New Fox Sports Network Is Hiring, Will Challenge ESPN
“Fox, in announcing Tuesday that it will launch the 24-hour Fox Sports 1 network on Aug. 17, is mounting what executives say will be a direct challenge to ESPN,” Michael Hiestand reported Tuesday for USA Today.
“Our hope is that we can be equally professional” with ESPN, says David Hill, who led Fox Sports when it launched 20 years ago and is overseeing the new channel. “It’s going to take us a while. We’re not expecting to knock ESPN off in the first week or two. It’s going to take two to three years. It will be a slog.”
FS1 will debut in about 90 million TV households compared to about 99 million on ESPN and ESPN2. It will have a daily 11 p.m. ET Fox Sports Live show meant to directly challenge ESPN’s SportsCenter. Hill, noting that head-to-head competition said, “The quality of sports journalism on ESPN is world-class. It’s not going to be easy. But we’ll give it a shot.”
Hiestand also wrote, “FS1 will also take on ESPN, as well as HBO Sports, in sports documentaries. Its Being series begins in the fall with a film on Mike Tyson.”
Lou D’Ermilio, spokesman for the network, told Journal-isms, “I’m told we will have positions to fill. Interested parties should log on to www.foxcareers.com http://www.foxcareers.com/#/home . No one has been hired yet for our news operation.”
- Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times: Can Fox Sports 1 take on ESPN the way Fox News Channel tackled CNN?
Time Inc. Now Planned as Independent Company
“Weeks of negotiations between Time Warner and Meredith Corporation came to an end Wednesday when the two companies could not agree to a deal to join their magazines into a separate company,” Amy Chozick and Michael J. De La Merced reported Wednesday for the New York Times. “Instead, Time Warner said it would move ahead on its own with a plan to make Time Inc. an independent company.”
“The deal came apart after Time Warner in particular grew increasingly concerned over the future of four of Time Inc.’s iconic but struggling magazines — Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations who could not publicly discuss private conversations.”
None of the statements or news stories referred to the two Time Inc. that target people of color, Essence and People en Español.
Rick Hancock to Join Atlanta Paper’s Digital Team
Rick Hancock, digital platform manager at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, is joining the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s digital staff as subscriber products editor, Monica Richardson, AJC managing editor of the Digital and Beats departments, told Journal-isms on Wednesday.
“He will oversee the digital staff devoted to the production of our digital subscriber products. The AJC’s digital staff recently reorganized to provide more focus and better meet needs of its digital suite of free and subscriber products,” Richardson said in an emailed statement. “In January, Cynthia DuBose was named AJC.COM Editor. Hancock will work closely with DuBose and other newsroom leaders on our digital platform.
“In December, the AJC released a new suite of digital news apps including ‘Today’s Paper,’ which offers subscribers total access to the day’s newspaper — all news stories and ads plus the comics, obituaries and more. Readers can page through each section, just like the printed paper, on tablets and smartphones.”
AP’s Rochester to Be Deputy Managing Editor in Pittsburgh
Mark J. Rochester, assistant West Coast bureau chief of the Associated Press, is joining the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as deputy managing editor, David M. Shribman, executive editor and vice-president, told staff members.
Rochester told Journal-isms by email, “Pittsburgh is such a great news town, and one of the few competitive newspaper markets left. On top of that, The Post-Gazette position will allow me the unique opportunity to lead efforts on digital strategy as well as parts of the traditional print news operation. The publisher and executive editor are both committed to a robust print edition that provides high-impact watchdog journalism and breaking news, while continuing to grow its digital audience on multiple platforms. It’s going to be an exciting challenge.”
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| Dominican woman Nexis de los Santos Santana was one of three women who claimed in a Skype interview with ABC News to have been paid for sex with Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. Santana was later identified by a Dominican official as the woman who signed an affidavit saying she was actually paid to make up the story. (Credit: ABC News) (Video) |
Story on Menendez and Prostitutes Begins to Unravel
“The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s conservative version of Huffington Post, is at the center of a media controversy. And loving it,” Jeff Sonderman reported Wednesday for the Poynter Institute.
“In November, the Caller published a story based on two anonymous Dominican women claiming that New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez had paid them for sex.
“ABC News says it received similar information at the same time, as Republican operatives organized interviews with those two women, plus a third woman the Caller did not talk to, all of whom said the senator paid them for sex. But ABC News didn’t run with the story, because ‘none of the women could produce identity cards with their names, and they all provided the same story almost word for word, as if they had been coached.’ ”
“After the Caller’s story was published, things started to unravel. . . .”
Menendez has been an advocate of media diversity. In 2010, he released a “Corporate Diversity Report” with the results of a survey of 537 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 in 2009 and 2010. “At the five media/entertainment/marketing companies that responded, says the report, 13 of the 59 board seats are held by women and 11 by minorities. On those companies’ executive teams, 11 of 58 positions are held by women and three by minorities,” RadioInk reported.
Meanwhile Carlson, the Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, told Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post in an interview that racial diversity is, “by far, the shallowest and least interesting kind of diversity.”
He said, “Maybe the unintended consequence of professionalizing journalism is that all journalists come from the same background and think the same things and have the same assumptions. There’s no diversity at all. And I’m not talking about racial diversity, which is, by far, the shallowest and least interesting kind of diversity. But I mean cultural and ideological diversity. And I don’t think you should hire right-wingers. I don’t care if they have some affirmative action program for right-wingers. That’s stupid. But just make sure every third person’s from North Dakota. That’ll fix it.”
- Chris Ariens, TVNewser: Univision Asks Sen. Menendez About ‘Daily Caller’ Reports of Sex Parties: ‘Those Are Lies Intended to Slander Me’ (Feb. 8)
- Mariah Blake, Columbia Journalism Review: Anatomy of a so-called scandal
- Dylan Byers, Politico: Menendez saga’s he said, she said
- Rhonda Schwartz, Brian Ross and Ned Berkowitz, ABC News: The Menendez Prostitution ‘Scandal’: How It Happened
Indian Country Sees Deep Impact in Budget Cuts
“Indian Country is an asterisk in the federal budget,” Mark Trahant wrote Monday for indianz.com. “Yet the impact of this austerity will impact our communities deeply and fairly soon. By my count, there will be at least $386 million in direct service budget cuts between now and the end of September. As the National Congress of American Indians said last week, ‘forced spending cuts will undermine the trust, treaty, and statutory obligations to tribal governments that are funded in the federal budget. Not only would it sacrifice the federal trust responsibility to tribes, but it would thwart tribes’ ability to promote economic growth or plan for the benefit of future generations.’ . . . “
- Joe Davidson, Washington Post: Sequester hits federal agencies. Now what for federal employees?
- Sophia Kerby, Center for American Progress: Top 10 Reasons Why People of Color Should Care About Sequestration (Feb. 22)
- Edward Wyckoff Williams, the Root: How the Sequester Crosses the Color Line
- David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun: Could TV have a done a poorer job of covering sequester?
Why Some Groups Still Need Their Own Spaces
“MyBrownBaby.com has grown by leaps and bounds since it launched. Why was it important to create an online space specifically for African-American mothers?” Janelle Harris asked Denene Millner, described as an award-winning journalist and the author of 21 books and counting, for MediaBistro.
“My last job inside of an office was working at Parenting. I loved what the magazine did, but I just found that the brand didn’t necessarily speak to black mothers,” Millner replied.
“When I moved to Atlanta, they gave me a column called ‘Reality Check,’ and every month I would give advice on parenting ethics and etiquette. But during the 2008 election, there was a conversation about Bristol Palin, and I just remember getting the impression from newspapers and websites that we weren’t supposed to talk about her decision to have a baby or her getting pregnant.
“I just felt like, you know what? This is not the conversation that my black mom friends and I are having. As a matter of fact, we’re all walking around saying if that was Sasha or Malia who wound up knocked up during the presidential election, they would’ve buried Obama under the bus, under the White House, and the whole discussion would’ve been about the irresponsibility of black women, teenagers, the high rate of single motherhood in our communities. It would’ve been about irresponsibility or our aversion to protection.
“So I said, ‘Since nobody else is going to say it, I’ll go on ahead and say it. I wrote something basically to that effect and emailed it to all of my friends and said, ‘I managed to set up a blog on Blogger. You need to read it and leave comments.’ It felt good to me. I got to write from a very specific black mom perspective in a way that you won’t find anywhere else. It was a huge hit right off of the bat, because nobody was talking about what it means to raise black children in America and what it means to constantly be thrown under the bus when we’re talking about black mothers but never being invited to the conversation. . . . “
Short Takes
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger for the Atlantic, rejected an offer to become a regular columnist at the New York Times, Jordan Michael Smith wrote Tuesday in a profile of Coates for the New York Observer. “He would not comment on the matter, but recently wrote on his blog about the difficulties of writing a twice-a-week Times op-ed column. He suggested that he would be taxed writing so frequently at such length, and feared his writing would suffer.” Smith called Coates “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.”
- “This week’s controversy over the Atlantic asking a freelancer for an unpaid contribution has reignited a debate among journalists — when, if ever, does it make sense to write for free?” Jeff Sonderman wrote Wednesday for the Poynter Institute. Kira Goldenberg of Columbia Journalism Review listed “some of the pieces that have contributed to this still-unfolding, widespread discussion.”
- In the third of a series resulting from a trip to China, George E. Curry, editor in chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, writes, “Acknowledged or not, racial discrimination is indeed a problem in China that manifests itself in strange and sometimes unique ways.” Curry wrote, “In both old and new China, whiteness — or proximity to it — is prized.”
- “Luis Cruz has left his news director job at KYMA-TV in Yuma to take on a new position as executive producer of afternoon news and programming at U-T TV. That’s U-T San Diego’s new TV station, which streams online and on cable,” Veronica Villafañe reported Tuesday for her Media Moves site.
- “Covering breaking news is more demanding than ever, driven by unrelenting micro-deadlines and financial pressures that have whittled staffs and forced a spot news makeover, crime reporters and editors say,” David J. Krajicek and Debora Wenger wrote Tuesday for the Poynter Institute. They quoted Andrew Smith, a court reporter with Newsday: “In the past 10 years, I think the appetite for breaking crime news has acquired more urgency &mdash nothing changes a static news site like a ‘new’ crime story. At the same time, though, I think the tolerance for thinly sourced, incompletely reported stories has increased in order to accommodate that appetite for stories.”
- “An analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data [shows] that low-income households, including disproportionately large numbers of families of color, were hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy and continue to face the toughest challenges in recovering from the massive storm, according to studies by Enterprise Community Partners and NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy,” the groups announced on Wednesday.
- Michael Scott, a veteran anchor who has worked in Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Kansas City, Charlotte, N.C., Huntsville, Ala., and Omaha, Neb., took the stand in his own defense in Omaha on Tuesday. He is accused of misdemeanor domestic violence stemming from an altercation with an ex-girlfriend, Maggie O’Brien reported for the Omaha World Herald. “The prosecution and defense rested Tuesday. The case won’t go to the jury until Monday to let a juror go on a planned vacation.”
- Attention, columnists who argue every year that black history should be taught year-round, not just in February: the Chicago Public Schools will teach African American history classes year-round and system-wide beginning this fall, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad reported Tuesday for WBEZ-FM.
- “Burundian authorities today released Hassan Ruvakuki, a reporter who has been imprisoned for 16 months on charges related to his interview with a rebel leader,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday. The circumstances of the release were not immediately clear, the committee said, calling on authorities to vacate Ruvakuki’s conviction and prison sentence.
- Jaime Guadalupe Gonzalez Dominguez, 38, a journalist who ran an online publication in northern Mexico, has been fatally shot, according to a posting Monday on the website, Agence France-Presse reported on Tuesday. The website said the man’s body was riddled with at least 18 bullets. “The killing late Sunday has led to a decision to shut down the publication, which covered general news in Ojinga, a town in the state of Chihuahua, which shares a border with the US state of Texas.”
- “Many observers have watched Kenya’s presidential election with bated breath, largely out of fear that the country could again see the kind of violence that killed 1,000 people in 2007,” Caitlin Dewey wrote Monday for the Washington Post. “But on Twitter, at least, some Kenyans are sick of the attention — and want the media to know it. Two hashtags mocking foreign media went viral on Kenyan Twitter today, both directed at outlets that reported on the possibility of violence and disorganization at the polls.”
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