Maynard Institute archives

Black Journalists Threatened After WDBJ Shooting

by richard0429

Roanoke Television Station Secured Restraining Order

NAHJ Messages: “Be Bolder,” “Do Exactly What Ramos Did”

Hsu Named Executive Director of Maynard Institute

Reaction Surprised Reporter Who Broke Clock Story

Expanded Roles for Yvette Miley, Rashida Jones at MSNBC

Rev. Everett Parker Dies, Challenged Bigots’ TV License

4 of Color Laid Off at N.Y. News, New Orleans Group

“Mikado” Pulled After Asian Americans Protest Yellowface

Photographer Joined Migrants to Document the Danger

Big Digital Push for Coates’ Opus on Incarceration

Short Takes

Roanoke Television Station Secured Restraining Order

Black journalists in Roanoke, Va., were threatened after the Aug. 26 shooting in which black former journalist Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed a reporter and photographer doing a live shot, and then killed himself, the news director at Roanoke’s WDBJ-TV said Saturday.

One African American reporter from WDBJ-TV and another from the competing WSLS-TV were reporting in the aftermath of the shooting incident when a man in a pickup truck formed his hand like a gun, pointed it at the reporters and called out the name of the shooter, Kelly Zuber, WDBJ-TV news director, told journalists at the Excellence in Journalism convention in Orlando.

The reporter from WSLS-TV, whom she did not name, wrote down the license plate of the man in the pickup truck. The station secured a restraining order against him, Zuber said. The reporter in question sent word through a colleague that he did not want to discuss the incident or speak with Journal-isms.  

“We continue to get threats to our newsroom,” Zuber told the 8 a.m. gathering of members of the Radio Television Digital News Association, Society of Professional Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“One against an African American reporter who had just joined” two weeks prior was “as racist as you could possibly get,” she said.  

The session, “WDBJ Shooting: A Tragedy Unfolds in Real Time,” was a late addition to the conference, which drew about 1,540 people, Sarah Beck, bookkeeper of the Society of Professional Journalists, told Journal-isms on Sunday. Alberto B. Mendoza, NAHJ executive director, said there were “nearly 600” NAHJ members.

Moderated by Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” the WDBJ panel included Mark Luckie, former manager of journalism and news at Twitter, Zuber and Scott Libin, RTDNA ethics committee chairman. Because the shooting happened at her news organization, Zuber said, her station was both news outlet and victim, giving her a different perspective on crime stories.

The newsroom at WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Va.

Now, Zuber said, she wonders, “what would happen if we had the victims of crimes write the stories.” The killer, known on the air as Bryce Williams, “produced his own crime,” in Libin’s words, by videotaping the shooting and posting it. Zuber said she now wonders about people “sitting in the basement playing it over and over and planning” their own crimes.

After the incident, Zuber declared WDBJ’s newsroom off-limits to outside reporters. “The newsroom was our sanctuary, the place where we could hold each other and cry,” she said.

To avoid alerting would-be criminals, the station no longer announces to viewers where it intends to send its reporters, Zuber said.

Allison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27, were fatally shot while reporting live for WDBJ7 at a shopping mall in Monetta, Va.

Parker and WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst had been dating, which led to a question from an audience member about whether the station had second thoughts about such dating among colleagues.

“We need a little more love in the newsroom,” Zuber said, the only comment in the session to receive applause.

NAHJ Messages: “Be Bolder,” “Do Exactly What Ramos Did”

A Hall of Fame & Honors luncheon at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention was marked by honorees’ repeated entreaties to challenge news managers to improve their reporting on Latino issues.

As with the convention itself, it was sponsored by Toyota, which has agreed to underwrite NAHJ conventions for three more years, Medina announced Sunday to the NAHJ board of directors. That is worth “just under half a million dollars,” Medina said.

Honored Saturday were José Diaz-Balart of MSNBC and Telemundo; Cecilia Vega and Tom Llamas, ABC News weekend anchors; and Julio Ricardo Varela of the Latino Rebels website. They received President’s awards. NPR pioneer Maria Martin, columnist and academic Miguel Pérez and Frances Robles of the New York Times were inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“I know what it feels like to be afraid of being labeled that angry person,” Vega said. However, she added, “We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’ve got to make changes faster in this business, we really do.”

“Be bolder,” Varela said.

Perez noted that “long before I was a journalist, I was a Hispanic, and my priorities were in the right order.” He urged Latinos to know their history and praised Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who was expelled from a Donald Trump news conference after asking Trump about immigration before being called on. Ramos was allowed to return.

“We need to do exactly what Jorge Ramos did,” Perez said. Not everyone mentioned Ramos, however. Diaz-Balart told Journal-isms, “I don’t talk about that. He does his thing, and I do mine. Jose is a friend of mine. I have known him for 30 years.”

Sarah Glover, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, joined NAHJ President Mekahlo Medina on stage to promote next year’s joint NABJ-NAHJ convention in Washington. Glover said she expected 4,000 attendees.

Julian Castro, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, told the audience that “good journalism can’t be measured by clicks and viewers alone,” urging the journalists to “stand up for the truth and . . . the marginalized. . . . The Latino story is a vital part of the American story,” he said.

Castro appeared at last year’s NAHJ convention in San Antonio, and this year at the conventions of the Native American Journalists Association and NABJ, as well as at an event by the Washington chapter of NAHJ.

“I wanted to be a [television] journalist,” he told Journal-isms, adding that his career plans took a different turn in college. He added that he was also at the Seattle convention of Unity: Journalists of Color in 1999.

In other developments:

  • At a Sunday panel called “Covering Ferguson, Baltimore and Beyond: Rights and Responsibilities as a Journalist,” Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery discussed major mistakes made by out-of-town reporters. One is failing to provide context by reporting how wide an area is affected by unrest, a shortcoming compounded when the same images of burning buildings are shown repeatedly. “Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know,” Lowery said. In the Latino Reporter student project, Lowery named “Five things reporters should do when covering protests.”
  • On the same panel, Gilbert Bailon, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said, “I would put my camera away and talk to some people” to get background on the area being covered, a practice used effectively by Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson, whose images of the Ferguson unrest helped the newspaper win the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in April. 
  • Lowery said that while residents distrust police, “they also have a deep distrust for the media.” Journalists have been mugged and faced attempts to steal their smartphones, especially if they do not look as though they are from the neighborhood, he said.
  • The description for a Spanish-language workshop Saturday asserted, “Lack of copy and content editors in the Spanish media industry is one of the primary reasons why grammatical errors go unnoticed in the newsroom. The abuse of gerund, the incorrect use of the prefixes influenced by the English language or the ambiguities in the translations can easily be avoided by following simple technical writing skills . . . ”
  • At the Saturday workshop “Who Delivers the Message Is as Important as the Message,” Paul Cheung, national president of the Asian American Journalists Association,” suggested that creating a more inclusive newsroom environment means that people of all races should attend journalist-of-color conventions and that white reporters might collaborate with those of color in undertaking projects dealing with race.
  • Kimberly Wyatt, news director at WEAR-TV, Pensacola, Fla., was elected to a two-year term as an RTDNA director at-large. Among those re-elected to the RTDNA board were Andrea Parquet-Taylor, news director, WNCN-TV, Raleigh, N.C., and Jam Sardar, news director at WLNS-TV, Lansing, Mich.
  • About 50 people attended an NAHJ membership meeting in which the primary topic was the board’s proposal to grant public relations practitioners, professors, part-time bloggers and others of media-related professions equal voting status with working journalists in the association. Voting begins Oct. 12. Balloting is to proceed until one-third of the membership, or about 585 members, votes. President Mekahlo Medina cited GLAAD, formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as an organization that changed its structure to open voting to the entire membership, as the NAHJ board proposes.
  • “The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) have agreed to explore continuing their partnership in hosting the Excellence in Journalism conference in 2017 and 2019,” SPJ announced. The Native American Journalists Association is joining RTDNA and SPJ at the Excellence in Journalism Conference in New Orleans, Sept. 18-20, 2016. 

Hsu Named Executive Director of Maynard Institute

Evelyn Hsu, who became interim executive director of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in February after the death of institute president Dori J. Maynard, was named executive director on Saturday, board chairman Mark Trahant announced.

“The thinking now is the ED position is the same as the president,” Trahant messaged Journal-isms from Oakland, where the board was meeting. “Board is impressed by Evelyn’s leadership and wanted to give her a vote of confidence.”

Hsu had been program manager. “For ten years, I had the opportunity to work as deputy to Dori Maynard, who was a great leader and friend,” she told Journal-isms by email. “So it is a particular honor that the Maynard Institute board has given me the opportunity to carry on its work as director.

“We have now embarked on a strategic plan to define the Institute’s role in the digital future, where there’s as much need as ever for our unwavering commitment to encouraging diversity in media coverage and staffing.”

As reported in March, “A board task force, chaired by Martin Reynolds, will look at short-term steps needed to ensure that MIJE remains as relevant today as the program that was launched at Columbia University a generation ago . . . .” Reynolds is senior editor for community engagement at the Bay Area News Group.

“That task force will be followed by a formal strategic planning process.”

According to her bio, Hsu “began her journalism career at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she was a city hall reporter and a member of the investigative team. She spent eight years at The Washington Post as a metropolitan reporter covering politics and government and as an assistant editor for the paper’s weeklies.

“From the Post, she joined the American Press Institute in Reston, Va., as an associate director responsible for designing and leading seminars on editing, management and writing. In 2000, she joined the faculty of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., where she worked on programs for students and on midcareer programs on management and writing. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists.

“Evelyn is a past national president of the Asian American Journalists Association and was a key organizer of the first UNITY conference that brought together more than 5,000 journalists. She has served on the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications and on the board of the Student Press Law Center. She served on the Youth Services Committee of the Newspaper Association of America.”

Reaction Surprised Reporter Who Broke Clock Story

“When Avi Selk set out to write the story that would soon become a viral sensation, inspiring tweets from Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Hillary Clinton, he didn’t even expect to make the front page,” Tamar Wilner wrote Friday for Columbia Journalism Review.

“The Dallas Morning News reporter got a text from a local activist about Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Irving, Texas, boy who took his homemade clock into school to show his teacher — and ended up being handcuffed and arrested on suspicion of building a hoax bomb. A lot of the activist’s suggestions hadn’t panned out, but Selk suggested to his editor that this one might be worth pursuing.

” ‘I said this could be a story — or we could just blog it,’ he recalled. The editor assured him this one would go into print, as well as online.

“Meanwhile, the local NBC station was following the same lead, and actually got out the first tweet, promoting its on-air coverage. The newspaper and station posted web stories around the same time Tuesday evening — but it was the Morning News article that launched the national furor over Ahmed’s arrest.

“By noon the next day, the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, started by a college student in nearby Arlington, was getting 2,000 tweets a minute — and Barack Obama was weighing in. Invitations also came in from Facebook, Twitter and Google. . . .”

Expanded Roles for Yvette Miley, Rashida Jones at MSNBC

Yvette Miley, a senior vice president and executive editor at MSNBC, and Rashida Jones, a managing editor at the network, will assume expanded roles as MSNBC shifts to more hard news coverage during the day, network president Phil Griffin announced on Thursday.

Miley “will continue to work closely with me and the dayside leadership team and will be responsible for talent management in front of and behind the camera plus weekend and overnight editorial coverage. In addition, Yvette will take on responsibility for leading diversity for NBC News and MSNBC,” Griffin wrote in a memo to the staff.

Jones “will be the Managing Editor for dayside and will have the pivotal role of overseeing all of our coverage throughout the news day.” Jones, who was a producer with jurisdiction from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., will now have responsibilities until 5 p.m. and be the “minute-by-minute” editorial leader.

Overall, the reorganization represents “the coming together of NBC News with MSNBC into one news operation that pushes its coverage across broadcast, cable and digital outlets,” Emily Steel wrote Thursday for the New York Times.

As Steel also reported, “Kate Snow, an NBC News national correspondent, will anchor news coverage at MSNBC from 3 to 5 p.m. during the week and anchor the Sunday edition of ‘NBC Nightly News.’

“Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ will host a new daily show at 5 p.m. called ‘MTP Daily’ starting Sept. 28, which executives hope will become the ‘cable news show of record’ for the 2016 campaign. The changes coincide with the return of Brian Williams, “the former anchor of ‘Nightly News,’ who in February was suspended for six months without pay after he acknowledged misleading viewers about his experience in a helicopter attack in Iraq. . . .”

Craig Robinson, executive vice president and chief diversity officer of the parent NBCUniversal, Inc., who was attending the Excellence in Journalism convention in Orlando, told Journal-isms there that Miley’s new responsibilities formalize diversity efforts she already undertook voluntarily.

Miley said in a statement to Journal-isms, “It is an exciting time for me and for MSNBC. Rashida, Pat and Izzy make for a powerhouse editorial trio, and I’m looking forward to having more time to focus on talent management — both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.”

She was referring to Pat Burkey, who is leaving as executive producer of “NBC Nightly News” to be the executive producer in charge of afternoon news coverage, and Izzy Povich, who is to do the same with morning news coverage.

Rev. Everett Parker Dies, Challenged Bigots’ TV License

“The Rev. Everett C. Parker, who won a landmark broadcasting case and led a civil rights crusade to hold television and radio stations accountable for presenting racially biased programming and for failing to hire blacks and other minorities, died on Thursday in White Plains,” N.Y., Robert D. McFadden reported Friday for the New York Times. “He was 102.

“His death was announced by the United Church of Christ, where he was the founder and longtime director of its Office of Communications. With church support, he used the office as his civil rights platform for 30 years.

“In a nation with a history of racial discrimination, it was not unusual decades ago for minorities to be ignored or to have their dignity trampled on radio and television. Station executives, under no pressure from federal regulators, gave little thought to segregated shows or on-the-air slurs, let alone to minority hiring.

“But as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, Dr. Parker, a minister and director of communications for the socially conscious, 1.75-million-member United Church of Christ, began to survey the performances of radio and television stations in the South. He identified WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss., as a flagrant purveyor of racist programming. . . .”

In a message to colleagues and friends, Randall Pinkston, the veteran broadcast journalist who in 1973 became the first African American to anchor WLBT’s 6 p.m. newscast, noted that WLBT “was the same station that civil rights leader Medgar Wiley Evers began petitioning in 1957 for an opportunity to speak on behalf of the black community. He was finally permitted time on WLBT in 1963. One month later, Evers was assassinated. Many believe that his appearance on WLBT made him a target.

“Two years later, Reverend Parker began what would become a decades-long license challenge to WLBT-TV, as well as a battle against the FCC which wanted to renew WLBT’S license (The saga is described in meticulous detail in CHANGING CHANNELS by Kay Mills). I do not know for sure, but I would like to believe that Reverend Parker selected WLBT, in part, to finish the work that Evers so bravely began.

“During his years in Mississippi, Reverend Parker also faced threats to his own safety and that of others who assisted him in the complicated and expensive effort leading to the landmark UCC v FCC decision.

“When broadcasters realized that ‘… public interest,convenience and necessity. . .’ in the 1934 Communications Act meant all of the public, barriers to hiring, promotion and, eventually, ownership began to crumble. Reverend Parker cannot receive too much credit for triggering a revolution in media licensed by the FCC. . . .”

4 of Color Laid Off at N.Y. News, New Orleans Group

Prescotte Stokes III and Renita D. Young, young black journalists, are among the casualties as the NOLA Media Group cuts 21 percent of its full-time employees, the two reporters have confirmed.

In New York, two more journalists of color have been identified among the additional layoffs the Daily News undertook on Friday. They are Celeste Katz, who worked at the News for 15 years and identifies herself on LinkedIn as an “experienced multimedia reporter and blogger specializing in national and local political coverage,” and Zayda Rivera, a Latina who wrote entertainment news.

Katz, whose mother is Asian and father Caucasian, messaged Journal-isms, “I’m really trying to keep an open mind as I consider my next steps. This isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, so I’m just grateful for the support of everyone who’s reached out to me.”

Columnist Juan Gonzalez moved to scuttle reports that he is among the casualties. Gonzalez tweeted, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I can confirm that I am still writing for the Daily News.”

At the NOLA Media Group, Young covered Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital, and Stokes did video stories.

Young said in a Facebook message Friday, “I want to thank each of you for taking the time to visit my page and support my work at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune’s Baton Rouge hub. Yesterday I was let go of the team as part of a companywide reorganization. It has been an esteemed honor to be a source of Baton Rouge news for you over the last (nearly) two years.

“As I shared with my editor and colleagues, my time with NOLA.com has truly been outstanding. You’ve all helped in my personal and professional growth — and for that, I’m forever thankful. So what’s the best lesson I’ve learned here? Follow the Platinum Rule. Always be kind and treat others well, but go the extra step if you can, get to know a little about them and treat others how they want to be treated. Please stay tuned for the next phase of my career. ?#?Onward? ?#?Upward? ?#?Faith?.”

Stokes confirmed his layoff by telephone on Sunday and said he was not sure what he wanted to do next.

The NOLA Media Group, which includes the Times-Picayune newspaper, announced Thursday “that it is restructuring its news operation to reinforce its core journalistic mission. The changes are designed to focus on topics that are important to readers and have driven the substantial readership growth of NOLA.com, making it one of the country’s top local news websites.

“The restructuring will also lead to operational efficiencies and will result in an overall reduction of 28 full-time and 9 part-time content staffers – or 21 percent of the overall content operation’s full-time employees, according to NOLA Media Group President Ricky Mathews. . . .”

Photographer Joined Migrants to Document the Danger

“When the engine of the leaky fishing vessel spluttered and died, the Italian photographer Guilio Piscitelli had been on the boat crowded with migrants for more than 28 hours. Behind them were wars and revolutions. Ahead was the Italian island of Lampedusa, and the promise of a safer life in Europe,” Finbarr O’Reilly reported Friday for the “Lens” blog of the New York Times.

“Between those two worlds loomed the threat of a tragic fate that has befallen thousands of other asylum-seekers. . . .”

O’Reilly also wrote, “The crossing took place in April 2011, during the early days of the Arab Spring, long before the world’s attention was gripped by desperate scenes of mass migration from the Middle East and Africa toward Europe. The experience gave Mr. Piscitelli personal insight into the risks people take in search of safety. And it drove him to embark on a long-term photographic project titled ‘From There to Here,’ which explores the issue of migration by tracing the migrants’ paths across continents. . . .”

Big Digital Push for Coates’ Opus on Incarceration

“The Atlantic’s October 2015 cover story by Ta-Nehisi Coates is around 17,000 words long,” Shan Wang reported Wednesday for the Nieman Journalism Lab.

“And while the length of the print story is notable — it’s the longest article published by The Atlantic in more than a decade — Coates’s reporting on the devastating impact of decades of mass incarceration on black families is accompanied online by an encyclopedic multimedia package that includes original videos, annotated documents, and other response pieces.

” ‘We publish the magazine ten times a year, so we need to take advantage of this extraordinary piece of real estate to drive a really big idea into the public consciousness,’ said James Bennet, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief and co-president. ‘If that is our ambition, we should be trying to reinforce that with all our other forms of storytelling.’

“Coates has written about mass incarceration in the past, and it’s been an ongoing theme for the magazine. The concerted digital push around ‘The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration’ drew from The Atlantic’s experience last year publishing another Coates cover story, ‘The Case for Reparations.’ That was also a multi-part piece accompanied online by photographs, original video, and interactive maps. . . .”

Short Takes

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