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Journal-isms March 5

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Cartoon Has Paterson’s Seeing Eye Dog Resigning

ImpreMedia Says It Used Webcam From Chile to Beat CNN

Ojibwe Tribal Watchdog Bill Lawrence Dies of Cancer at 70

Atlanta Post Web Site Targets High-Income Blacks

Tavis Smiley Sets Up "Black Agenda" Meeting

Reporters to Continue Probing Civil Rights "Cold Cases"

Short Takes

Cartoon Has Paterson’s Seeing Eye Dog Resigning

As New York Gov. David Paterson’s approval rating sank to "among the lowest in recent records," the New York Post drew a cartoon in which Paterson’s seeing-eye dog resigned and the New York Times was criticized by the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s largest black weekly, which asked whether a white politician would be treated similarly.

The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that "a mere 21 percent of New York voters polled this week approve of Paterson, among the lowest recorded for an elected official in its 18 years of polling," Reuters reported on Friday.

Paterson "insisted Friday that he had no plans to step down as his staff tried to carry on the business of state amid a fiscal crisis and the cloud of multiple investigations," Jeremy W. Peters and Danny Hakim reported in the New York Times.

"He continued to push back against reports that have detailed his administration’s intervention into a domestic assault case in which a close adviser was accused of a violent confrontation with a companion."

The New York Post ran a front-page depiction of a letter of resignation with the headline, "Just Sign It, Dave (Or get someone to forge your signature)." On Thursday, its cartoonist Sean Delones, whose portrayal of a policeman shooting a chimpanzee widely taken to represent President Obama drew protests last year, depicted Paterson’s seeing-eye dog resigning.

"In the background Paterson is seen crying and saying, "Not You Too!!!" Sam Stein wrote in the Huffington Post.

On Thursday, the governor’s communications director, Peter E. Kauffmann, resigned.

The Amsterdam News, an ally of Paterson, and the Nytpick, a blog that reports on the Times, were critical of the newspaper whose stories have led coverage of the scandal.

Elinor Tatum, the Amsterdam News editor and publisher, wrote, "They have taken a story about an aide and created a governmental crisis. The style and the approach taken by the reporters seems more in the style of the Daily News or the Post rather than the higher quality we have grown to expect from the New York Times. It appears that the Times reporters have decided to put the governor on trial on the news pages, and the editorial page has decided to act as the jury in the case. Would the reporters have taken the same aggressive stand if they were talking about a white politician?"

Nytist began its Friday blog entry, "In its page-one story about David Paterson today, the NYT yet again quietly added new wrinkles to its narrative of the governor’s actions in the domestic violence case at the core of his troubles¬†- altering yet again the timeline of events, and contradicting its own previous reporting of the case."

Some readers defended the Times in the blog’s "comments" section.

Joel Dreyfuss, managing editor of theRoot.com, wrote collectively about the troubles of Paterson; Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who is stepping aside (temporarily) as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; and Marion Barry, the former Washington mayor who has been stripped of his chairmanship of a city council committee. He concluded that, "the unusual scrutiny of African-American politicians reflects the unprecedented acquisition of power by black Americans http://www.theroot.com/views/perils-black-power ."

Saturday’s magnitude 8.0 earthquake, above, was followed on Friday by a magnitude-6.6 shock that rattled buildings for nearly a minute. It was the most powerful aftershock in six days and sent terrified Chileans fleeing into quake-shattered streets and forced doctors to evacuate some patients from a major hospital.

ImpreMedia Says It Used Webcam From Chile to Beat CNN

ImpreMedia, the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper chain, used social media to beat CNN to live images from Chile’s earthquake on Saturday, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, executive editor for ImpreMedia, told Journal-isms.

"Our news alerts went out minutes after the earthquake at 3am, beating most major pubs and media in the US. We put stories up online on all the sites almost immediately thereafter," he wrote via e-mail.

"We used both facebook and twitter not only to spotlight our work but as a journalistic tool. For example, through twitter we found one of the few webcams that was live in Santiago and dropped its live feed into one of our blogs (Tu mundo al dia) in time to catch visible aftershocks. As a result, ImpreMedia had live images from Chile before CNN did."

Vourvoulias-Bush added, "We worked rolling stories on the tsunami alerts as these traveled around the world. We refreshed amplified and updated the earthquake story throughout the day and weekend — worked on by different shifts by editors in LA, NY and MEX. We put up information on how to reach people in Chile and where to send help.

"We published (and continue publishing) a number of exclusive articles from stringers on the ground in Chile. We also brought chainwide resouces to bear including our stringer network and our DC correspondent.

"We generated many multimedia videos and –including live video interviews from Chile over skype —and photo-galleries including a gallery of snapshots of the destruction sent to us by ordinary people in Chile.

"Our two daily newspapers El Diario in New York and La Opinion in LA, produced and are producing excellent in-depth special coverage and analysis. Together with impremedia’s weekly publications, La Raza in Chicago, El Mensajero in SF, Rumbo in Houston and La Prensa in Orlando —we have covered the local community reactions and the efforts to help the victims of the quake in the major Hispanic centers across the country."

Univision, the largest Spanish-language network, was on the air for more than 12 hours on Saturday and had reporters on the ground beginning Sunday," spokeswoman Lenis E. Guzman said. "On Tuesday night we aired a special edition of Aqui y Ahora dedicated to this disaster."

She listed the crews that have been reporting from Chile as Jorge Ramos (and crew); Maria Luisa Martinez (and crew); Ricardo Arambarri (and crew);Tifani Roberts (and crew); and Pablo Monzalvo, a freelancer who contributes on a fairly regular basis.

English-language media also used social media, of course. At the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune, "we found a Chilean national and Santiago resident, Diego Herrera, who had attended one of our colleges, the University of Wisconsin-Superior, who immediately wrote a first-person account for our Sunday paper," Editor Robin Washington told Journal-isms. "He also provided photos that we used in a gallery and one, of the tsunami that hit Chile (while everyone was thinking of Hawaii), that ran page one with a wire story on that part of the devastation.

"Turned out also that he had been the roommate of a cameraman at our news partner, FOX21News/KQDS-TV. You get that in a small town."

Ojibwe Tribal Watchdog Bill Lawrence Dies of Cancer at 70

"Bill Lawrence, a Red Lake Ojibwe and crusading journalist who hounded tribal officials in northern Minnesota for more than 20 years — and helped send some to prison — died Tuesday in Idaho, where he was being treated for prostate cancer at a Veterans Affairs medical center," Chuck Haga reported Thursday in the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald.

"Lawrence, 70, was founder and editor of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, which he started in 1988 and published in Bemidji. Because of his declining health, his last edition was published last fall.

‚Äú ‘I am no longer physically able to do the tasks ‚Äî computer searches, investigating, seeking ads‚Äî that are necessary to put out an edition,’ he wrote in a final editorial.

"Apparently borrowing a line from Chief Dan George in the 1970 film ‘Little Big Man,’ he titled the editorial ‘A good day to die.’

"In addition to his campaigns against corruption, Lawrence fought for requirements that audits of Indian casinos be made public — he received an award for that in 2003 from the Society of Professional Journalists — and published a series detailing the causes and consequences of fetal alcohol syndrome among Minnesota’s Indians.

Lawrence had “devoted most of his adult life to digging up dirt on corrupt tribal politicians and shedding light on news neglected by both the tribal and the mainstream press,” Salon.com reported.

Lawrence made liberal use of anonymous sources and had what Salon called a “laissez-faire attitude toward journalistic decorum,” which drew criticism from some other Native American journalists.

His severest critics, though, were tribal leaders who resented and resisted his calls for more transparency in tribal government, including the legendary Red Lake Tribal Chairman Roger Jourdain — who was Lawrence’s godfather.

‚Äú ‘I should have dropped him in that baptismal font,’ an unsmiling Jourdain told another reporter in 1990.

Atlanta Post Web Site Targets High-Income Blacks

"Moguldom Media, the company behind Bossip.com and Hip-Hop Wired, today announced the launch of The Atlanta Post, a site catering to high-income African Americans," Mike Taylor wrote Thursday for MediaBistro.

"Don’t let the name fool you. The Atlanta Post is a New York-based, nationally focused site. Its name comes from Atlanta’s prominent place in African-American culture, managing editor Rahwa Asmerom tells us:

" ‘It’s been said that Atlanta is the capital of African-American influence. It’s a city with a deep African-American history and is a locus of burgeoning black entrepreneurs and businesses. It’s the spirit of the city’s African-American activity and progress that we were trying to capture with the name. (Not to mention, the parent company Moguldom Media Group is also based there)’.

"With local editions geared toward New York, DC, Chicago and of course Atlanta, the site provides original and aggregated content on personal finance, business, media and politics. In a statement, Moguldom CEO Marve Frazier says that The Atlanta Post will fill a gap in current online media."

Tavis Smiley Sets Up "Black Agenda" Meeting

"Two months after ending his annual State of the Black Union conference, Tavis Smiley is gathering African-American advocates to press the case for a ‘black agenda,’" Jesse Washington wrote Thursday for the Associated Press.

The decision was motivated by what Smiley called recent statements from some black leaders downplaying the need for President Barack Obama to specifically help African-Americans.

" ‘I was compelled to do it because of this debate,’ the activist and PBS talk show host said Wednesday.

The panel discussion will be March 20 at Chicago State University. Panelists include advertising pioneer Tom Burrell, professors Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Bennett College President Julianne Malveaux.

Reporters to Continue Probing Civil Rights "Cold Cases"

"Over the past 20 years, every unsolved civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted in the South was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist.

"So the FBI’s decision to close, without prosecution or further disclosure, all but a few of the 108 unsolved murder cases it began re-examining three years ago, only highlights the vital need for investigative reporting that can find the truth, tell the stories and fill in the gaps in our nation’s history," the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting said in a statement  on Thursday.

"The Civil Rights Cold Case Project (www.coldcases.org), a team of investigative reporters, documentary filmmakers and interactive media producers, is digging into unsolved civil rights murders in the South. Led by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Paperny Films, the project — which includes Clarion Ledger reporter and recent MacArthur Genius award winner Jerry Mitchell, and Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff — has been focused for more than two years on race murders and crimes primarily in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

‚Äú ‘These cases are not cold when it comes to the relatives and friends of the victims,’ said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. ‘Our reporting has found that these cases resonate powerfully today. Too many Americans are unaware of the terror of that era and how it has affected our country in terms of race and reconciliation.’ ‚Äù

Separately, the Gannett. Co. announced, that ContentOne, its restructured Washington-based news service, "has launched a major Gannett-wide project around the Civil Rights Movement.

"It is a dynamic live portal that updates continually and features news stories, archived records through partner Footnote, documents and videos on the civil rights movement," Jennifer Carroll, Nichelle Smith and Jeanette Barrett-Stokes wrote for the company’s Newswatch newsletter.

"At the project’s heart is an all-out effort to capture the personal stories that tell the history of the movement. The site invites four generations to write about their experiences, upload photos and videos and pass along their histories. To give context and inspiration, the video segment showcases stories from all four generations. And the site conveys the stories of the communities, beginning with Jackson, through its newspaper archives and award-winning reporter Jerry Mitchell. Mitchell’s investigations of unsolved civil rights murders have won kudos and led to convictions."

Short Takes

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