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61% of Blacks Say Families Gave for Haiti

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Americans’ Interest in Quake Aftermath Remains High

ABC News to Implement Sharp Cutbacks

3 of Color Among 27 Let Go in Oregonian Newsroom

From Journalist to Cleaning Houses, and Still Optimistic

Chauncey Bailey Project Wins Award for Courage

Smiley, Sharpton Spar Over Obama on Radio

Is "Chris Rock Voice" Racial Stereotyping?

N-Word Prompts Shutdown of Campus TV Station

"Washington Watch" Not Seeking Immediacy, CEO Says

Short Takes

Black Entertainment Television held "Saving Ourselves: Help for Haiti," one of many media telethons for Haitian relief, on Feb. 5. It was hosted by Sean Combs, left, Queen Latifah and Pharrell Williams. (Credit: BET)

Americans’ Interest in Quake Aftermath Remains High

Fully 61 percent of African Americans said they or someone in their household has made a donation to help victims of the Haiti earthquake, while another 27 percent plan to give, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported on Wednesday, Overall, 52 percent of Americans polled said that they or someone in their household has made a donation to help those affected, including 48 percent of whites who have made a donation and 10 percent who plan to.

"A majority of Democrats (59%) say they or someone in their household has made a Haiti donation, compared with 49% of independents and 47% of Republicans. There also are sharp regional differences: 62% of those living in the Northeast say they have made a donation to those affected by the earthquake, compared with 50% in the South and 42% in the Midwest. Among those in the West, 57% say they gave to relief efforts.

"And, as expected, those with higher family incomes are far more likely than the less affluent to say they have made a donation: 68% of those with family incomes of $75,000 or more say they have made donation compared with 53% of those with incomes of $30,000 to $74,999 and 40% of those with family incomes of less than $30,000.

The survey also "found that the Obama administration continues to receive positive ratings for the government’s response to the earthquake in Haiti. Nearly two-thirds (66%) say they approve of the administration’s response to the crisis while just 16% disapprove. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (84%), 65% of independents and 49% of Republicans approve of the administration’s response to the earthquake. The administration’s approval ratings on Haiti were little changed from mid-January, shortly after the earthquake struck (64% approve, 14% disapprove).

The survey did not link media coverage to donations. However, it said public interest was highest when the quake hit. "There was considerably less public interest in news about the release of most of the U.S. missionaries accused of kidnapping Haitian children than there has been in the massive earthquake that struck Haiti and its aftermath," Pew said.

"Just 16% say they followed news about the freed missionaries very closely. In the days following the Jan. 12 quake, 60% followed news about the Haiti earthquake very closely. While interest slipped over the next four weeks (to 37% very closely in Feb. 12-15 survey), the aftermath of the quake remained the public’s most closely [followed] story during each of those weeks."

ABC News to Implement Sharp Cutbacks

"ABC News will sharply reduce its news-gathering staff through buyouts and possible layoffs, the company said on Tuesday. ABC employees said they expected the cutbacks would affect 300 to 400 people, or roughly 25 percent of the news division’s work force," Brian Stelter and Bill Carter reported in the New York Times.

"The cuts at ABC, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, are among the steepest ever made at a network news division. A spokesman said ABC News currently employed roughly 1,500 people.

"In a memorandum to staff members, the ABC News president David Westin called the cutbacks a ‘fundamental transformation’ for the division that would result in a leaner, smaller organization. ‘The time has come to rethink how we do what we are doing,’ he wrote.

". . . Jason Samuels, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and a former senior producer at ABC, said Tuesday‚Äôs move ‘makes sense,’ but added, ‘ultimately the pressure to continue churning out network quality news with a pared-down staff is a recipe for burnout.’‚Äù

3 of Color Among 27 Let Go in Oregonian Newsroom

Three journalists of color were among 27 newsroom employees laid off Wednesday at the Oregonian in Portland, Editor Peter Bhatia told Journal-isms. The number will maintain or increase the diversity level at the newspaper.

Bhatia identified the three as Dylan Rivera, a reporter who is Hispanic, Frederick Joe, an Asian American photographer, and Boaz Herzog, a sports copy editor who is Asian American. Thirty-seven employees companywide were laid off.

"Severance packages were offered," the Newhouse newspaper told readers. "Staffers were informed last year that layoffs were likely this month. The Oregonian, like all newspapers, has endured declining revenues the past few years, the result of the recession and the migration of advertising to the Internet.

"After the layoff, Oregonian Publishing Company will have 750 employees, more than 200 of whom work in the news department."

Bhatia personally called those who would be laid off on Wednesday morning, employees said. "I can’t really complain about the process," Rivera told Journal-isms. Former editor Sandra Mims Rowe even advised some staffers that they would get a better deal if they took a buyout. However, not enough did.

"I knew layoffs were coming at the end of this month and I knew I could be," laid off, "but in my heart of hearts I knew that I wouldn’t," Joe said. "It hit me like a bolt out of the blue." Joe, 41, had been at the paper for nearly 12 years.

He said he would not seek another newspaper job, after 20 years in the business, arriving at the Oregonian from the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune. He traced his inclination to his love of Portland, that he has a wife and a 3 year-old, and that his career has already taken him to India, to New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to Oklahoma after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. "Newspapers are not a growth industry," he added.

Neither was Rivera optimistic about landing a job in newspapers, although he said, "This is the only thing I wanted to be since I was a kid ‚Äî a daily newspaper reporter. When I got my first reporting job, it was like I’d gone to heaven."

Rivera, 37, arrived at the Oregonian in 2000 after working at the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman.

"The Oregonian has always been aggressive about diversity," Rivera added.¬† The newspaper reported 19.1 percent journalists of color in the 2009 census of the American Society of News Editors, with 10.6 perent of those Asian American. The city of Portland, center of the Oregonian’s circulation area, is 77.9 percent white, according to U.S. census figures.

Bhatia, whose roots are in South Asia, is among the highest-ranking Asian Americans in the news business and is a former president of the ASNE.

From Journalist to Cleaning Houses, and Still Optimistic

Less than a year after taking a buyout at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, features reporter Lori Price is back in Texas, holding jobs simultaneously as freelance writer,  restaurant hostess, part-time journalism instructor and jewelry maker.

She has also been a security guard and a house cleaner. A couple of Thursdays ago, she told American Public Media’s "The Story," she found her bank account down to less than $4.

Price was the subject of "The Story" on Feb. 17, in a segment called "Life After Journalism."

She described an odyssey of rejection notices, tears and summoning the strength to press onward. One potentially embarrassing moment came when Price was cleaning a house in Dallas and the owner of the housecleaning firm mentioned that the homeowner’s husband was also a journalist. "My heart dropped," Price said. "She told me who it was. The good thing was it wasn’t someone who used to work at the Morning News," her old employer, "but it was someone I considered a peer whom I had met a couple of times in social settings, like at happy hours, and I knew his writing very well because I admired it.

"I do remember, when I was scrubbing the sink in his kitchen, thinking, ‘Wow, why I am here doing this, and he gets to do what we love?’ And then I kind of got past it." However, the husband came home early that day.

"I remember thinking, if he looks at me and recognizes me, I’m just going to die." Thankfully, he didn’t. "And I don’t know that it was a matter of me not being memorable or anything like that, I think it was, it would never register in his mind that this person he had shared cocktail conversation with about movies and the journalism of writing reviews several years before, I don’t think it registered that this was the same person who just cleaned his house. He just kind of looked through us."

Still, despite her tribulations, Price said she encourages her students to enter the field.

"I actually think it’s a great time to be a journalist," she said. "The thing is you’ve got to figure out a way to be a journalist in this environment, and I think that means us doing what’s called entrepreneurial journalism. There is one students this semester who already has his own blog, a sports blog . . . and I think that’s awesome. I feel my responsibility is, or any of us teaching or inspiring them to do what we do, is for them to keep the tenets of journalism alive in what they do. That to me has been the disconnect.

"Anybody can be a writer" with today’s technology, she said. "What’s missing is truth, accuracy, fairness, balance, those things. I think if you marry those things with what’s new and exciting about the way we give out information, that makes it a great time to be a journalist. It’s going to take a little bit of a deeper thought process to figure out how to do this.

"If I had the business model to figure this out, I wouldn’t have all these jobs."

 

The Center for Investigative Reporting has posted this video of Chauncey Bailey from 2001. (Video)

Chauncey Bailey Project Wins Award for Courage

"Four reporters associated with the Chauncey Bailey Project will be honored by the University of Georgia for journalistic courage.

"Thomas Peele, Josh Richman, Mary Fricker and Bob Butler will receive the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage on Wednesday, March 24, at UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication," the college at the University of Georgia announced on Wednesday.

" ‘Peele, Richman, Fricker and Butler’s reporting was truly courageous,’ wrote Oakland Tribune editor Martin G. Reynolds in his nomination. ‘A reporter was killed and they continued and expanded his work despite obvious dangers.’

"The reporter was Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, who was murdered in 2007 while investigating black Muslims and their Your Black Muslim Bakery, headquartered in Oakland, Calif. The man charged with Bailey’s killing told a court he was ordered by the group’s leader to murder Bailey ‘to stop this story.’

"The four reporters wrote more than 100 stories about the group, the murder and the police investigation. Reynolds wrote, ‘Their reportage forced the indictment of the group’s leader on murder changes for ordering the assassination.’"

The McGill Medal is just the latest award collected by a project suggested in the Journal-isms comments section by Boston journalist Kenneth J. Cooper shortly after the Aug. 2, 2007, assassination of Bailey on an Oakland street.

Smiley, Sharpton Spar Over Obama on Radio

"An impassioned debate ignited Tuesday morning over America’s black agenda, with two of the nation’s most visible black political commentators on opposite sides of the table," Denise Stewart reported for BlackAmericaWeb.com

"In a commentary on ‘The Tom Joyner Morning Show,’ Tavis Smiley, host of ‘Tavis Smiley’ on PBS, announced plans for a discussion in Chicago on March 20 entitled ‘We Count: The Black Agenda is the American Agenda.’ As part of his comments, he opined that ‘a chorus of black leaders have started singing a new song,’ saying that the president doesn‚Äôt need a black agenda.

‚Äú’I must have missed that choir rehearsal, because I don‚Äôt know the words to this new hymn,’ Smiley said. ‘We have asked some of these lyricists to show up who apparently wrote this new song to explain why they penned these words. It‚Äôs time for a choir rehearsal so that we all are singing from the same page.’

. . . The Rev. Al Sharpton "later called in to the TJMS and took issue with several of Smiley’s comments, claiming that Smiley had not talked with him about the event. Then in the afternoon, Smiley called in to Sharpton’s radio talk show as he discussed the matter" with Harvard professor Charles Ogletree. "Their exchange on Sharpton’s show lasted several minutes and was highlighted by abrupt cutoffs and a more intense debate."

Is "Chris Rock Voice" Racial Stereotyping?

"New York Times reporter Kate Zernike has gotten into a spat with Young Americans Foundation spokesman Jason Mattera, who spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, last week. The argument: who was being racist?" Mike Taylor reported for the FishBowl NY media blog.

"In last week’s Times story titled ‘CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones,’ Zernike said Mattera used a ‘Chris Rock voice’ to mock the president. She also noted his derisive attitude toward the concept of diversity on college campuses.

"Accusations of racial insensitivity usually invite rebuttal, and Mattera got his in a Washington Times story, ‘Mattera vs. Zernike.’ The item is careful to observe that Mattera ‘is of Latino descent’ ‚Äî an inoculation against prejudice if ever there was one. Mattera’s heated response, quoted in the article:

" ‘Kate Zernike should be fired immediately. She has no business being in a newsroom. Her allegation is absurd and flatly not true,’ Mr. Mattera tells Inside the Beltway. ‘The racial stereotyping she speaks of was nothing more than my Brooklyn accent, something she could’ve figured out by doing a quick Internet search of me. . . .’"

N-Word Prompts Shutdown of Campus TV Station

"Two words aired on Student-Run Television Thursday night brought UCSD into the national spotlight ‚Äî and into yet another campus free-speech debate," Angela Chen wrote Monday for the Guardian, student newspaper at the University of California at San Diego. "After Kris Gregorian, editor in chief of humor newspaper the Koala, said that protesters of last week‚Äôs controversial ‘Compton Cookout’ party were ‘ungrateful niggers’ on Channel 18, the Black Student Union declared a ‘State of Emergency’ and issued a six-page list of demands to the university.

"In response to the outrage — expressed principally by the black population at UCSD, or about 1.3 percent of 22,000 undergraduates — [Associated Students] President Utsav Gupta immediately shut down SRTV. Then, on Friday afternoon, he unexpectedly decided to freeze all student fees toward media organizations."

According to the NBC station in San Diego, the off-campus "Compton Cookout" mocked Black History Month. It was held off campus, and participants were urged "to wear chains, don cheap clothes and speak very loudly. ‘We will be serving 40’s, Kegs of Natty,’ the invitation read.

"Female participants were encouraged to be ‘ghetto chicks.’"

"Washington Watch" Not Seeking Immediacy, CEO Says

TV One’s Sunday talk show "Washington Watch" is actually taped on noon Friday, unlike the major Sunday talk shows, which broadcast live. And so the reporters’ discussions on "Washington Watch" do not include such developments as last weekend’s news that the NAACP had elected its youngest board chair in history: 44-year-old health care advocacy professional Roslyn Brock.

Johnathan Rodgers, CEO of TV One, says he and his viewers are fine with that.

"Washington Watch is a public affairs show produced by TV One to serve . . . members of the African American community," he told Journal-isms. "Its purpose is not to compete against ‘Meet the Press.’"

He said he was not sure that the NAACP news would have been on the show anyway.

"Washington Watch with Roland Martin" debuted Sept. 27, aiming to "focus on issues of importance to African Americans, through interviews with officials from the Administration, Congress and other policymakers who represent black communities, as well as discussions with journalists and commentators, and a wide range of policy experts."

It tapes on Fridays, Rodgers told Journal-isms, because that was the "most economical" time to do it, and because it makes it easier for members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who had complained that they were not invited to the mainstream Sunday talk shows, to appear. Many of them leave Washington for the weekend, he said.

The previous week, "Washington Watch" was taped before that Sunday’s New York Times appeared with a story questioning the influence of lobbyists on the Congressional Black Caucus and its foundation, as well as those groups’ spending priorities.

On a January weekend, the now-infamous news broke that a book on the 2008 presidential campaign said of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, " ‘He was wowed by [Barack] Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama ‚Äî a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’" Reid’s comment was discussed on all of the other Sunday talk shows.

What’s more important, Rodgers said, is that Obama responded to the Reid controversy an interview with Martin. That it wasn’t on "Washington Watch" "didn’t bother the president or the White House," he said.

As for the Black Caucus, Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., discussed that story with Martin on radio’s syndicated "Tom Joyner Morning Show."

The Joyner Show has a partnership with Radio One, a sister company of TV One. "That’s a continuum," Rodgers said: "Washington Watch," the TV One interview and the Joyner show. "If Roland got people on Tom’s show, I consider that as a continuum. I see that as our contribution.

"Cable audiences are unique in their understanding of our medium," Rodgers continued. "My audience knows where to go to find news. they don’t turn to us for breaking news." However, "when we have news, we release that news right away to everybody."

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