The National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and Unity: Journalists of Color protested the disproportionate numbers of journalists of color on the layoff list; black journalists were twice as likely to be there. Management and the Newspaper Guild each blamed the other for that outcome, then negotiated some reinstatements.
Buyouts — offered to those with seniority — seemed to have less of an impact on diversity than layoffs, since white journalists had been on the payroll longer. But diversity took its hits with buyouts as well. At USA Today, for example, four African American sports journalists were among the 43 overall taking buyouts, wiping out the paper’s NBA reporting team. By March 7, eight journalists of color had left Newsday in just three months. The San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, Houston Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe were among others that shrank. Ron Schofield, Midwest bureau chief of ABC News, was laid off after more that 11 years in the job. Narda Zacchino, the San Francisco Chronicle’s deputy editor who monitored diversity efforts, left in July.
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In September, Janet Clayton, who for nine years was editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page and for the last three assistant managing editor for state and local news, said she was leaving the paper on her own. In October, Rick Rodriguez resigned as executive editor of the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee. Neal Scarbrough, general manager and editor of AOL Sports, was one of 2,000 employees laid off by AOL in October, but he landed as senior vice president and editor-in-chief of the start-up Sportnet Web site.
Separately, the Black Family Channel lost its small news department when it made plans to become Internet-only.
Perhaps most damaging was the inference that would-be journalists of color should seek careers in an industry with more job security.
“The business has turned hostile toward us,” Ricardo Chavira, former State Department reporter and foreign correspondent, told Hispanic Link. “I suggest to Latino students that they will need to think long and hard about dealing with this changed atmosphere.”
At year’s end, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to relax rules preventing newspapers from owning television stations in the same market. Opposing that action, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said they feared that further media consolidation would decrease the number of minority owners; NAHJ added that it expected fewer journalist jobs if media outlets combined operations.
2. Hiring Glass Is Half Full
While old media were cutting back, Internet sites, ESPN, suburban weeklies and ethnic media were hiring, and even in old media, some journalists of color were making advances.
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NBC’s hiring of former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker as No. 2 in the news department and Lyne Pitts’ promotion to one of five NBC News vice presidents, overseeing of the news division’s strategic partnerships and managing production, helped earn NBC News President Steve Capus the Ida B. Wells award from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Conference of Editorial Writers. At the parent NBC Universal, Paula Madison, who juggled her station-running duties at NBC in Los Angeles with her role as the parent company’s diversity chief, was named executive vice president for diversity in May.
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Harold Jackson became editorial page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer; Gilbert Bailón, who assumed office as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, later became editorial page editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, moving on from publisher and editor of the Dallas Morning News’ Spanish-language Al Día; Debra Adams Simmons, who lost her job as editor of the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, was named managing editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer; Roy S. Johnson, who had stepped down at Sports Illustrated, became editor of Men’s Fitness magazine, and Deborah Simmons was promoted to editorial page editor at the Washington Times. The New York Times made room for Dean Baquet, who had been ousted as editor of the Los Angeles Times after he refused to make budget cuts mandated by the parent Tribune Co. He rejoined the New York paper as chief of its Washington bureau.
In the journalism associations, Vanessa J. Gallman, editorial page editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, became the first African American woman to lead the National Conference of Editorial Writers, and Garry D. Howard, assistant managing editor/sports at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was elected second vice-president of the Associated Press Sports Editors, on the ladder to become president. He is the first black editor elected for APSE board leadership.
Meanwhile, as Richard Pérez-Peña reported last Monday in the New York Times, “ESPN and Yahoo Sports are on a furious hiring binge, offering reporters and columnists more than they ever imagined they could make in journalism. And ESPN, in particular, has gone after the biggest stars at newspapers and magazines, signing them for double and triple what they were earning — $150,000 to $350,000 a year for several writers, and far more for a select handful.”
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Among the black former print journalists now at ESPN are Rob King, editor in chief of ESPN.com, who had been deputy managing editor/visuals and sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Sports Illustrated football writer Jeffri Chadiha; Dwayne Bray of the Dallas Morning News; Howard Bryant of the Washington Post; Larry Starks, assistant managing editor for sports at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jemele Hill, former Orlando Sentinel columnist; Stephen A. Smith and Claire Smith of the Philadelphia Inquirer; J.A. Adande, former Los Angeles Times columnist; and Michael Wilbon of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” who remains a Washington Post columnist.
In September, Stephen A. Smith signed to do a show on ESPN radio after challenging his reassignment as a general assignment sports reporter at the Inquirer. He later left the newspaper and hired trial lawyer Willie E. Gary to deal with the Inquirer.
As for weeklies, Philip M. Stone wrote in April on followthemedia.com, “For all the doom and gloom told time and time again about US newspapers, there is one sector that is actually doing very nicely, thank you very much. How about 6-10% revenue growth in 2006 and profit margins holding steady. No wonder it is the weeklies that are getting the attention of the smart money.”
A 2005 study from New America Media found that “a staggering 29 million adults (45 percent of the 64 million ethnic adults studied), or a full 13 percent of the entire adult population of the United States, prefer ethnic media to mainstream television, radio or newspapers. More than half of all Hispanic adults are primary consumers of ethnic media.”
3. Don Imus Raises Consciousness
The phrase “nappy-headed ‘ho’s” entered the lexicon this year thanks to radio host Don Imus, whose fall and re-entry crystallized a debate over the growing coarseness of the culture, the use of the “N” word, media responsibility, the race and gender of those permitted on the airwaves, and perhaps who owns the airwaves as well.
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Imus uttered his epithet on the April 4 edition of “Imus in the Morning,” syndicated by CBS Radio and simulcast on MSNBC, after sidekick Bernard McGuirk called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “hard-core ho’s.”
Imus and McGuirk went on to call the black members of the team “jigaboos and wannabees.”
Word circulated, and the National Association of Black Journalists issued a statement two days later in which NABJ President Bryan Monroe, vice president and editorial director for Ebony and Jet magazines, declared, “Has he lost his mind? Those comments were beyond offensive. Imus needs to be fired. Today.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton joined in and hosted Imus on his own show, during which Imus repeatedly apologized. Women’s groups followed with their denunciations.
On MSNBC, Imus was first suspended for two weeks, then, two days later, dropped. CBS Radio followed the next day, firing him on April 12.
“About 30 angry NBC News employees, many of them black, met with news division president Steve Capus less than 24 hours before Capus decided that a two-week suspension of Imus’ morning telecast wasn’t enough,” the Associated Press said.
“They said they’d had it with Imus’ brand of coarse ethnic humor . . . “
“Within this organization, this had touched a nerve,” Capus said. “The comment that came through to us, time and time again, was ‘when is enough going to be enough?’ This was the only action we could take.'”
Black business leaders played a major role in driving Imus from the airwaves: Kenneth Chenault, chief executive officer of American Express, which pulled its multimillion-dollar account from his MSNBC show; and former NAACP president Bruce S. Gordon, who is a board member for CBS. African American employees at Sprint Nextel Corp. successfully lobbied CEO Gary D. Forsee to pull that company’s advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Attention soon turned to rap music lyrics, and Ebony magazine, with Monroe as editorial director, pulled a cover featuring the rapper and actor Ludacris for its “black fathers” issue. In February, the word “Enough!” had been bannered across the cover in a discussion of the “N” word.
Women of all races noted that women were missing from much of the commentary about Imus, leading to questions about who makes the booking decisions. This columnist raised questions of media ownership, in light of studies that show that people of color make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, but own only 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations and 3.15 percent of television stations.
Imus returned to the air on Dec. 3 on New York’s WABC-AM, pledging to earn his “second chance” and agreeing that he should have been fired.
In August, he and CBS quietly settled a multimillion-dollar breach of contract suit that his lawyer had threatened to file. Imus reportedly got $20 million.
4. Barack Obama Candidacy
Shortly before Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., formally announced his candidacy for president in February, Tony Dokoupil wrote this on Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily: “‘Is America Ready for a Black President?’ It’s a question that many media outlets have posed recently ahead of a possible presidential run . . . But instead of asking if the country is prepared, the press would do well to ask itself, ‘Is Journalism Ready?'”
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The year gave the news media — and everyone else — its first experience dealing with a black man with a serious shot at the presidency. Obama’s biracial background — his father was black, his mother white — and the fact that he was not part of the civil rights establishment complicated things.
It wasn’t long before “Is he black enough?” became the media’s story line. By August, when Obama addressed the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, the candidate made it clear he found the question irritating. He said journalists who raised it were going after an “easy story to write and a lazy story to write,” and that reporters should investigate how the phrase became a campaign issue in the first place.
The media decided early on that it wasn’t necessary to mention Obama’s race in every story, but two pieces at the end of the year illustrated that the question of how to address his racial identity still wasn’t resolved. A Washington Post piece by Kevin Merida put Obama in the context of other African Americans who have sought the presidency, while a New York Times article by Janny Scott was headlined, “A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line.”
In the magazine world, Obama was declared cool. In addition to gracing the covers of Time, Newsweek and Ebony, Obama’s image sold issues of Vibe and GQ.
5. Chauncey Bailey Killing
Veteran Oakland, Calif., journalist Chauncey Bailey, a longtime reporter for the Oakland Tribune who was editor of the Post Newspaper Group, which publishes black weeklies in the San Francisco Bay area, was shot to death in August in an assassination-style killing. He was 57.
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It was the first targeted slaying of an American journalist in the United States since 1993, but it initially received scant coverage outside of California.
New America Media, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Investigative Reporters and Editors, an array of Bay Area journalists and local university journalism departments collaborated to form an investigative team to honor and continue Bailey’s work and answer questions regarding his death. Their reports have appeared in Bay Area newspapers.
Police arrested Devaughndre Broussard, 20, a handyman at Oakland’s Your Black Muslim Bakery, which Bailey had been investigating, as the gunman.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported in December that more journalists were killed worldwide in 2007 than in any year since 1994. It said 64 journalists died in circumstances linked to their work, and nearly half of those deaths, 31, took place in Iraq.
6. Numbers
Whites are now the minority in nearly one in 10 U.S. counties, the Census Bureau reported in August, but news media numbers showed little progress in matching the nation’s demographics.
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“The percentage of minority journalists working in America’s daily newsrooms declined slightly to 13.62 percent this year, according to the ASNE annual newsroom census,” the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported in March, noting that, “Currently minorities make up 33 percent of the U.S. population.”
At local broadcast stations, “The 2007 RTNDA/Ball State University Annual Survey shows that minorities comprised 21.5 percent of local television news staffs in 2006, compared to 22.2 percent in 2005. Asian Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic journalists decreased by a fraction of a percentage point, while African Americans increased from 9.5 percent to 10.1 percent of the workforce,” the Radio-Television News Directors Association said.
A list of the top 100 newspaper columnists by “reach,” defined as “the proportion of the total American daily newspaper circulation that each columnist reaches,” the watchdog group Media Matters for America reported, included Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald in fifth place; Clarence Page, No. 13; Eugene Robinson, 14; Ruben Navarrette Jr., 16; Thomas Sowell, 17; Bob Herbert, 18; Michelle Malkin, 22; Cynthia Tucker, 30; DeWayne Wickham, 32; Walter Williams, 37; Mary Sanchez, 49; Star Parker, 60; Linda Chavez, 65; Stanley Crouch, 86; Marcela Sanchez, 88; and Roger Hernandez, 90.
The National Conference of Editorial Writers attempted the first diversity survey of opinion writers.
At the University of Georgia, the Cox Center’s Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates found a continuing racial gap among job-seeking journalism and mass communication grads. The percentage for minorities who landed communications jobs remained at 66.6 percent in 2006, as it was in 2005. For non-minorities, it was 75.8 percent in 2006, compared with 76.9 percent in 2005.
A survey of journalism and mass communications administrators by Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and incoming president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, found that of 89 responding deans, directors and department heads, 90 percent were white and 64 percent were male.
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7. Challenging Ken Burns
Latino organizations, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, spent much of the year demanding that the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns include Latinos in “The War,” his seven-episode documentary on World War II that began airing on PBS on Sept. 23.
Veteran filmmaker Hector Galan earned the contract to produce new material on Latino and Native American contributions, a concession to the protesters. Galan and other Latino filmmakers said it had often been a struggle to get PBS’ attention, and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas journalism professor honored by NAHJ this year for her activism on the Burns film, said an underlying issue was decision-making at PBS, including sensitivity to concerns of people of color and their filmmaking proposals.
PBS aired five Latino projects in the weeks before the start of Burns’ “The War,” though the network denied a connection. In October, PBS named Haydee M. Rodriguez director, PBS Diversity Initiative. She was executive director of the Governor’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs in Maryland.
8. Controversy Over Immigration
The immigration debate, which culminated in June with a Senate rejection of President Bush’s effort to overhaul immigration policy, generated commentary upon commentary, became a wedge issue in political campaigns and touched Latino journalists both personally and professionally.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists continued to insist that “illegals” should not be used as a noun to describe what it prefers to call “undocumented immigrants,” but not everyone in the news media agreed.
At NAHJ’s annual awards banquet in September, winners told of how their parents worked the sugar beet fields or had only a fourth-grade education but learned English by reading the newspaper. “Story after story has shown that immigrants have a lower crime rate,” the master of ceremonies, anchor Antonio Mora of WBBM-TV in Chicago, said from the stage. “And as an immigrant myself, my blood boils” when hearing the opposite. Mora is a native of Havana.
In December, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that, “Hispanics in the United States are feeling a range of negative effects from the increased public attention and stepped up enforcement measures that have accompanied the growing national debate over illegal immigration. Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos.”
The immigration bill would have offered legal status to millions of illegal immigrants while trying to secure borders. Conservatives and others called it a form of amnesty for lawbreakers.
9. Jena Six
The Jena Six protest was viewed by some as a revival of the energy of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, but it also represented a milestone for African American media.
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“For months, the story of the so-called ‘Jena Six’ unfolded largely out of sight of the mainstream media. But in the emerging ‘Afro-Sphere,’ as some call the loose network of black bloggers, the story of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate passed from blog to blog, taking on a life of its own,” Eric Weiner reported in September on National Public Radio. “Petitions were signed, money was raised and protests were organized— all online.
“‘I think a lot of people ignored the story but the African-American blogosphere has been on it from early on, and it has really caught steam recently,’ said Shawn Williams, who writes the popular Dallas South blog.”
Black talk radio also played a major part in the turnout. Michael Baisden and Al Sharpton used their shows to generate support.
“Ten years ago this couldn’t have happened,” Sharpton told Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune, saying he first learned of the Jena case on the Internet. “You didn’t have the Internet and you didn’t have black blogs and you didn’t have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day. We’ve been able to form our own underground railroad of information, and when everybody else looks up, it’s already done.”
Awareness of the Jena Six wasn’t solely the creation of black media, however. The Chicago Tribune’s Witt says, “I was the first national reporter to cover this story, back on May 20, 2007, and it was then picked up by the African American blogosphere, and only afterward noticed by the rest of the media as well as Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and others.” The BBC aired a piece on May 19, Britain’s Guardian newspaper on May 20, and chinadaily.com on May 21. Among U.S.-based broadcast outlets, Audrey Irvine, a CNN assignment editor on the Midwest desk, came across the story when doing routine beat checks with CNN affiliates in Northern Louisiana. “She pushed, prodded, cajoled, argued for and finally ended up producing the first network story,” her colleague Greg Morrison said. That story aired on “Paula Zahn Now” on June 25.
The Associated Press was early on the story as well. Mike McQueen, bureau chief for Louisiana and Mississippi, said AP moved a story on its national wire on Sept. 7, 2006, about the noose incident at Jena high school and the growing tensions, and a story May 3 about the young men being charged in the beating and the growing outcry over the fact they were charged as adults. Alan Bean, “a mild mannered 54-year-old former Baptist minister who is white,” worked tirelessly to get the Jena story out, initially with little success, Wade Goodwyn of National Public Radio reported in January 2008.
10. Larry Whiteside Honored in Cooperstown
In a year in which sportswriters covered NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s conviction in a dogfighting conspiracy, whether Barry Bonds’ home-run record should carry an asterick, Marion Jones surrendering five Olympic medals after admitting she used performance-enhancing drugs, and former senator George Mitchell’s damaging report on baseball players’ steroid use, there was good news among their own ranks:
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Larry Whiteside, the Boston Globe baseball writer and columnist who died in June, was elected into what has fancifully been called the “writer’s wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame,” only the third black journalist in the history of the hall to be so designated.
“We’re pretty tough critics,” said Jack O’Connell, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America organization, explaining the significance of the association’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award. “We’re all newspaper guys. He was a great member of our association and one of the real pioneers in our business. It was a very satisfying election.”
The first black journalist to win the award was Wendell Smith, who spent more than 10 years covering Negro league baseball for the Pittsburgh Courier and who ghostwrote books for sports legends Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Joe Louis and Ernie Banks. He died in 1972 at age 58 and was voted the award in 1993.
Sam Lacy, sports editor of the Baltimore Afro-American and a key figure in the integration of major league baseball, was voted into the hall in 1997, six years before he died at age 99.
