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Howard U. Mentor to Stay on Campus

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Outpouring Keeps Carol Dudley at ‘The Mecca’

The Root Closes In on BET.com:

Two Top the List of Most-Viewed Black Websites

Hill, ESPN Reportedly Agree on Settlement

In Death, McCain Wins Multicultural Praise

Boston Globe Names Leung Interim Opinion Editor

Reporter Reassigned After Wells Fargo Complains

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A 2013 story in the Howard University publication the Capstone said, “Carol Dudley has had such a profound influence on communications majors through the years that her office is filled with cards and letters of appreciation.” (Credit: Ceasar)

Outpouring Keeps Carol Dudley at ‘The Mecca’

Carol Y. Dudley reached agreement with Howard University’s president Wayne A.I. Frederick Monday to remain on campus after an outpouring from students and alumni protesting a decision to end her university career of more than 40 years “due to financial reasons,” in Dudley’s words.

Dudley, director of the Office of Career Development at Howard’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, posted on Facebook Monday night:

“I will be working out of the university Career Services Offices under the Office of the Provost. Dr. Frederick and Provost [Anthony K.] Wutoh very graciously met with me today and we finalized my transition to Career Services. I don’t want to leave the School of Communications but this option is good and I will see students and alumni in that office. It is still in the School of C building on the 2nd floor.

“I will forever be grateful for your beautiful words, your swift actions and your broad support. WE ARE HOWARD STRONG! The ghosts of Howard are smiling again…”

University spokeswoman Crystal Brown told Journal-isms earlier Monday, “As a matter of protocol, Howard University does not comment on personnel matters.”

In its first hour, Dudley’s Facebook announcement garnered 344 “likes,” 83 comments and 44 shares.

“Power of Bisons united,” one comment said, referring to the mascot of the university known to students as “the Mecca.”

Dudley has said that in her years at the university, she has helped change the lives of more than 6,000 young people. “It’s an honor to be rewarded for something I consider my life’s obligation,” she said in accepting a “beauty of diversity” award in 2016.

The BET.com homepage in January 2017

The Root Closes In on BET.com:

Two Top the List of Most-Viewed Black Websites

The Black Entertainment Television website remains the most-viewed targeting African Americans, but TheRoot.com, which delivers its news and opinion with a pronounced attitude and at times earthy street language, doubled its number of unique U.S. visitors in the latest survey compiled for Journal-isms by the comScore research firm.

BET.com had 11,917,000 unique visitors in June 2018, down from 14,708,000 in January 2017, a 19 percent decrease. The Root had 10,367,000 in June 2018, up 105 percent from the 5,067,000 it recorded in January 2017.

The two sites were far above the other black-oriented sites submitted to comScore by Journal-isms. However, totals for NBCBLK.com, HuffPost BlackVoices, Blavity.com and theShadowLeague.com were not available. “In order for us to collect data for a [site], they have to sign onto our tracker,” a spokesman explained. HuffPost BlackVoices had come in second in rankings published in January 2017.

BET spokesman Luis Defrank attributed the achievement of BET.com partly to its connection with the cable network.

“The continued success of BET.com is rooted in our overarching mission to entertain, engage, and empower African Americans,” Defrank messaged. “Supporting this mission, we have a team of digital creatives who are deeply passionate about Black culture, news, and entertainment. This team consistently delivers award winning editorial, original video, and shoulder content surrounding BET’s television and live events.

“From linear extras and exclusives surrounding the highly anticipated ‘The Bobby Brown Story’ and the ‘BET Awards’, to acclaimed digital originals like ‘Rate the Bars’ wherein respected emcees blindly rate the lyrics of other emcees, we super serve our fans with premium content they love, in new and innovative ways.”

Bobby Singh, head of BET Digital, said in the statement, “We are proud and thrilled that our content resonates so strongly, and we strive to expand our digital footprint and maintain our position as the prime destination for African American audiences.”

Danielle Belton

Danielle Belton has led the Root newsroom since May 2016, when she became managing editor. She was promoted to editor in chief in September.

“In January 2017, we at The Root decided to dedicate ourselves to being our most authentic selves and with that, we have seen quite an embrace from our community, our readers and many, many others, as evidenced by our overall growth, month after month,” Belton messaged Journal-isms.

“Our strategy of being [unapologetically] ourselves and [unapologetically] black with little filter and lots of authenticity, is allowing for us to not just report on our culture, but to be part of the culture. We’re not talking at or to the black community, nor are we speaking for the totality of them. Instead, we’re engaged in a conversation. We aren’t having monologues on race, politics and culture — The Root is a daily dialogue with black America.

“As for our growth, I have to give credit to our incredible staff of writers and editors, video producers and social media experts who embraced this vision of melding smart opinion with breaking news and a refreshingly blunt take on what is happening in our increasingly polarized world today. We work hard every day finding, writing, researching and reporting on stories that make a difference. It means a lot that the black community is responding by engaging in this conversation with us. We also owe thanks to Gizmodo Media Group and our parent company Univision, and their continued support of The Root, helping the site flourish greatly in these last few years.”

However, Gizmodo and Univision have both experienced financial difficulties in recent months, which have led to layoffs and cutbacks. Journal-isms, which had appeared on The Root since 2010, was cut effective June 30.eUnivision is disbanding its digital holdings — once seen as a lynchpin in the company’s IPO plans,” Natalie Jarvey reported on July 17 for the Hollywood Reporter, as Univision content chief Isaac Lee stepped down. “In early July, the company said it would explore a sale of the Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion. . . .”

The Undefeated, ESPN’s rendering of the intersection of sports, race and culture launched in May 2017, is also the subject of speculation.

Sports columnist Richard Deitsch tweeted Sunday, “Something to keep an eye on at ESPN: The future of @TheUndefeated. This was an important project to former President John Skipper — especially given the delays in getting it started and how hard Skipper worked to get @meridak [Kevin Merida], one of the newsroom leaders in the country.”

Others will be watching thegrio.com. Entertainment Studios, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Byron Allen, bought the Grio in 2016 from co-founders David A. Wilson and Dan Woolsey.

In October 2017, the black-owned operation announced that Amy DuBois Barnett, a former top editor at Ebony, Teen People and Honey magazines, had been named the Grio’s executive vice president, digital and chief content officer. She relaunched the site in January ” to give users a better overall experience and offer an improved platform for our advertising clients.”

Denver Blackwell, an associate of B. Scott, messaged this explanation for the 73 percent drop for LoveBScott.com: “Unlike our competitors, we don’t buy traffic or participate in any link sharing. Most of our organic traffic came from Facebook in 2017, however when Facebook changed their algorithm to deemphasize news links and combat the ‘fake news’ problem, our unique visitors declined.
“At the same time, our Instagram growth became extremely profitable so our overall brand strategy began to shift. We put less emphasis on getting people to the website and instead made Instagram (social) our primary focus.
“Our goal for the last year or so has been to engage and monetize people where they are, instead of driving them to the website. “

Here is the listing of websites submitted to comScore for ranking. The list is not intended to be comprehensive.

1. BET.com, 11,917,000 unique visitors in June 2018, down 19 percent from 14,708,000 in January 2017.
2. TheRoot.com, 10,367,000 in June 2018, up 105 percent from 5,067,000 in January 2017.
3. WorldStarHipHop.com, 4,456,000 in June 2018, up 8 percent from 4,116,000 in January 2017.
4. Essence.com, 3,746,000 in June 2018, down 21 percent from 4,720,000 in January 2017.
5. MadamNoire.com, 2,898,000 in June 2018, up 18 percent from 2,451,000 January 2017.

6. AtlantaBlackStar.com, 2,817,000 in June 2018, down 35 percent from 4,324,000 in January 2017.
7. Bossip.com, 2,284,000 in June 2018, down 10 percent from 2,530,000 in January 2017.
8. TheUndefeated.com, 2,049,000 in June 2018, down 44 percent from 3,650,000 in January 2017.
9. HelloBeautiful.com, 1,492,000 in June 2018, up 60 percent from 935,000 in January 2017.
10. TheGrio.com, 1,393,000 in June 2018, down 19 percent from 1,730,000 in January 2017.

11. NewsOne.com, 825,000 in June 2018, down 18 percent from 1,000,000 in January 2017.
12. BlackAmericaWeb.com, 715,000 in June 2018, down 12 percent from 814,000 in January 2017.
13. LoveBScott.com, 694,000 in June 2018, down 73 percent from 2,550,000 in January 2017.
14. Ebony.com, 540,000 in June 2018, down 29 percent from 755,000 in January 2017.
15. BlackEnterprise.com, 451,000 in June 2018, up 73 percent from 261,000 in January 2017.

16. BlackPlanet.com, 107,000 in June 2018, down 33 percent from 159,000 in January 2017.
17. EURWeb.com, 74,000 in June 2018, down 63 percent from 198,000 in January 2017.

MediaTakeOut.com had 933,000 unique visitors in January 2017, but a 2018 figure was not available.

Hill, ESPN Reportedly Agree on Settlement

“Jemele Hill, the Detroit native and former Free Press writer who drew the ire of some, including the president, will reportedly leave ESPN at the beginning of September,” Kirkland Crawford reported Sunday for the Detroit Free Press.

“James Miller, the longtime ESPN chronicler posted on Twitter Saturday night that Hill and ESPN have come to ‘an amicable’ buyout of her contract, reportedly a multi-million dollar deal, which goes into effect on this coming Saturday. . . .”

Bossip.com reported Monday, “BOSSIP can exclusively confirm that Hill will receive just shy of $6 million from ESPN to fulfill the multi-year deal she signed in 2016. Contrary to musty MAGA belief, Hill was not fired by ESPN, in fact, she asked to be released from her employment with the network shortly after the ESPY awards in July according to our source who is familiar with the negotiation. . . .”

However, ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said the network was “not commenting,” and neither was Hill nor fellow journalist Kelley L. Carter.

“Jemele and her long-time friend and now business partner, Kelley L. Carter, recently launched their production company, Lodge Freeway Media, and will be concentrating on future endeavors that speak in their honest and socially-conscious voice,” Bossip reported.

John McCain’s encounters with racial bigotry touched his family. Here, he holds his biracial grandson, also named John, son of Navy Lt. Jack McCain and Renee Swift McCain. When McCain was running for president in 2000, anonymous “push-pollers” smeared McCain over a little girl he and his wife had adopted from a Mother Theresa orphanage in Bangladesh. They called Republican voters across South Carolina, transforming Bridget into an illegitimate black baby.

In Death, McCain Wins Multicultural Praise

The Arizona Informant hadn’t gotten around to posting the news that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had died, but its publisher, Cloves Campbell III, made his views known in a news release Monday from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the black-press trade group of which Campbell is a former chairman.

“Senator John McCain will be remembered in the African American community of Arizona as a national statesman who grew and evolved particularly in his later years as an elected official who transcended partisan politics and who eventually did what he thought was the right thing to do rather than to be confined to political party loyalty. That is why he voted pivotally to save the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) at a time when most Republicans were voting to end the ACA,” Campbell said.

The outpouring seemed to encompass all ethnicities. On indianz.com, Richard Monette, a former chairman and chief executive officer of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, wrote Monday, “Senator John McCain’s passing has many of us wondering aloud whether the balance of America’s history will ever again produce such a giant spirit.”

In the Arizona Republic, columnist Linda Valdez wrote Friday, “[Y]es, I am among the journalists who felt McCain’s anger at a question he didn’t like. It’s a badge of honor to have been yelled at by John McCain way back when he was in the House.

“He matured. During his political career, he also showed more courage than most politicians. . . .”

In the Washington Post, Isaac Stanley-Becker also wrote Monday of McCain’s maturation.

“The candidate for the Republican nomination, who endured five years of torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp, came under criticism in February 2000 for using a racial epithet to describe his captors.

“It wasn’t a gaffe. He had used it before on the campaign trail, though the slur went mostly unreported by the news media. One notable exception was a September 1999 story in U.S. News & World Report by Roger Simon, in which the journalist wrote: “Strictly speaking, one does not say gooks anymore. It is simply not done. But John McCain says” it, he added, “and who is going to tell him not to?” Simon said the word frequently crossed the candidate’s lips, before voters and reporters alike. McCain had enlisted the epithet a dozen times in a first-person account of his imprisonment that appeared in Rolling Stone in May 1973. The derogatory term for East Asians was widely used by members of the U.S. military during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

“At first, McCain was unrepentant, claiming the right to recall his jailers as he wished.

“ ‘I was referring to my prison guards,’ McCain said, ‘and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.’ . . .”

Stanley-Becker also wrote, “Still, the language was incendiary, and it drew the condemnation of the Vietnamese government and of some Asian Americans in the United States — for whom the slur had racialized meaning that transcended McCain’s individual memory of suffering. . . .

“By the end of the month, McCain had offered a full-throated apology and pledged not to repeat the epithet.

“ ‘I will continue to condemn those who unfairly mistreated us,’ he said. ‘But out of respect to a great number of people whom I hold in very high regard, I will no longer use the term that has caused such discomfort. I deeply regret any pain I have caused.’

“He concluded, ‘I apologize and renounce all language that is bigoted and offensive.’ . . .”

Stanley-Becker also observed, “In a moment played on loop since the death of the war hero and two-time presidential aspirant, the 2008 Republican nominee rebuked a supporter in Minnesota for saying that she couldn’t trust his opponent, then-Sen. Barack Obama, because he was, in her factually challenged words, ‘an Arab.’ His rebuttal gained new traction a decade on as an example of McCain’s candor and decency, values captured in the name of his campaign bus, the ‘Straight Talk Express.’ . . .”

Boston Globe Names Leung Interim Opinion Editor

Shirley Leung

“Shirley Leung, a Boston Globe columnist who has explored topics ranging from business and politics to gender issues in the workplace, will become interim editorial page editor, replacing Ellen Clegg, who retired last week,” the Globe announced on Aug. 20.

“In a note to staff, Linda Pizzuti Henry, the Globe’s managing director, said Leung would serve as the leader of the editorial board for the next six months, beginning Aug. 27.

“ ‘Shirley has been a bold voice in Boston, writing an impactful, must-read, often counterintuitive column in our business section for the past five years,’ Henry wrote, adding that while she was reluctant to lose Leung’s column in the news pages, ‘I could not be more excited about this new role for her.’

“Henry indicated that Leung would serve in the role while the newspaper searches for a permanent editorial page editor. . . .

“Leung will be the 5th woman and the first person of color to hold the job in the Globe’s 142-year history. Her appointment came several days after more than 400 newspapers, in a push organized by the Globe’s editorial board, published editorials supporting the free press and denouncing President Trump’s attacks on the news media. . . .”

Reporter Reassigned After Wells Fargo Complains

Shahien Nasiripour (Credit: screen shot)

“A Bloomberg News reporter who covered Wells Fargo was reassigned earlier this year after the bank’s CEO called the news organization’s editor in chief and complained about the reporter, multiple people familiar with the matter told CNN,” Oliver Darcy reported Monday for CNN Money.

“The incident rocked part of the banking team, the people familiar with the matter said, and was a contributing factor in the departures of some of the unit’s veteran reporters.

“A Bloomberg News spokesperson said, ‘Bloomberg publishes 5,000 stories a day and, like every news organization, we get push back from the companies we cover. We make decisions about how we cover those companies based purely on what is best for our readers.’

“A spokesperson for Wells Fargo (WFC) declined to comment.

“Bloomberg’s primary source of revenue is selling subscriptions to the Bloomberg Terminal, which cost approximately $20,000 per year. Like most banks and companies in the financial sector, Wells Fargo is a significant client. If the bank were to pull subscriptions from the terminal, Bloomberg could lose millions of dollars in revenue.

“The chain of events was prompted by a story the reporter, Shahien Nasiripour, wrote in March. The story called Wells Fargo the ‘preferred financier for the U.S. gun industry’ and detailed the bank’s relationship with the National Rifle Association. . . .”

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