N.Y. Times Stakeout Pays Off in FIFA Arrests
Sun-Times Runs Photo That Police “Didn’t Want Anyone to See”
Waco Columnist Calls Shootout a Brawl Without “Legs”
Charleston Paper Finds Faulty Oversight of Police Shootings
Why Sale of The Root to Univision Matters to Advertisers
Eric Newton to Become Innovation Chief at Cronkite School
Radio Journalist Sunni Khalid Acquitted, a Nightmare Ends
N.Y. Times Stakeout Pays Off in FIFA Arrests
“Around 4 a.m. Wednesday, New York Times reporters Michael Schmidt and Sam Borden arrived at a five-star hotel in Zurich and tried to get breakfast,” Michael Calderone reported Wednesday for the Huffington Post.
“It was an unusual place for the pair to be, and not simply because breakfast wouldn’t be served for a couple more hours. Schmidt covers the FBI from Washington D.C., and Borden, a European sports correspondent based in Paris, should have been at the French Open. But the reporters were staking out the Baur au Lac hotel to witness the anticipated arrests of top officials with FIFA, soccer’s international governing body.
“Just before midnight at Times headquarters, or dawn in Zurich, the paper reported that Swiss authorities had arrested seven top FIFA officials on corruption charges stemming from an FBI investigation. The Department of Justice had indicted them and seven others on charges that included racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering. Matt Apuzzo and William Rashbaum, who cover the Justice Department and New York federal law enforcement, respectively, co-wrote the bombshell story with Schmidt and Borden. . . .”
Calderone also wrote, “The reporters had prime vantage points to give the play-by-play on Twitter, and thousands of users retweeted the descriptions and images they posted.
“Schmidt, who recently broke the news that Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, said tweeting the arrests ‘was a different type of journalistic experience than a lot of things I’ve done before.’ Schmidt said he doesn’t typically tweet photos of a story playing out in real time.
“Borden tweeted a short video clip from the scene, though neither reporter used live-streaming apps like Periscope or Meerkat to broadcast what was happening. The Times also had a photographer posted outside the hotel to capture the proceedings.
“Clearly the Times suspected that arrests could be taking place in Zurich, as top FIFA executives met in the city, when it sent Schmidt and Borden there on Monday. But the editors and reporters who worked on the story pushed back against any suggestion they were fed the scoop.’ . . .”
Sun-Times Runs Photo That Police “Didn’t Want Anyone to See”
“Photographs can do a number of things. They can help frame a news story or put it into better context. They can convey details and nuances of a story that might otherwise be lost,” Jim Kirk, publisher and editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times,” wrote Wednesday.
“But if we don’t know all the facts surrounding a photograph, some things are left open to interpretation. It is why news organizations are careful in considering the images they run and try as hard as possible to detail what is being displayed.
“Today on Page 18 and in digital editions, we ran a picture and a story about a shocking photograph that the Chicago Police Department didn’t want anyone to see. It depicts two white police officers posing with rifles standing over a black man on his stomach who has deer antlers on his head. The police have said that the unidentified man lying on the floor was a suspect in a crime.
“It’s an offensive image, so much so that this newspaper had to think long and hard before publishing it today. When two Chicago Police officers pose like hunters with rifles over a black man with deer antlers on his head, a responsible newspaper cannot withhold the image from its readers, especially when you consider that one of the officers, Timothy McDermott, was fired because of the image and is fighting to get his job back. (Jerome Finnigan, the other officer, was sentenced to prison 3½ years ago for leading a robbery ring and other crimes). . . .”
- Frank Main and Kim Janssen, Chicago Sun-Times: CPD cops posed for photo standing over black man dressed in antlers
Waco Columnist Calls Shootout a Brawl Without “Legs”
“For several days, big-city pundits have tried to channel the deadly Twin Peaks motorcycle-gang shootout through ideological prisms of police brutality, racism and journalistic shortcomings,” columnist Bill Whitaker wrote Sunday for the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald. Most of the results have been a stretch, oddly compelling but not very convincing.
“A synthesis of some of these dubious interpretations holds that Waco police handled the arrests of bikers (the ones not shot, that is) without incident because police and bikers are mostly white. A piece in Salon, for instance, faults some of the news media (Texas media primarily) for only employing the word ‘riot’ when communities of color are involved.
“All this overlooks inconvenient facts, including that last Sunday’s unrest was, whatever else, a biker brawl — bigger perhaps, certainly bloodier, and stupidly conducted at a modern shopping center along busy Interstate 35 rather than at some dusty outpost in rural stretches, but still a brawl. To call it a riot almost dignifies what unfolded when, according to one report, someone ran over someone else’s foot in the parking lot. . . .”
Whitaker also wrote, “Enjoy this while it lasts. The truth is the Twin Peaks story isn’t going to have ‘legs’ and command national attention for long — at least, not of the scope that we saw with the 1993 Branch Davidian fiasco, which erupted 10 miles east of Waco, settled into a 51-day standoff and since has sparked debates on religious liberty, gun control, federal overreach, law enforcement competency and the danger of apocalyptic cults.
- Charles M. Blow, New York Times: Of Bikers and Thugs
- D.L. Chandler, newsone.com: NAACP Monitoring Black Biker Discrimination In Wake Of Waco
Charleston Paper Finds Faulty Oversight of Police Shootings
“An officer in Summerville pumps four bullets through the side and back windows of a fleeing car, killing a young man.” the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., reported on Wednesday.
“An officer in Duncan sees a woman climb into his cruiser, yells, ‘Get out or I’ll shoot you!’ and then does just that.
“An officer in North Charleston shoots eight bullets at Walter Scott’s back, killing him on the spot.
“Every 10 days on average, South Carolina law enforcement officers point their guns at someone and pull the triggers — 235 shootings since 2009. Eighty-nine people died, and 96 were wounded.
“Each shooting also triggered an investigation into whether officers were justified in using deadly force. With just a few notable exceptions, these officers were cleared of any wrongdoing. To be sure, many cases were open and shut: Armed robbers shooting their way out of convenience stores after holdups; rage-filled drunks bent on destruction; suicidal people daring cops to cut them down.
“But a Post and Courier investigation uncovered case after case where agents with the State Law Enforcement Division failed to answer key questions about what happened, failed to document the troubled backgrounds of the officers who drew their guns, and failed to pinpoint missteps and tactical mistakes that could be used to prevent future bloodshed.
“Never-before released dashboard videos also reveal a disturbing pattern of officers shooting at and into vehicles. . . .”
The series runs through Sunday.
- Wayne Bennett, the Field Negro: State violence?
- Zak Cheney-Rice, mic.com: The Police Are Killing One Group at a Staggering Rate, and Nobody Is Talking About It (Feb. 5)
- Herbert Dyer Jr., CounterPunch: Cleveland: The Verdict This Time
- Errol Louis, Daily News, New York: Petty crimes and uprooted lives
- Dave Zirin, the Nation: An NBA Player Is Missing the Playoffs Because the NYPD Broke His Leg—Why the Sports-Media Silence?
Eric Newton to Become Innovation Chief at Cronkite School
Eric Newton is leaving the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he has long championed — and funded — journalism innovation, to become innovation chief at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Rem Reider reported Tuesday for USA Today.
“The idea, says the school, which has a wide array of professional programs including digital news bureaus in Phoenix, Washington and Los Angeles and an entrepreneurial innovation lab, is to ‘serve as a test bed for news industry innovations and experimentation.’
Newton, senior adviser to the president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was an associate of Robert L. Maynard, co-founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and considered Maynard a mentor. He spoke May 4 at the memorial service for Dori L. Maynard, CEO of the Maynard Institute and Bob Maynard’s daughter.
“Newton, who will continue to consult for Knight, sees Arizona State as a perfect fit,” Reider continued. “For 30 years, he says, he has been interested in the idea of journalism schools as teaching hospitals, where students learn by doing. In recent years, as traditional news outlets have cut back, more and more J-school have established news bureaus, and more and more of their work is showing up in professional venues.
“But, quoting Callahan, Newton says many of these J-school forays are more like clinics than hospitals. What is too often missing is the laboratory component from which creative solutions can emerge. . . .”
Radio Journalist Sunni Khalid Acquitted, a Nightmare Ends
Nineteen months after he was arrested and charged with assaulting his son, radio journalist Sunni Khalid has been acquitted by a jury in Harford County, Md., according to Baltimore news reports.
But the price of his ordeal has been the end of a 31-year marriage, five days in jail, loss of access to his children, a difficult time finding work as a journalist and first-hand experience with a criminal justice system he once covered. “He says the deputies never interviewed him or other potential witnesses,” Edward Ericson Jr. reported Thursday for the Baltimore City Paper. Two officers of the court in the Maryland county recused themselves because they knew Khalid from his days as a Baltimore Sun reporter there, he said.
Still, Khalid told Journal-isms by telephone on Wednesday, the nightmare is over. Khalid is now working for KGO-AM in San Francisco and freelancing for public radio station KQED there, and in December plans to marry a woman he met in the Bay Area, where he relocated. The Baltimore City Paper’s Ericson and Alison Knezevich of the Baltimore Sun reported details of his ordeal last week.
Short Takes
Merlene Davis told readers Saturday she was retiring as local columnist at the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky., diminishing by one the number of African American newspaper columnists. “I had been working for the Lexington Herald-Leader since November 1983, and had watched as my life as a journalist had gone from being filled with excitement and expectation to being just another job,” Davis wrote. “No successor has been named for Merlene,” Peter Baniak, editor and vice president of the Herald-Leader, messaged Journal-isms on Wednesday.
- “Late last month at the first-ever podcast upfront in New York City, NPR unveiled a study showing that nearly 33 percent of its podcast audience is comprised of people of color,” Tracie Powell wrote Friday for Columbia Journalism Review. “This is significant in light of public radio’s long struggle with trying to reach more diverse audiences, particularly African American, Latino, and Asian American listeners. While NPR is touting its success in expanding into new audiences, podcasts, generally, are growing among more digitally savvy audiences, which also happen to be more diverse. . . .”
- Dr. Sybril Bennett, professor of journalism at Belmont University, is the National Association of Black Journalist’s 2015 Journalism Educator of the Year, NABJ announced on Wednesday. “The award recognizes the service, commitment and academic guidance of an outstanding journalism teacher, professor or educator who has helped increase the number of black journalists in newsrooms. . . .”
“Antonio Fins returns to a newsroom after a 3-year break working as Executive Director for the non-profit Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation,” Veronica Villafañe reported for her Media Moves site. Fins, who was editorial page editor at the SunSentinel in Fort Lauderdale, is now business editor of the Palm Beach Post. He took over the role on May 18.
- Praya Ganapati, former Wired and Wall Street Journal reporter, is joining Quartz as its first platform editor and director of platform products, Richard Horgan reported Tuesday for FishbowlNY, quoting a memo from Quartz executive editor Zach Seward. “That refers to our existing and future products beyond qz.com, like the Quartz Daily Brief, Quartz on Flipboard, possible Quartz mobile apps, etc.,” Seward’s memo said.
- Farai Chideya, a former reporter and program host for ABC News, CNN and NPR and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute is joining The Intercept as a columnist and consulting editor who will “explore in her columns the ways technology shapes our lives — as each individual is shadowed by what Chideya calls a ‘cloud self’ that increasingly defines our existence at home, work and in social and political arenas,” Editor Betsy Reed reported Wednesday for the Intercept, founded by muckrakers Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
- Who are you going to believe? The oral history passed down through the family or a bland contemporary account by the local newspaper? Jada F. Smith, a news assistant in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, chooses the family. She wrote in the Times on March 15 about the account of a civil rights incident reported at the time in the LaGrange (Ga.) Daily News. “We tell those Auntie Jean stories and Uncle Bus stories and Grandaddy Frank stories because if we don’t, somebody else surely will.” Smith told Journal-isms by telephone Wednesday that readers told her they had similar experiences.
- “ProPublica announced today that it has hired Topher Sanders of The Florida Times-Union as a reporter covering racial inequality,” Nicole Collins Bronzan reported Wednesday for the investigative website reported. “Sanders has reported on education and city government for the Times-Union, of Jacksonville, Florida, since 2008. Named to the investigative team in 2013, he became the paper’s investigative editor in 2014. . . .” Nikole Hannah-Jones, who reported on racial inequality for ProPublica, has joined the New York Times Magazine.
- Daniel Shinun Kang of McGill University, Christine Chen of Stanford University and Priscilla Takondwa Semphere of Smith College are among 10 recipients of inaugural OZY Genius Awards for 2015, Ozy Media announced Tuesday. “Each recipient will get a stipend of up to $10,000 to pursue his or her project and will be part of an OZY Films documentary this fall that chronicles their progress. . . .”
- “Doing an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos before a live studio audience?” Mark Joyella asked Tuesday for TVNewser. “Consider this: you might want to avoid comparing Mexican immigrants (legal or otherwise) to members of ISIS, and if someone in the audience offers you a hug of friendship, perhaps don’t blow them off. In an interview set to air on Fusion tonight at 10pmET, Ann Coulter, somehow, did both. Coulter has argued that Americans should ‘fear immigrants’ from Mexico ‘more than ISIS’ and she did not back down. . . .”
- “Chester Lampkin, STL native and weekend meteorologist for KSDK (Channel 5), is leaving the station and heading to New Zealand,” Joe Holleman reported May 11 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “In June, Lampkin will start as a meteorologist for MetService of New Zealand, which he described as being akin to the National Weather Service for that nation. . . .”
- “Larry Starks tried out for his West Side high school’s basketball and baseball teams but didn’t make the cut,” Norman Parish wrote Monday for Chicago’s dnainfo.com. “But the former Austin [Ill.] resident’s writing skills in an English class at Holy Trinity High School helped him grab a spot on his school’s newspaper. Parish also wrote, “Today, Starks is the NBA news editor for ESPN. He helps decide how news stories are handled during NBA broadcasts on ESPN and ABC. . . .”
- “Elaine Diaz has spent the last several months studying at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, Sarah Kessler wrote Friday for Fast Company. “She is the first of 1,400 winners in the 77-year-old program who is from Cuba, and she plans to launch a publication called Periodismo de Barrio when she returns to the country in June. The publication will focus on natural disasters, a topic that impacts many people in Cuba, which is about the size of Tennessee but has, by NOAA’s count, been hit by one-third as many tropical cyclones as the entire United States and, by GDP, many fewer resources to support citizens in their aftermath. What is most unusual about her project, however, is its distribution strategy. Periodismo de Barrio will publish online, but it will also attempt to reach Cubans in a way they more commonly consume media: an offline version of the Internet called the ‘weekly packet.’ . . .”
- In Kenya, “A fresh warrant of arrest has been issued against television talk show host Jeff Koinange for failing to appear in court, ” Paul Ogemba reported Monday for Business Daily in Kenya. “Principal magistrate Maisy Chesang not only ordered the arrest of Mr Koinange, but also directed that he forfeits a Sh100,000 cash bail he deposited to gain his release last week after he was arrested over contempt of court charges. . . .” Koinange was the Africa correspondent for CNN and CNN International from 2001 to 2007. A warrant for his arrest issued four days ago after his lawyer explaining that he had traveled to Ivory Coast to attend a conference on the day he was due in court.
- Last week, a court in Angola indicated that libel charges against anti-corruption campaigner Rafael Marques de Morais would be dropped, but on Monday, the public prosecutor said he would proceed with a conviction, the London-based Index on Censorship reported on Tuesday. “This backtracking by Angola in the case of Rafael Marques de Morais is outrageous,” said Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Rafael’s investigations into human rights abuses in Angola are crucial and should not be impeded.”
- The Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday it “condemns the murder of Brazilian radio journalist Djalma Santos da Conceição and calls on authorities to investigate and bring all those responsible to justice. Santos da Conceição’s body was found with signs of torture on Saturday in the northeast state of Bahia, one day after the journalist was kidnapped by armed assailants, according to news reports. The journalist’s murder occurred less than a week after the killing of Evany José Metzker, a critical blogger who was found decapitated on May 18 in Minas Gerais, near the border with Bahia. . . .” In the Daily Beast, Martha Mercer wrote about Metzker Monday under the headline, “In a Small Town in Brazil, a Journalist Is Beheaded.”
- In Quebec, “A prominent French-language foreign correspondent says he will withdraw from public life to prepare a response, following allegations that he fabricated and embellished some of his stories,” the CBC reported on Monday. “François Bugingo has been suspended indefinitely from contributing to several Montreal media outlets, including 98.5 FM, Le Journal de Montréal and TVA. . . .”
- “Sudanese security forces seized the Monday print runs of 10 newspapers and suspended the publishing licences of four of them in a major media crackdown, editors and NGOs said,” Agence France-Presse reported on Monday.
