Toyota Pledges $100,000 to Underwrite NAHJ Conference
Toyota Motor North America, Inc., will become the “title sponsor” of all regional conferences of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists next year and the “title sponsor” of its 2014 national conference in San Antonio, Texas, after pledging $100,000 to the group if it staged the national event — which will celebrate its 30th anniversary — in the city where it has a major manufacturing plant.
Patricia Salas Pineda, group vice president of Toyota’s Hispanic Business Strategy Group, announced the underwriting commitments Monday night at NAHJ’s Hall of Fame Media Awards gala at its convention in Anaheim, Calif.
The pledge was enough to persuade NAHJ to accept the offer, NAHJ President Hugo Balta told members earlier Monday, outlining how he had built a personal relationship with a Toyota representative he had known when both worked elsewhere. Balta now works at ESPN.
This year, NAHJ partnered with the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio Television Digital News Association at the Excellence in Journalism convention in Anaheim, but next year that convention is scheduled for Nashville, Tenn., which lacks the strong Hispanic identification and central location that San Antonio offers.
Toyota has been “the number one automotive choice for Latinos in the last decade,” Pineda said. But she also said that Latino children are “10 times less likely than others to be buckled up” in automobiles, and thus the company had underwritten a “Buckle Up for Life” program, an initiative of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
At the awards gala, two of the major honorees — Joanna Hernandez, career services director at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, who won the President’s Award, and David Gonzalez, co-editor of the Lens blog at the New York Times and the biweekly “Side Street” photo essay feature for the City Room blog — related their careers to their hardscrabble beginnings in New York. Gonzalez was inducted into the NAHJ Hall of Fame.
A third honoree, Gilbert Bailon, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with prior tenure at the Dallas Morning News and Al Dia, a Spanish-Language daily produced by the same company, implored attendees not to confuse celebrity with substance and to “do work with a purpose” that will enable them to explain to their families “how what you do matters and how you are making your community better.”
Hernandez, introduced by Balta as his mentor, told attendees that she was a single mother majoring in secretarial science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College when she began her career in journalism. She had already been twice divorced, an abused spouse and a welfare recipient. The immediate past president of Unity: Journalists of Color, Inc., Hernandez went on to work at such major newspapers as the Washington Post and the New York Times Regional Media Group.
Noting that her tenure as Unity president was sometimes tempestuous, marked by the pullout of the National Association of Black Journalists, Hernandez said she sometimes felt like quitting. But “it was my loyalty to NAHJ that kept me going.”
Gonzalez said that in growing up in the South Bronx, the area’s unofficial motto was “Get out if you can.” But today, after a 30-year career, he lives only three blocks from where he grew up.
Journalists must “reclaim the narrative” of neighborhoods like the South Bronx, giving context to residents’ lives, Gonzales said. “Find the stories of people dismissed as unimportant.”
Gonzalez thanked his parents for giving him the “gift of Spanish.
“Some people think the fact that we speak Spanish” as well as English is luck, he said. “It’s not an accident. It’s a skill, and that skill has opened doors for me, and allowed me to enter that small universe throughout the years,” he said, referring to his reporting from barrios as well as foreign outposts in Guatemala, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Accent on Timidity Blamed for Slow Latino Progress
The workshop was called “The Latinization of Newsrooms,” but everyone on the panel at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention quickly realized it was a misnomer.
“I thought that when the 2010 Census came out, the people who run our business would know how to look at the data” and position themselves for the browner American that will come in 2020 and 2030,” Ray Suarez, correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour,” said. “I haven’t seen a great deal of [evidence] that they’re thinking that way, though they talk about it internally.”
The 2010 Census found Hispanics to be 16 percent of the population, up from 13 percent in 2000 [PDF].
One of the problems, Suarez said, is that “trying to grow inside a shrinking business is not an easy assignment for anybody.”
According to the annual survey of local television stations conducted by Bob Papper of Hofstra University for the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Hispanic share of the television workforce rose from 4.2 percent in 1995 to 7.8 percent in 2013.
The number and percent of Latinos employed in newspapers and online outlets is even lower. In the latest diversity survey of the American Society of News Editors, those figures declined in 2012 from 4.7 to 4.0 percent.
As Suarez pointed out, one can turn on MSNBC at 5 a.m. and watch until late at night “and there isn’t a single Latino hosting any of the programs, not a . . . beat reporter working on any of the national beats.
“And they’re not afraid — they know nothing will happen to them. There won’t be any blowback, they won’t get any adverse publicity and they don’t think they’re losing anything.” , Suarez said, quoting what he said he was told by an agent.
When Latinos do work in mainstream media, the panelists said, a number of other issues surface, such as which among the Latino accents are preferable and how authentic their pronunciation of Spanish words is allowed to be.
“The problem for us to deal with is OTM — ‘Other Than Mexican,’ a Telemundo reporter said. “If you don’t have the Mexican accent, you’re not on the air.” She said she had to either lose the job or change her accent. She altered her prounciations.
A dark-skinned Panamanian said from the audience that she was told she didn’t “look” Mexican and that Mexicans love to see their own people on television. But “on the street, Mexicans love me,” she said.
Spanish accents themselves are problematic, panelists said. “Don’t roll your Rs too much,” even if that’s the way the word is pronounced in Spanish, an audience member said she was told. The Southern California town of San Pedro is pronounced “San PEE-dro” by the locals, though Spanish speakers know that in Spanish it is “San PAY-dro.” A 90-year-old woman was reported to have said, “You know when those foreigners come, they want to say ‘San PAY-dro. It’s PEE-dro!”
Go with the locals, advised Rebecca Aguilar, who moderated the session and is NAHJ vice president for online. “But [the area] used to be Mexican,” protested Steven Malave, senior content producer for news of the new Noticias Mundo Fox.
To Aguilar, one problem is that Latinos are too timid. In Los Angeles, “I knew Latinos who never spoke up. They lived there all their lives” and didn’t want to rock the boat. “How do we speak up without risking our jobs, being labeled as ‘difficult’? There are people who fear losing their jobs,” she said. In management, “There are people who say, ‘I hired you to be a reporter. That’s all I want you to do.’ “
Arm yourself with the facts, Shereen Marisol Meraji, a reporter for the Code Switch race-relations team on NPR. Thirty percent of the blog’s readers are people of color, she said, compared with 18 percent for NPR.org. Fifty percent of the audience is 24 to 35 years old, 20 years younger than the overall NPR audience, she said.
Speak up, said the Telemundo employee. She said she just earned a master’s degree in business after persuading her employer to pay for her pursuit of the degree.
“You have to keep pushing, pushing,” said Suarez. “It’s not going to happen, unfortunately, just because we’re swell.” African Americans, panelists said, would never stand for the dearth of representation provided Latinos.
Steve Carlston, president and general manager of KNBC-TV in Burbank, Calif., said his station gets it.
“We’ve added 18 percent Latino reporters to our staff,” he said from the audience. “I say we need to make our management staff look like the audience.”
Todd Mokhtani, vice president of news for KNBC-TV, a panelist, said, “I think we need to be more pro-active.” He proposed that KNBC host a party with Telemundo at the next NAHJ convention “for anyone who wants to be a manager. Let’s go for 20 to 25 people,” said Mokhtani, who is Iranian. “I hope it’s 100 people.”
“I’d love to be a manager,” Aguilar said. “I’ve never been asked.”
Deggans’ “Reliable Sources” Is Departure From the Same-Old
The CNN media criticism show “Reliable Sources” reached a milestone of sorts on Sunday when Eric Deggans, a black journalist who is media critic for the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times and soon-to-be television critic for NPR, sat in as guest host.
The show departed from the same-old, same-old, brimming with diversity as a person of Arab descent spoke about al Al Jazeera America, a woman discussed ESPN and sports and a Hispanic man joined in talking about the history of civil rights coverage.
Veteran journalist Paul Delaney, a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, told viewers about the role of the black press during the civil rights movement, Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood recalled his 2009 news story that became the top-grossing film “The Butler,” and Dan Rather, the legendary former CBS anchor, shared recollections of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
It became that rarest of mainstream network news analysis shows, one told from a black perspective.
Deggans joined a growing list of media critics who have led the media analysis show in the wake of longtime host Howard Kurtz’s departure for Fox News. CNN was criticized for using only white male guest hosts for the show.