Soul of the South Network to Cover Zimmerman Trial
The new Soul of the South television network, which made its debut on Memorial Day, plans daily coverage of the trial of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman for second-degree-murder in the death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.
Tom Jacobs, the national news director of the African American-oriented network, said the coverage will begin on June 17, proceeding from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Central time. It will be anchored by Vickie Newton, a fixture in St. Louis for more than a decade when she left KMOV-TV to be closer to family in Arkansas. Soul of the South is headquartered in Little Rock.
Others on the news team are Willy Walker, national managing editor, Ray Metoyer, national planning director/coordinator, and Roy Hobbs, anchor. All are veterans, with more than 200 years’ experience between them, Jacobs said.
He spoke on a conference call Monday with the other team members, and gave the Zimmerman trial as an example of how the network would be different from others. “I don’t know that the case has been covered as much as commented on,” Jacobs said, adding that the network would bring a perspective without advocating.
“There are so many stories of people who are making a difference,” Metoyer said. “There are stories that are not being told that need to be told.” Newton said, “the African American narrative is not just negative, yet that’s what we’ve come to expect. What I’ve discovered is that African Americans appreciate good story telling. All of that can be found at Soul of the South.”
Jacobs also said, “We are primarily African American, but I don’t want to ignore issues affecting Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans. If there are stories that intersect with what we are doing, we’ll certainly report on that.”
The network is still hiring journalists; Jacobs said job-hunters should check its website. The daily newscast, which is to air at 7 p.m. Central time, begins in mid-July. The Washington-based “Capital Eye” show on political issues is scheduled to start abour Labor Day, and “Morning Call,” a two-hour morning show that will start in Little Rock and move to Washington, starts in mid-September. Newton is one of the co-anchors.
- Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel: George Zimmerman trial death will bring media village, public-assembly area
- Desiree Stennett, Orlando Sentinel: Trayvon Martin’s parents expect ‘rough road’ at murder trial
Public Editor Calls Out N.Y. Times on Poverty Coverage
“Newspaper people make decisions about what to cover and what to emphasize every day,” Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, wrote for Sunday’s print edition. “They have finite resources — only so much space in the paper, only so many reporters — and they have to choose. In this context, one question I’ve been thinking about for several months is this: How well does The Times cover those who live in poverty and the news that affects them? Sullivan continued, “Based on reading, interviewing and simply paying more attention, I’ve made some observations.
“First, when The Times does write about poverty — whether in a special series or a long feature article — it usually does so with depth and intelligence. The amount and intensity of the coverage, however, may not be in proportion to the size of the problem. One in six Americans live in poverty, and it’s worse for children: one in five. In New York City, it is commonplace to see men and women sleeping on the street. Among the city’s 8 million residents, 1.5 million don’t have enough to eat; a third of those are children.
“Occasional coverage — no matter how excellent — doesn’t get the job done.
“The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 52 major mainstream news outlets, including The Times, combined coverage of poverty amounted to far less than 1 percent of all front-page articles. The Times may do better than some, but given New York City’s high poverty rate and The Times’s special responsibility as the nation’s dominant paper, with the most plentiful resources, there should be more. . . .”
- D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center: Americans’ Views about Poverty and Economic Well-Being (Sept. 12, 2012)
- Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends
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| Melissa Harris-Perry, who hosts a show on the weekend, is one reason MSNBC ranks high with African Americans. (Video) |
MSNBC Suffered Last Two Months; Too Much Breaking News
“At MSNBC they view it as rooting against death and destruction: the last thing the channel wants is more months like the last two, filled with terror bombings, tornadoes and plant accidents,” Bill Carter wrote Sunday for the New York Times.
“It’s not all altruism. The destruction MSNBC also wants to avoid is the havoc such news has been wreaking on its competitive standing.
“In May, MSNBC, which generally runs second to the dominant leader, Fox News, among cable news channels, plunged all the way to fourth place, dropping behind not only its closest rival, CNN, but also that network’s sister channel, HLN (formerly Headline News).
“At a time of intensely high interest in news, MSNBC’s ratings declined from the same period a year ago by about 20 percent. The explanation, in the network’s own analysis, comes down to this: breaking news is not really what MSNBC does.
“ ‘We’re not the place for that,’ said Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, in reference to covering breaking events as CNN does. ‘Our brand is not that.’
“The brand, one MSNBC has cultivated with success, is defined by its tagline, ‘The Place for Politics,’ and a skew toward left-wing, progressive political talk, the opposite of the conservative-based approach that has worked well for Fox News. . . .”
In January, Tommy Christopher reported for mediabistro that MSNBC had more black viewers than CNN and Fox News combined.
4 of Color Win $20,000 Awards as Digital Age Journalists
Four students of color were among six promising undergraduate or graduate students awarded $20,000 scholarships for the 2013-14 academic year by the Associated Press and Google, the groups announced Monday.
They are “recipients of a national scholarship program targeted at college students whose innovative projects exemplify the new journalist in the digital media age. The Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, administers the program,” an announcement said. It added, “A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity and identify and support creative new talent and work in the field.”
The four are Adam Allevato, Nilkanth Patel, Nonny de la Peña and Erik Reyna.
Allevato, 20, “is a junior in Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colo., the Webmaster for Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation, the student voice at CSU, and has helped transition the organization to an online-first, demand-driven newsroom. Adam’s project is a deeply-integrated news platform built on WordPress that is being designed with requirements determined by user experience and consumer needs.”
Patel, 24, “is an Editorial Production Associate for The New Yorker, where he helps put together the magazine’s print and digital editions. He’ll begin a two-year dual M.S. degree program at Columbia University this fall, where he’ll study Journalism and Computer Science, focusing on the impact of data visualization in the newsroom. His project will focus on making interactive news a more pervasive component of reporting by creating tools to make data visualization quicker and easier for budding journalists.
“de la Peña is an Annenberg Fellow doctoral candidate in the Interdivisional Media Arts Program at the USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her focus is on pioneering Immersive Journalism, a groundbreaking way for first person experiences of the news using virtual reality and gaming platforms. A graduate of Harvard University, she is a former correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, her award-winning documentary films have screened in more than 50 cities globally and she also co-founded the Knight News Challenge winner Stroome.
“Reyna, 25, is a graduate student at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism studying New Media. His project will focus on developing a website to assist non-programmer journalists in the creation of news package templates through the use of code snippets.”
Veronica Villafañe to Become Web Editor for impreMedia
Veronica Villafañe, editor and publisher of the Media Moves website and columnist for Poder Hispanic magazine, is joining impreMedia Digital as Web Editor, West Division.
“I will be in charge of the front pages for the online pubs of La Opinion, El Mensajero and Rumbo (LaOpinion.com, ElMensajero.com and RumboTx.com) and help develop strategy to improve readership/traffic of the sites,” Villafañe told Journal-isms on Monday.
A past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Villafañe is a former anchor and reporter for the San Jose Mercury News “convergence” arrangement with the local NBC affiliate.
Short Takes
- Gil Robertson, a freelance writer who most recently edited “Where Did Our Love Go: Essays on Love & Relationships in the African American Community,” highly recommends books as a way for professional writers to make a living. He told Tomika Anderson of Black Enterprise magazine Friday, “you might be looking at anywhere between $15,000 to $25,000 for a healthy advance. What you don’t want to do, however, is have your advance be so high that you don’t earn out, because if you don’t earn out then the book is looked at as being a failure. . . . Essentially a book proposal is a business proposal, and, essentially, your publisher is your chief investor. Based on the proposal, Publisher A says, ‘Ok, fine I will invest in that. In exchange for that — after you’ve fulfilled my initial investment — I will pay you a royalty.’” Writers can build on that with speaking engagements, he said.
- “Shabelle Media is Somalia’s largest news outlet — and a very dangerous place to work. Of the 12 journalists gunned down in the country last year, four were reporting for Shabelle. A number of the reporters are teenagers, some as young as 15,” Gregory Warner reported Monday for NPR. Mohammed Garane, a journalist living in exile who is on the executive board of the National Union of Somali Journalists, “says that for the killings of journalists to cease, the country needs a better legal system, or the targets of slander will always be driven to street justice. ‘There is no court that a person can go to report his anger,’ he says. ‘So he takes a pistol, and he kills the journalist.’ ”
- “Around the world, Muslims who use the internet are much more likely than other Muslims to have a favorable opinion of Western movies, music and television and are somewhat more likely to see similarities between Islam and Christianity, according to an analysis of a recent Pew Research Center survey,” the Pew Research Center reported on Friday.
- As a follow up to a March discussion of the Philadelphia magazine article, “Being White in Philly,” the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists held a discussion last week called “Being Other in Philly,” “where we gathered editors from the city’s leading ethnic publications Black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish and representing the LGBT community to discuss the importance of diversity through the media in heavily majority-minority Philadelphia,” said Johann Calhoun, president of the association. Coverage of the discussion is in PRISM Magazine http://pabjprism.com/, a multimedia portal crafted by the chapter’s multimedia team.
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