AME Pamela Moreland, Columnist L.A. Chung Out
Assistant Managing Editor Pamela Moreland and longtime columnist L.A. Chung are among 10 newsroom employees of color out at the San Jose Mercury News as the paper cut about 5 percent of its staff, Managing Editor David Satterfield told Journal-isms on Friday.
Moreland took a buyout on Wednesday, Satterfield said. A black journalist, Moreland was assistant managing editor for features and had been at the paper since 2000. Before that, she was editorial page editor and managing editor at the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal.
Chung is a 1980 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists who is active in the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association.
She was laid off on Friday, Satterfield said, along with photographers Thu Hoang Ly and Joanne Ho-Young Lee, and food writer Carolyn Jung, who are Asian Americans; travel writer Michael Martinez, page designer Elizabeth Goodspeed and Latino affairs writer Javier Erik Olvera, who are Hispanic; and library archivist Steve Chae, an Asian American who wrote downscale restaurant reviews and at one time co-wrote the paper’s Action Line column. Levi Sumagaysay, a business section assigning editor who is Asian American, took a voluntary departure, he said.
“Fifteen newsroom employees and 19 employees from other parts of the paper were laid off today. Earlier in the week, 16 employees accepted buyout offers, five from the newsroom,” Pete Carey wrote Friday on the Mercury News Web site.
“Today’s job reductions are part of cost-cutting at two dozen daily and weekly Bay Area newspapers owned by MediaNews and operated by the Bay Area News Group. The other papers, which include the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times, announced staff reductions Thursday of 10 percent through buyouts given to 107 people. There were no layoffs at the other newspapers. . . . The cutbacks at the Mercury News follow two other reductions in July 2007 and December 2006.”
Staffers were instructed to wait at home on Friday morning. If they didn’t get a phone call by 10 a.m. telling them that they had lost their jobs, they were to head to work. However, Chung said some staffers learned their fates early and, as she did, stayed until the wee hours Thursday night packing up their personal belongings. “They knew a lot of people were pretty anxious and they allowed you to talk to the AMEs” about their situations.
The San Jose Newspaper Guild called for its members to wear black on Friday and gather outside the Mercury News Building at noon to thank their departing colleagues for their contributions.
Guild rules required that the layoffs be undertaken partially by seniority, and “minorities and women tend to have a little less time at the paper,” Satterfield said.
Chung, who had been at the paper 11 years, said she had already scheduled a vacation in Hawaii. She had been an assistant city editor and an assistant business editor and wrote her column for seven years. In October, she was reassigned to write “point of view features” about ordinary people.
“I’ll stay in the Bay Area and see what I can do. I’ll work with my community contacts,” she told Journal-isms.
Moreland said, “I plan to take a couple of months off to unwind, then I am going to join forces with a Silicon Valley start-up called Golden Wheel Communications. At Golden Wheel, we plan to develop and test drive news and information products. I may be leaving the newspaper business, but I am still in the communication business. I also would like to thank the Maynard Institute. Last summer, I attended a workshop for media folks who had either been laid off or accepted buyouts. I learned a lot about starting a business.”
Katherine Fong is now the highest ranking journalist of color at the paper. She added Moreland’s portfolio to her own, becoming assistant managing editor for features, online and budget.
Asian American Journalists Association statement [Added March 10]
Society of Professional Journalists Chapter Expresses Grave Concern Over Cutbacks at MediaNews Papers in Northern California [Added March 10]
Editor & Publisher: Bay Area Papers Make 26 Cuts — But Avoid Layoffs
Newspaper Guild of New York: New York Times extends buyout deadline
New Media Line: Democratic Campaign to Get Nasty
“The media narrative for this next phase of the Democratic campaign is now set, as firmly as if the top players had secretly hammered out a memo over drinks at the Palm,” Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media writer, said Friday on his blog.
“Hint: It’s not, what a great race! Nor is it, what a remarkable comeback for Hillary Clinton! Or even, I always wanted to cover a Puerto Rico primary!
“No, the plot line is that Hillary went ‘negative,’ thereby extending the race, screwing up our vacation plans, boring America to death and — this is the important part — sending the Democratic Party to the very gates of hell.
“Check it out. The Hillary/Obama contest is ‘increasingly brutal’ (Boston Globe); in danger of ‘tearing the party apart’ (L.A. Times); a ‘political party trying to destroy itself’ (New York Post); the ‘most cutthroat political campaign in years’ (Boston Herald); ‘depressing and distressing’ (Time), and facing a ‘nightmarish scenario’ (Baltimore Sun) that ‘will heighten racial, ethnic, gender, and class divisions’ (Politico).
“Wow — is it sending the stock market plunging, too? Jeopardizing national security? Ruining the basketball season?
“I’m sorry, but this is over the top. I’ve covered a lot of campaigns, and this isn’t even close to the kind of nastiness that has erupted in the past. It’s not in the same league as a typical congressional race where the rivals hurl personal charges, call each other liars and run ads morphing the opponent into Osama bin Laden. It’s a healthy political debate that’s being fought out mainly on substantive issues, along with the usual distractions about tax returns, indicted fundraisers and the like.”
Meanwhile, Clinton’s Texas victory is turning out not to be as big as many in the media have portrayed it. Compared with Ohio, “In the Texas primary, Clinton’s margin of victory was smaller, about 3 percentage points, and her net gain was smaller, too: four more delegates than Obama,” Stephen Ohlemacher reported for the Associated Press on Friday.
“Obama could wipe out most or all of that advantage if early returns showing him winning in the Texas caucuses hold up. Final results won’t be available until the party’s county conventions at the end of month.
“The message to be taken from Clinton’s victories . . . depends on which campaign is doing the spinning.”
Sunil Adam, New American Media: A Question of (Minority) Patriotism
James N. Crutchfield, Poynter Institute: About that Obama Ad: Get Over it!
George E. Curry, National Newspaper Publishers Association: Obama-Farrakhan: Guilt by Disassociation
Carlos Guerra, San Antonio Express-News: As Clinton and Obama move down the road, keep an eye on the economy
Annette John-Hall, Philadelphia Inquirer: Black women’s Clinton problem
Timothy Kalyegira, the Monitor, Kampala, Uganda: The Emergence of Barack Obama, Part II
Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Did Russert’s Playing the Farrakhan Card Have an Impact on Tuesday’s Primary Contests?
Alexandra Marks, Christian Science Monitor: Comic ‘news’ a force in ’08 campaign
Roland S. Martin, Creators Syndicate: Now It’s Obama’s Turn To Make the Adjustments
Timothy J. McNulty, Chicago Tribune: Portraying the election
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Obama needs to join Hillary in the gutter
Roosevelt Montés, Los Angeles Times: Hillary’s Latino allure
Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, Washington Informer: The Clinton I Would Vote For
Phillip Morris, Cleveland Plain Dealer: Candidates often flirt, then forget us
Askia Muhammad, Washington Informer: Whose Idea Was it to Have a Farrakhan Litmus Test?
Alberta Phillips, Austin (Texas) American-Statesman: Do Democrats think black voters are stupid?
James Ragland, Dallas Morning News: Identical twins from Oak Cliff not so similar at the ballot box
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: What Obama Needs: A Keystone Address
Ken Rodriguez, San Antonio Express-News: Is it time for Democrats to give the Texas Two-Step the boot?
Tara Setmayer, theDailyVoice.com: Obama Is Like Diluted Hip Hop
Rachel Sklar, Huffington Post: Obama’s New Strategy: Blame The Media!
Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News: This superdelegate won’t be swayed by Clinton’s sales pitch
Marisa Treviño, Latina Lista blog: What It Would Take to Get More Latinos to Vote for McCain
Ron Walters, National Newspaper Publishers Association: After Texas and Ohio, Obama Strategy Must Shift
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Cartoonist Joins Fray Over “Afrocentric” School
An editorial cartoon in the Toronto Globe and Mail opposing a planned “Afrocentric” public school has drawn an unusually high 250 to 400 letters, the newspaper’s editorial page editor told Journal-isms on Friday.
“Some have wrongly seen this as racial stereotyping,” Comment Editor Patrick Martin said, but others, he suspects, are part of a writing campaign by those who have not even seen the cartoon.
The Feb. 18 drawing by Anthony Jenkins shows a well-dressed black teacher in front of a blackboard with mathematic equations.
He says, ” ‘S’up, dog?” It is headlined, “Afrocentric Algebra . . .”
Its appearance followed an 11-9 vote by Toronto District School Board trustees on Jan. 29 to approve “a contentious proposal for a black-focused school that opponents argued would be the equivalent of segregation,” the Globe and Mail reported. Such a school is now planned for September 2009.
One spark for the idea: “TDSB statistics reveal that many black students are struggling. The dropout rate for students of English-speaking Caribbean descent is highest among all groups at 40 per cent compared with 23 per cent for those with Canadian roots, according to tracking data of a cohort of students between 2000 and 2005,” Roline Alphonso and James Bradshaw wrote in their story.
The cartoon’s point was that “the minute we begin to break into specialized groups, we may lose sight of the fact that there are certain subjects that are too specialized” for an Afrocentric focus, Martin said.
Some readers took issue with the language in the cartoon’s bubble, but “We weighed it carefully and we thought it fell on the acceptable side of the line,” Martin continued.
Others thought differently. In a letter published Feb. 28, Allya Davidson of Montreal called the cartoon “racist, demeaning and insulting. As commentary, it is void of intellectual discourse. The visual depiction of the black teacher is representative of the ‘Sambo-ism’ and blackface cartoon tactics applied during the Jim Crow era of North American history.”
“It completely misses the mark on the debate and demonstrates just how ignorant both the illustrator and the editors are about what defines Afrocentricism,” wrote Jason Robinson of Toronto.
Martin said the cartoon was in synch with the newspaper’s editorial policy. “If the public education system throws up its hands and says the only way to reach many black students is to withdraw them from the common system and skew their curriculum to distance it from other students’ curricula, this is a declaration of failure,” the paper argued on Feb. 13. “Before declaring such failure, a system dedicated to treating all students equally regardless of skin colour has a duty to try harder to remove whatever obstacles exist in the regular classroom to the education of disaffected youths.”
Did the artist convey all that? “We view them as columnists,” Martin said of the paper’s two cartoonists, Jenkins and Brian Gable. “They don’t have the 700 words, but they can put 700 words of meaning in their cartoons.” Other cartoonists, he added, told him they thought the subject too radioactive.
Public sentiment is running against the proposal, according to a survey cited in the editorial. “An Angus Reid poll of Ontarians found 79 per cent opposed the Afrocentric school (59 per cent strongly) and 15 per cent supported it (only 3 per cent strongly).”
Some of the opponents didn’t express their thoughts in a cartoon. In nearby Barrie, Ontario, Police Insp. James Farrell was put on leave after an offensive e-mail was sent to more than a dozen officers under his command. The Toronto Sun said it was slugged “Afrocentric Math for Toronto’s new black-only school,” and it included math problems dealing with firearms, drugs and gangs.
Nadia Bello, National Post: Afrocentric schools need our support
Royson James, Toronto Star: Lessons to be learned from Obamamania
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Book Fraud Prompts Memo on Fact-Checking
The standards editor of the New York Times, reacting to two pieces in his newspaper that failed to recognize the fraud perpetrated by a white author who claimed to be a half-white and half-Native American, and raised by a black foster mother in gang-infested South-Central Los Angeles, issued a reminder to the staff this week about fact-checking.
Journalists of color, meanwhile, wondered aloud whether people of color were part of the vetting process for “Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival,” which Margaret Seltzer wrote under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones.
The Times’ House & Home section on Feb. 28 featured an interview with “Margaret B. Jones” conducted in Eugene, Ore. Its publication prompted Seltzer’s sister to notify the Times that the book was a fabrication.
“Single-source profiles of people who are not already well known quantities are traps we have fallen into twice in the past year or two, and that’s too often,” Craig R. Whitney, the Times’ standards editor, wrote the staff. “Until publishers start fact-checking their own nonfiction books, and that’ll be the day, we should remember that profiles of unknown authors should always include reporting from other sources — not just surrogates of the profilee like agents, publishers, lawyers, etc. — to verify the most important facts. But even when there’s no book involved, the same rule applies. If we can’t find ways to check key facts, names, graduation claims, etc., we should hold the story until we can verify them, and if we can’t, we should be suspicious. Live and learn . . .”
Whitney told Journal-isms that the freelance writer, Mimi Read, could have verified that the author lived at the place where she was interviewed, and that she was listed under the same name. No one had told the Times that the author was using a pseudonym, he said.
In a story Wednesday on the fabrication, the Times’ Motoko Rich quoted Read and the House & Home section editor, Tom de Kay. “I was to some degree trusting that the vetting process of a reputable book publisher was going to catch this level of duplicity,” de Kay said. “But, he added: ‘Do I wish in retrospect that we had called L.A. child services and tried to run down the history of this person? I certainly do,'” Rich wrote.
Meanwhile, writers of color were questioning the vetting process. “This is not the first time that white, upper-middle class gatekeepers at a mainstream media outfit have been undone by their lust for an ‘authentic’ ghetto experience told by an insider with an entré into the deep, scary recesses of the inner city,” Amy Alexander wrote on the Nation magazine’s Web site. “(Even Jayson Blair, the infamous fabulist at the New York Times, admitted playing on the ignorance and unseemly attachment to ghetto tropes that some of his editors displayed.)”
Referring to the book’s editor, Sarah McGrath, journalist-turned-television writer David Mills said on his blog on Tuesday, “McGrath’s bosses at the Penguin Group should make some gesture of contrition and good will . . . They were probably already counting the money they expected to make . . . peddling black pain and death to white readers.”
McGrath was not available Friday to say whether people of color had vetted the book. But a blog devoted to the publishing industry noted last August that publishing remains a very white environment.
“The starting salaries — very low — might be seen as a barrier for those lacking trust funds, or the high competitiveness of available jobs further self-selects the available employee pool,” reported the MediaBistro blog GalleyCat. “. . . Plume editor-in-chief Cherise Davis thought it had to do more with background and socioeconomic status. ‘The issue is much broader than race. There are not a lot of working-class people in publishing either, and there aren’t even that many men. When I started out 13 or 14 years ago, I noticed that everyone had very wealthy parents and they were all from the Northeast.'”
Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: Memoirs reveal a (wolf)pack of lies
Nancy Rommelmann blog, LA Observed: Clueless in New York
Ben Yagoda, Slate.com: Memoir fabulists getting caught means the system is working
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Gwen Ifill Gets a Boost With Profile in Vogue
Vogue magazine this month tosses a mid-winter bouquet to public television’s Gwen Ifill, host of “Washington Week in Review” and senior correspondent on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” profiling her in its March issue.
“To guide them through a volatile election season, Americans are turning to ‘Washington Week’s’ Gwen Ifill as a sane voice amid the hoopla,” reads the blurb above the piece by Julia Reed.
Ifill tells Reed she is working on a book on the new generation of black politicians. “‘I don’t say they’re not Al,’ she says, referring to often-controversial minister and former presidential candidate Al Sharpton. ‘But they’re not — they’re under 50 and mostly Ivy League educated. The world is crying for someone to explain why the black vote is not a monolith anymore, that Jesse Jackson is not the only person who has ever thought about black issues,'” the piece says.
Ifill also gives her take on diversity. “When I covered HUD at the Washington Post, I was the only person on that beat who had ever lived in public housing,” Ifill tells the writer. “My colleagues had all these impressions about who these people were, that they were all welfare queens. That’s what I mean when I talk about the need for diversity in newsrooms. It’s about diversity in points of view and backgrounds.”
Ifill also describes her first job, at the old Boston Herald American. “I knew if I got my foot in the door I could do it. That’s when it’s on you. It’s up to them to diversify and bring people in, but it’s up to you to perform when you get there.”
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Nominate an Educator Who Has Helped J-Diversity
The National Conference of Editorial Writers annually grants a Barry Bingham Sr. Fellowship — actually an award— “in recognition of an educator’s outstanding efforts to encourage minority students in the field of journalism.” The educator should be at the college level.
Nominations, which are now being accepted for the 2008 award, should consist of a statement about why you believe your nominee is deserving.
The final selection will be made by the NCEW Foundation board and will be announced in time for the Sept. 17-20 NCEW convention in Little Rock, Ark., when the presentation will be made.
Since 2000, an honorarium of $1,000 has been awarded the recipient, to be used to “further work in progress or begin a new project.”
Past winners include James Hawkins of Florida A&M University (1990); Larry Kaggwa of Howard U. (1992); Ben Holman of the U. of Maryland (1996); Linda Jones, Roosevelt U., Chicago (1998); Ramon Chavez, U. of Colorado, Boulder (1999); Erna Smith of San Francisco State (2000); Joseph Selden of Penn State (2001); Cheryl Smith; Paul Quinn College (2002); Rose Richard, Marquette University (2003), Leara D. Rhodes of the University of Georgia (2004), Denny McAuliffe of the University of Montana (2005), Pearl Stewart of Black College Wire (2006) and Valerie White of Florida A&M University (2007).
Nominations may be e-mailed to Richard Prince, NCEW Diversity Committee chair, at this e-mail address. The deadline is May 15.
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Short Takes
“A state appeals court rejected a discrimination suit Wednesday by a white man who was replaced by an African American as a news anchor at Bay Area NBC affiliate KNTV, saying station managers were concerned about his on-the-air style, not his race,” Bob Egelko wrote Thursday in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Brad Hicks, one of several anchors whose contracts were not renewed in 2003 after NBC brought in new management, said in his suit that he was more qualified than his successor and that KNTV had bowed to pressure to hire more minorities. But the Sixth District Court of Appeal in San Jose, upholding a judge’s dismissal of the case, said Hicks failed to back up his claims.”
The National Association of Black Journalists is offering its first Larry Whiteside Scholarship, honoring the long-time Boston Globe baseball columnist who died last year. The scholarship will be awarded to an enrolled college student who is pursuing a career in sports journalism. The student must demonstrate commitment to the field by working for a campus or off-campus media outlet. The winner will be given $2,500 and be honored at the Pioneers Reception at the Unity convention July 23-27.
Edwina Blackwell Clark has been named publisher of Cox Ohio Publishing’s Southwest Group, which includes the Journal News of Hamilton, Ohio, and the Middletown (Ohio) Journal, Cox announced on Friday. “The Southwest Group encompasses multiple weekly papers in Butler and Warren counties. Blackwell Clark most recently served as Senior Vice President of Audience for Cox Ohio. In her role, she was responsible for Editorial, Online, Marketing, and Community Development for all Cox Ohio newspapers,” the announcement said.
Oscar Dixon, a longtime sports editor with USA Today, has been named to the new position of the Associated Press’ assistant sports editor for the South region, the AP announced on Thursday. “Dixon has spent the past 14 years with USA Today, most recently working as the pro basketball assignment editor. . . . Dixon led several enterprise projects, including the paper’s partnership with the Versus network to produce the ‘Soul of a Champion’ series. He worked as an assignment editor at the past three summer Olympics. Dixon also worked at the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald and had distinguished career as a military journalist.” In December, voluntary buyouts temporarily wiped out Dixon’s NBA coverage team.
The Monterey Park, Calif.-based Chinese Daily News said Thursday it plans to appeal a court decision awarding its current and former employees back pay for overtime violations. The newspaper accused the judge of “blatant biases and judicial errors.” On Feb. 28, federal Judge Consuelo B. Marshall signed a verdict to award the employees more than $3.5 million in damages and penalties, plus more than $1.6 million in interest, New America Media reported.
Todd S. Burroughs, who worked with Benjamin Jealous and George E. Curry at the National Newspaper Publishers Association, is defending Jealous, who Curry wrote Thursday was one of three finalists for president of the NAACP. “Ben and the multi-talented Raoul Dennis together transformed the nation’s Black press while I largely watched (and worked on my doctoral dissertation),” Burroughs wrote Friday on his blog. Curry had said “Jealous is uninspiring, an unimpressive orator, and he would easily be overshadowed by other figures already on the civil rights stage.”
“A citizens group formed to prevent the closure of the Albuquerque Tribune is shifting its focus to launching its own print and Web newspaper,” Mark Fitzgerald reported on Monday in Editor & Publisher. “Friends of the Albuquerque Tribune (FOAT) was created in the literal last days of the paper, which was shuttered by E.W. Scripps on Feb. 23. The paper had sought a buyer for the circulation-losing evening paper since August, and folded it when sales negotiations with two local businessmen fell apart.”
“Historians have often cited the impact of television news coverage in exposing the harsh realities of a segregated South in the early 1960s. But 70 years ago this winter, a national radio audience began hearing about the struggles of African-Americans in sermons, lectures and songs on ‘Wings Over Jordan,’ which aired in the 1930s and ’40s,” David C. Barnett reported on March 3 on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” In the summer of 1940, Time magazine reported that “Wings Over Jordan,” which originated in Cleveland, was heard on more than 100 stations across the country, with an extended reach around the world via shortwave.
Will Sutton, Scripps Howard endowed chair at Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, has earned scouting’s top training recognition, the Wood Badge. “One of the merit badges I’m helping scouts earn is the journalism merit badge. I’ll be doing that as a part of a Boy Scout troop visit to the nation’s capital in early April,” Sutton, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, told Journal-isms.
“The Iranian government has presented an Iranian-American journalist working for an American-funded radio station with a choice between her 95-year-old mother and prison,” Eli Lake reported on Thursday for the New York Sun. “Over the weekend, a revolutionary court in Tehran sentenced the journalist Parnaz Azima to a year in prison for spreading ‘anti-state propaganda.’ If Ms. Azima, who is both an American and Iranian citizen, does not serve her sentence, the state will seize the home of her 95-year-old mother.”
“The Kenyan media failed in its duty to report fully on the political crisis and violence that followed last 27 December’s presidential election because it was too busy trying to ‘calm passions and encourage reconciliation,’ a joint fact-finding mission by Reporters Without Borders, International Media Support and Article 19 said today,” Reporters Without Borders said on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Media Council of Kenya reiterated its plan to audit the coverage of the election, the East African Standard reported in Kenya on Friday.
In Pakistan, “The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the fate of three reporters for Azadi, an Urdu-language daily in the unstable southwestern province of Baluchistan. Two have gone missing in the past several days, while the third disappeared on November 30,” the organization said on Thursday.
In Brazil, four members of the military police were arrested on Tuesday in connection with the May murder of Luiz Carlos Barbon Filho, a journalist based in Porto Ferreira, in São Paulo state, Reporters Without Borders said on Thursday.
“Sudanese authorities have reimposed daily censorship of newspapers after they published reports accusing the government of backing Chadian rebels,” according to journalists and a security official, Alaa Shahine of Reuters wrote on Thursday.