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Howard University Paper Suspends Print Edition

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News to Be Transmitted Online Amid Financial Woes

Howard University’s student newspaper the Hilltop is suspending print publication until the university’s May commencement but will continue to publish online as the school wrestles with the paper’s financial problems, the Policy Board overseeing the publication decided on Wednesday.

 

 

 

The Hilltop, which in 2005 became the nation’s first black daily college newspaper, had a $48,000 bill from the Washington Times for printing expenses that it was attempting to pay off, student editor Drew Costley said on Friday.

University spokesman Ron Harris told Journal-isms Wednesday that the university’s Department of Student Affairs had offered to pay for the cost of the online publication and for a special commencement print edition, but that the board decided that publishing any further print editions would simply create more debt.

During Wednesday’s meeting Jannette Dates, dean of the John H. Johnson School of Communications, handed over an envelope with $2,500 in contributions, and Harris said faculty, staff, alumni and friends had pitched in to help the Hilltop.

Harris said the debt had been “substantially reduced.” Previously, Costley had said the university’s student affairs office kicked in $10,000 and the editorial staff had agreed to go without salaries for the time being.

Incoming editor in chief Vanessa Rozier, who was part of the meeting, told Journal-isms she agreed with the board’s decision. It was a blessing in disguise, she said, in that “hopefully, our staff will focus online,” which is where the news industry is heading.

“I like having that paper in my hand, but in the year ahead, we’re going to have to roll with it,” Rozier, currently nation/world editor, said of online publication. She said she expected the Hilltop to operate as other online newspapers do, posting stories when they are ready, rather than waiting for the next day. For most of the semester, she said, she had been working without pay as evidence of her dedication.

The Hilltop serves one of the oldest and most successful historically black colleges and universities, located in the nation’s capital and a recipient of substantial federal funding. The newspaper was founded in 1924 by novelist Zora Neale Hurston.

“There was transition in the business office and turnover that disrupted operations,” Yanick Rice Lamb, a faculty member who has advised the newspaper, told Journal-isms on Friday. “There were also production problems that contributed to missing deadlines,” she said.

The paper published an “open letter to the Howard community” on Jan. 28 in which Costley said:

“For the last three years, we’ve seen decreases in the amount of revenue generated by the publication but have managed to stay afloat due to shrewd budgeting and financial support from the Office of Student Affairs. While preparing for the spring semester, we discovered that the newspaper’s liabilities outweighed our expected revenue and collected revenue.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, the Policy Board created a subcommittee to look into ways to help the newspaper become financially sound, Harris said.

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Hillary Clinton Breaks Silence, Knocks Rev. Wright

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton broke her silence Tuesday on the controversy over the videotaped comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a wide-ranging interview with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, saying she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks attributed to Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend,” she said, according to the Tribune-Review.

Meanwhile, Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, analyzing last week’s news coverage, reported, “It was, to put it simply, the week of ‘the speech.’ The 37-minute address on race delivered by Barack Obama March 18 at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center dominated last week’s campaign narrative in the press.

“While the subject was race relations in America, there were so many subtexts it was hard for the press to know where to begin. First, there was the broader context of political damage control. There was also the fate of the battle for the Democratic nomination. But perhaps the most intriguing element was watching the media culture try to deal with a speech that was so complex it defied the TV panel debate, the skills of the veteran political writer or the parameters of a 90-second nightly news segment.”

Colin McNickle, editorial page editor of the Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, arch-conservative Republican financier, told Journal-isms that Clinton’s comment about Wright came in response to a question “well into the 90-minute session,” and that news reports were inaccurate that said Clinton raised the subject to deflect attention from Tuesday’s admission that she made a mistake in claiming she came under hostile fire in Bosnia 12 years ago.

“You know, I spoke out against Don Imus,” who was fired from his radio and television shows after calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s), “saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that,” Clinton said. “I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”

The Tribune-Review trumpeted its exclusive with multimedia clips on its Web site, and the statement dominated its front page. Clinton repeated her statements at a news conference later in the day.

The Obama campaign accused the former first lady of exploiting the controversy, and Obama defended his church in an interview on “the Michael Smerconish Show” on WPHT-AM in Philadelphia.

“Understand this, something else that has not been reported on enough is despite these very offensive views, this guy has built one of the finest churches in Chicago,” Obama said, according to Ben Smith, writing on Politico.com.

“This is not a crackpot church. Witness the fact that Bill Clinton invited him to the White House when he was having his personal crises. This is a pillar of the community and if you go there on Easter on this Easter Sunday and you sat down there in the pew you would think this is just like any other church. . . . So I don’t want to suggest that somehow, the loops you have been seeing typifies the services all the time. That is the danger of the YouTube era. It doesn’t excuse what he said. But it gives it some perspective.”

On the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists, Carol T. Bowdry, a writer-producer for Fox Television in Los Angeles, wrote, “I feel blessed to say I attended Trinity United Church for nine years and was baptized by Rev. Wright.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I, could I have imagined this happening to a person who encouraged me to be a Journalist. With a congregation over 4,000 . . . Rev. Wright could tell me when I missed church.

“Do you really believe that 6,000 people would attend a church with a radical, racist, crazy ordained minister who by the way has a doctorate degree in divinity AND who belongs to the predominately Caucasian, United Church of Christ? I’m talking, doctors, lawyers, accountants, city-state workers, etc.” She told Journal-isms she had sat next to white people in the church who “leave rejuvenated. The power of the media has me shaken up,” she said of the portrayal of Wright that has come to be accepted in many quarters.

On National Public Radio, Michel Martin read an unusually pointed commentary on her “Tell Me More” show, “Obama Should’ve ‘Walked Out’ on Wright? Spare Me,” in which Martin told about white people who had been too timid to speak out against racism directed against her, much less had the courage to walk away.

On the Web site of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Patricia Ryan described a cartoon hanging on the committee’s wall, drawn by the late editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette. It shows an older black man telling a black boy that he can grow up someday to be front-runner, but not president.

“When I first saw it in November, I chuckled and shrugged ‘that’s good’ to myself. Now, 4 months and 40 primaries later, when I walk by the cartoon, I think — Holy cow! That could have been drawn yesterday!

“Yet, the cartoon was drawn in 1987 and ran in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution in 1988, under the Pulitzer-prize winning watch of editor Bill Kovach who went on to found the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Its purpose was to illustrate the futility of Jesse Jackson‘s bid for the Democratic ticket.”

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Animated ‘Toon Tweaks Detroit’s “Superhero” Mayor

For Detroit Free Press cartoonist Mike Thompson, Monday’s indictment of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, was another occasion to continue his animated cartoon series featuring Kilpatrick as superhero Big Scheme man, a megalomaniac.

“I created the Big Scheme man character several years ago in response to Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s tendency to consistently deliver less than promised,” Thompson told Journal-isms. “His grandiose schemes for the city always fell short and he found himself at the center of numerous scandals.

“I retired the character when Kilpatrick won a second term. I believed that the mayor had learned his lesson and matured in office. I couldn’t have been more wrong. So I dusted off the BS man costume when the text messaging scandal broke.

“I’ve produced eight (I think) animations since the scandal first broke at the end of January. Most were created for publication online the day after a significant development in the story.

“Given the amazing speed at which this story has developed, taking a week to create an animation would result in something stale. So I’ve set the goal of responding to developments within a 24-hour time period. Sometimes even less. The initial animation was posted within hours of the story first breaking.

“Reader reaction has been fantastic. Some of the animations have been in the ‘Top 10 most popular’ feature on my paper’s homepage.”

Meanwhile, both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News called for Kilpatrick to step down.

Kilpatrick and Beatty surrendered to Wayne County, Mich., authorities Monday afternoon after prosecutor Kym L. Worthy charged them with perjury, obstruction, conspiracy and misconduct. Kilpatrick said he expects “full and complete vindication,” as the Free Press reported.

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L.A. Times Concedes Tupac Story Based on Forgeries

“A Los Angeles Times story about a brutal 1994 attack on rap superstar Tupac Shakur was partially based on documents that appear to have been fabricated, the reporter and editor responsible for the story said Wednesday,” James Rainey reported Thursday in the Los Angeles newspaper.

“Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section.

The criticism came first from The Smoking Gun website, which said the newspaper had been the victim of a hoax, and then from subjects of the story, who said they had been defamed.”

The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) said the documents seemed suspicious for multiple reasons, including the fact that they appeared to be written on a typewriter, rather than a computer, and included blacked-out sections not typically found in such documents, the Times explained earlier.

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Ketan Gandhi in “Discussions” to Leave Gannett

 

 

Ketan N. Gandhi, an Indian immigrant who became the first South Asian publisher of a U.S. daily newspaper when in 2005 he was named president and publisher of the Gannett Co.’s Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, N.J., is in discussions to leave Gannett, Gandhi said on Wednesday.

Gandhi, 45, is also publisher of Gannett’s Courier News in Bridgewater, N.J. Gandhi denied a report in the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., that he had already resigned, saying he was “in the middle of discussions” and was “going to look at a lot of different options.”

The Star-Ledger story by Ralph R. Ortega said a memo circulated Monday at the Courier News informed employees that Gandhi had left the company and that William “Skip” Hidlay had been named acting publisher.

Gandhi, reached at home, told Journal-isms that during his tenure he had started a free weekly, Desi NJ, to appeal to South Asians, and that it had reached a circulation of 12,000. He also launched CentralJerseyMoms.com, and set in motion plans for www.MyCentralJersey.com, which is planned to serve the two dailies’ circulation areas jointly starting in April. Gandhi had noted when he was appointed that in India, newspaper circulations are increasing, and that he wanted to bolster the newspaper’s online presence.

Gandhi said print circulation was “hemorrhaging” to the Internet. The Courier News has 35,158 daily subscribers, while the Home News Tribune has 52,393, according to audited circulation figures from March, the Star-Ledger said.

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Jan Simpson, Arts Editor at Time, Retiring

 

 

Jan Simpson, the first African American assistant managing editor at Time magazine, is retiring as its arts editor, managing editor Rick Stengel told Time staffers on Tuesday.

“Jan embodies some of the greatest virtues of journalism: utter fairness and a strong skepticism, coupled with the ability to praise when praise is due. No one has as little tolerance for cliché or as much appetite for intellectual sparring. Many a bad idea has died at her feet, while countless great ones were born out of her ability to make writers refine their thoughts and search beyond the obvious to explain something deeper and more significant for the reader,” Stengel said in his memo.

“As an editor, she combined an ability to protect writerly flights of fancy with a rigorous literal-mindedness that did not let flabby observations or extraneous facts get into copy. And of the many things that I will miss, one is very simple: when you asked Jan to get something done, you always knew it would get done, and get done well.”

Simpson, 57, told Journal-isms she leaves April 9. “I’m thinking about lots of different kinds of things for the future but for now, am most looking forward to taking off the rest of the spring and all of the summer,” she said. She came to Time from the Wall Street Journal in 1979 to be a correspondent in the New York bureau. As Mexico City correspondent, she covered the Sandinistas and the contras in Nicaragua, then became deputy New York bureau chief and reported about books, movies, music and the theater as an editor in the Arts section.

“Jan is one of the best journalists I ever knew — smart, tough-minded, insightful and funny,” said a former colleague, retired Time columnist Jack E. White. “Collaborating with her and Breena Clark on a cover story about the explosion of black artistic creativity was one of the high points of my career. She loves Broadway theatre and now she’ll have the time to see everything. TIME is going to miss her.”

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Chauncey Bailey Project Wins Investigative Award

 

Chauncey Bailey

The Chauncey Bailey Project, created last year to continue the work of assassinated Bay Area black journalist Chauncey Bailey, has won an award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, IRE announced on Tuesday.

The news came as Bob Butler and Thomas Peele of the project reported that Santa Barbara, Calif., police, responding to inquiries by the project, have reopened an investigation into the unsolved 1968 shooting deaths of a couple affiliated with a mosque that was the forerunner to Your Black Muslim Bakery, which has been implicated in Bailey’s Aug. 2, 2007, killing.

The IRE judges said of the project’s work: “These stories would have been difficult to pursue under any circumstances, but it took extreme dedication to get at the truth following the assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey. In the tradition of the Arizona Project, this coalition of Bay area journalists delved into questionable real estate deals and contracts involving the owners of Your Muslim Bakery in Oakland. The reporters raised questions about the thoroughness of a police investigation into the group before Bailey’s murder. They probed the interrogation and confession of Bailey’s alleged killer. And they carried on the work that Bailey intended to pursue before his death.”

In the Arizona Project, 38 journalists from 28 newspapers and television stations across the country went to that state to continue the work of investigative reporter Don Bolles, who was killed in Phoenix in 1976.

The award to the Bailey Project credited members of the Bay Area News Group: A.C. Thompson, Thomas Peele, Josh Richman, Angela Hill, Mary Fricker, G.W. Schultz, Cecily Burt, Bob Butler, Paul T. Rosynsky and Harry Harris.

The idea for the Bailey Project started with an Aug. 7, 2007, message to Journal-isms from Ken Cooper, former national editor at the Boston Globe, suggesting that the National Association of Black Journalists organize a team of reporters to swoop into Oakland and finish Bailey’s investigation of the Muslim group.

From there, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, NABJ, New America Media, IRE and other groups, including Bay Area news outlets and journalism programs, joined to create the project. It launched a new Web site late last week, with four dozen video and/or audio productions and 130 stories with photographs.

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N.Y. Gov. Paterson Admits to Past Illegal Drug Use

“In an exclusive interview on NY1’s ‘Inside City Hall’ Monday night, the state’s new governor elaborated on recent revelations from his personal life and offered up some new ones, this time regarding illegal drug use,” the New York cable channel reported.

In a one-on-one interview with political anchor Dominic Carter, David Paterson spoke candidly about his past, admitting to illegal drug use, but not since the late 1970s.”

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