Updated January 20

For Decades, a Go-to Person on Inclusion Efforts

Visiting Press Groups Alarmed by Climate in U.S.

Washington Post Sets Out to Find ‘What Unites Us’

Post-Gazette Won’t Run Dissents From Newsroom

‘Is This Norway?’ Asks Member of the Twitterverse

In U.S., Supremacists Are the Extremists to Watch

Short Takes

For Decades, a Go-to Person on Inclusion Efforts

Walterene Swanston-NuevaEspana, a decades-long champion of diversity in the news media as a former print and broadcast journalist and journalism association executive, died Friday at a Fairfax County, Va., hospital in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. She was 74 and suffered a massive heart attack a week ago, said friend and fellow journalist Wanda Lloyd.

“Walt was one of the sweetest, most gentle souls, and someone who was dedicated to the success of every organization for which she worked, every project she led and every young journalist who needed her help,” messaged Lloyd.

“Over the years I traveled with Walt around the country and across the ocean, attending conferences for NABJ, AAJA, NAHJ and to many other meetings where we shared our passion for journalism. Now she is gone and journalism has lost one of its most dedicated professionals.”

The references are to the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

She had worked with all of them, as well as with Unity: Journalists for Diversity, the collaboration that consists of AAJA, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. She was Unity’s interim executive director from 2012 to 2014, having previously been executive director of Unity: Journalists of Color, which included AAJA, NABJ, NAHJ and NAJA, and spearheaded the Unity ’94 and Unity ’99 conventions.  She had also been director of diversity management at NPR, a consultant for the American Society of News Editors and from 1993 to 1995, executive director of NABJ.

In addition,  she worked for the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation,  directing the organization’s diversity, educational and international programs; for the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, where she directed diversity programs; and for Knight-Ridder Inc., where she was a consultant.

NPR host Michel Martin remembers Swanston’s time at that network. “From the minute I set foot in the door at NPR, Walt was a source of friendship and wise counsel,”Martin said by email. “And I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with a more diverse network of friends, colleagues, and mentees. Diversity was something she did, it was what she was, a way of life.  She was a walking, talking example of how it can and should be done.”

Keith Woods, who succeeded her as diversity executive at NPR, said by email Saturday, “Walt was one of the most resilient, persistent, and, above all, empathetic people I’ve known. She believed deeply in the work of diversity, and so many of us who have done this work found themselves at one time or another following in her path. Walt was a true champion, and journalism is particularly poorer with her passing.

“I knew Walt for more than 20 years. She had a rough time at NPR and struggled to make progress in the newsroom. Still, she strongly encouraged me to follow in her footsteps and offered herself as a coach because, above all, the work she did was out of love and passion. No organization or obstacle ever beat her. I’m heartbroken to have lost her.”

NuevaEspana was known mostly to fellow journalists as Walt Swanston before she remarried in 2015, after the 2006 death of her first husband, public relations executive David Swanston. 

She was hospitalized on Jan. 12 and died in the early hours of Jan. 19, according to her daughter, Rachel Swanston Breegle.

The former Walterene Jackson was born in Clinton, La., and attended segregated schools there before she, her sister Bettye Jackson and brothers Raphael “Ray” Jackson and Ruffin Lane “Buzz” Jackson were put on trains for Oakland, Calif., where they lived with an aunt and uncle so they could attend integrated schools.

When presented with the Ida B. Wells Award from NABJ in 2011, she thanked her parents for enabling her and her siblings to leave Louisiana. “None of the children ever went home to live there again,” she told the NABJ audience. Still, she regretted that the move broke up her family,

At her alma mater, San Francisco State University, she met David Swanston, and as a young journalist, worked at the  San Francisco Examiner and the old Washington Star. Later she was a copy editor and contributor to the Washington Post’s Style, weeklies and real estate sections; a reporter and producer at Washington public television station WETA and executive editor at WUSA-TV, the Gannett-owned CBS affiliate.

But it was as a diversity champion that she was best known. For more than 25 years, she worked with newspapers and television and radio stations to recruit, promote, train and retain people of color and women.

In accepting the Wells Award in 2011, she said, “I have left behind a number of people in news operations around the country whose voices have been heard for the first time.”

She was a member of the strategy committee for Journal-isms Inc., the nonprofit organization created to nurture Journal-isms, and successfully nominated this columnist for the Wells Award two years after she had won it herself.

Since 1999, she had been one of four organizers of the Journal-isms Roundtable, a monthly gathering of Washington journalists who discuss issues of race and journalism. The others are Paul Delaney, Betty Anne Williams and this columnist.

Swanston-NuevaEspana lived in Fairfax County and in addition to her daughter, is survived by a son, Matthew Swanston, four grandchildren and her sister, Bettye Snowden, of California. Her husband, Ray NuevaEspana, died in 2016.

The family is asking for privacy over the next few days. A memorial service will be planned in a few weeks, to give friends and family time to make travel arrangements, Breegle said.

• Debbie Elliott, NPR: Before Desegregation: The Education Migration: In Difficult Choice, Children Sent Away to Integrated Schools (Dec. 9, 2003)
• YouTube: 2011 NABJ Ida B. Wells Award Winner Walterene Swanston Video Profile with Michel Martin, Alicia Shepard and Keith Woods (video)

Visiting Press Groups Alarmed by Climate in U.S.

“An already adverse environment for journalists in the Midwestern United States has worsened in the year since President Trump’s inauguration, an international group of media watchdogs concluded after traveling to the state of Missouri. The group also met with journalists from Illinois and Wisconsin,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

“The fact-finding mission this week concluded in St. Louis, where journalists were indiscriminately arrested in 2014 and 2017 during protests in response to police shootings in the city and its suburb, Ferguson. The group also met with journalists from the city of Columbia and the capital, Jefferson City, as well as representatives of the Missouri Press Association and national media groups headquartered at the Missouri School of Journalism.

“The group, which included leaders of the Committee to Protect Journalists, IFEX, ARTICLE 19, and the International Press Institute, found that local public officials have embraced Trump’s rhetoric toward the media and bypassed the press in favor of social media. A Wisconsin sheriff used expletives to deny an interview. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens has called the media ‘fake news,’ refused interviews, and directed his staff to use software that immediately erases mobile chats. . . .”

Washington Post Sets Out to Find ‘What Unites Us’

“In the year since President Trump’s inauguration, Washington Post photographers set out to explore what unites Americans, through portraiture and audio interviews,” the Post wrote on Wednesday.

“What values and beliefs are shared in a country often described as polarized? In 102 conversations, two in each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., we asked people to contemplate what it means to be American in this time of upheaval and rapid change.

“Together, their interviews reflect the core beliefs and values that connect Americans to their fellow countrymen and women. And they reveal commonalities and convictions that bridge geography, gender, occupation, race or religion — an indication that perhaps what unites Americans to one another is as powerful as what divides them. There were seven unifying themes reflected most prominently. They represent a provocative and surprising atlas of the country’s values — one that paints a complex picture of what it means to be American at this moment in history. . . . ”

The Post also wrote, “We are a nation of immigrants and are united by our pride in that fact. Fifty people . . . talked about the concept of America as a melting pot and beacon of hope. They embrace people’s disparate backgrounds and experiences and believe most Americans value that variety. Eleven said the country’s diversity is the most important bond between its people — and its chief source of strength . . .  Immigrants, many said, bring an economic and cultural vitality to America that keeps it strong. . . .”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publisher hangs on Donald Trump’s jet in a ‘more than memorable’ experience. https://t.co/nrzwkDeSRK pic.twitter.com/5jzm21xkLu

— Pittsburgh City Paper (@PGHCityPaper) September 22, 2016

Post-Gazette Won’t Run Dissents From Newsroom

“Earlier this week, two letters to the editor were sent to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Colin Deppen wrote Thursday for the Incline, sibling site of Billy Penn in Philadelphia.

“Both included forceful and intimate condemnations of an editorial that ran in the paper Monday.

“Neither will appear in the more than 100,000 copies of the paper sold throughout the city today or any day, for that matter.

“That’s because Publisher and Editor-in-Chief John R. Block won’t allow it.

“ ‘It’s simply that the editor-in-chief (Block) declined to publish them. He didn’t provide an explanation. He just said “no.” I’m not privy to the decision-making process on that,’ John Allison, editor of the Post-Gazette’s editorial page and a member of its editorial board, told The Incline on Wednesday.

“Block’s decision not to run the letters to the editor, one submitted by the union representing more than 150 of the paper’s current newsroom employees and one submitted by more than two dozen former Post-Gazette employees, marked the latest chapter in an ongoing and increasingly public rift between the paper’s ownership and the paper’s staff.

“Both letters to the editor were highly critical of Block’s decision to run an editorial on Martin Luther King Jr. Day titled ‘Reason as racism…’ The editorial compared racism to McCarthyism and included the line, ‘We need to confine the word “racist” to people like Bull Connor and Dylann Roof.’ . . .”

On Thursday, the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis published the Post-Gazette editorial as well as a rebuttal from the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

• Indira Lakshmanan, Poynter Institute: “Abomination:” Pittsburgh publisher’s editorial inflames newsroom, readers
• Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: MLK’s message today — resistance with loving defiance

Here is the entire @axios team on our one year anniversary! pic.twitter.com/LAF4CGP14P

— Roy Schwartz

(@roylschwartz) January 18, 2018

‘Is This Norway?’ Asks Member of the Twitterverse

This first-anniversary tweet from the media startup Axios, founded by Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei “with plans to upend the way news organizations deliver stories and advertising,” as the Wall Street Journal wrote in November, was greeted Thursday by the Twitter equivalent of catcalls.

“Is this Norway?” asked the Orla Hutchinson account. “Norway has more brown skin than that…” replied the Kevin Sinclair account. “Maybe it’s Mar-A-Lago,” suggested Sjarif Goldstein’s account. The account of activist Deray McKesson tweeted Friday, “I found the one black person. Can you?”

The “About” page of the Axios site indicates there is more diversity than appears in the photograph, but the site did not respond Friday to an emailed question sent to the designated “news” address.

“Media diversity is a worthy goal, and can be achieved if organizations work consciously towards it,” HuffPost’s Jamil Smith tweeted. “But we can’t wait for them to get it. Every time I see a photo like this, I’m reminded that we need our own platforms.”

In U.S., Supremacists Are the Extremists to Watch

“The number of white supremacist murders in the United States more than doubled in 2017 compared to the previous year, far surpassing murders committed by domestic Islamic extremists and making 2017 the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence since 1970,” the Anti-Defamation League reported on Wednesday.

“In its annual assessment of extremist-related killings, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017, up dramatically from 20 percent in 2016.

“White supremacists were directly responsible for 18 of the total 34 extremist-related murders in 2017, according to the new ADL report, Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017. A total of nine deaths were linked to Islamic extremists.

“The most recent ADL data shows that over the last decade a total of 71 percent of all fatalities have been linked to domestic right-wing extremists, while 26 percent of the killings were committed by Islamic extremists. The other 3 percent of deaths were carried out by extremists not falling into either category. . . .”

Short Takes

• “One of the co-founders of Vice Media attacked New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (D) for his impassioned questioning of Homeland Security Secretary [Kirstjen Nielsen] on Tuesday, calling the lawmaker ‘Sambo,’ and saying he was performing for white people,” Tom Boggioni wrote Friday for Raw Story. “In a video posted to YouTube by CRTV — and flagged by Right Wing Watch — controversial commentator Gavin McInnes used inflammatory language to describe the black Democrat. . . .”
• “KNBC reporter and anchor Mekahlo Medina has been named co-anchor of the weekend editions of Today in LA.,” Chris Ariens reported Thursday for TVSpy. “Medina had been interim anchor for the last year, but was promoted to the job by news director Todd Mokhtari last week. . . .” Medina is immediate past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
• “The stunning Jan. 15 New Yorker cover of Martin Luther King Jr. linking arms with athlete-activists Colin Kaepernick and Michael Bennett has elicited a lot of strong responses, including both thunderous praise and biting criticism,” Lois Nam wrote Monday for the Undefeated. “We asked the artist Mark Ulriksen, who has been a freelance illustrator for The New Yorker since 1994, to walk us through the making of the cover, and he shared his creative process with us, which included his sketches from conception to completion. . . .”
• “Her name may not be recognized nationwide, but Val Zavala has been a well-known fixture in Los Angeles television for the past three decades, as a reporter, anchor and executive producer of award-winning shows ‘SoCal Connected,’ ‘Life & Times’ and public affairs programs,” Veronica Villafañe wrote Friday for her Media Moves site. “But after 30 years at KCET, the multi-Emmy award-winning journalist has decided to retire, leaving her role as anchor and VP of News & Public Affairs. . . .”
• “Newsroom layoffs have begun at The Florida Times-Union, which signaled plans to downsize last month with the decision to stop printing the daily newspaper in Jacksonville,” Garrett Pelican reported Thursday for WJXT-TV in Jacksonville. “Employees learned of the layoffs Thursday morning. They include four reporters, two members of the photo staff, one editor, one designer and two members of the clerical staff, a staffer reported. . . .” Tom Burton added Thursday for the National Press Photographers Association, “Layoffs today at The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville have reduced its photo staff to just two staff photographers for a daily newspaper in one of the largest cities in Florida. . . .”
• “In a hearing in Baltimore City Circuit Court today, a judge threw out Demetrius Smith’s conviction for a shooting he has long insisted he did not commit and chastised the prosecutor in the case for making several misrepresentations to the court,” Megan Rose wrote Thursday for ProPublica. Last year, after ProPublica chronicled Smith’s saga, Baltimore prosecutor Richard Gibson “acknowledged his error, and Smith went back to court to seek the sentence modification that would wipe away the shooting conviction. . . .”
• “Armstrong Williams, a conservative political commentator and entrepreneur whose companies hold the licenses for seven television stations, told CTFN that he intends to buy five local TV stations from Sinclair Broadcast Group if the U.S. Justice Department requires Sinclair to divest stations in conjunction with Sinclair’s pending $3.9 billion merger with Tribune Media,” Robert W. Welkos reported Tuesday for CTFN, a Westport, Conn.-based financial news outlet.
• Ross Levinsohn, the CEO and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, “is on an unpaid leave while under investigation by the paper’s parent company, Tronc, following an NPR report about what it said was ‘questionable behavior’ in his past,” Brian Stelter reported Friday for CNNMoney.
• “Employees at the Los Angeles Times have voted to unionize (paywall), a historic shift for a publication long resistant to organized labor that will likely escalate rising tensions between newsroom workers and management,” Benjamin Mullin reported Friday for the Wall Street Journal. “The vote to join the NewsGuild-CWA union passed with 248 workers in favor versus 44 against, the NewsGuild said Friday. . . .”
• “Loyal readers of the New York Times — a reliable source of editorial invective and fault-finding reportage concerning the 45th president (‘Trump Is a Racist. Period,’ blared the headline over a recent Charles M. Blow column) — were startled, and in some cases outraged, to turn to the Times’ Opinion page Thursday morning and discover that it was filled entirely by letters from Donald Trump fans, replete with flattering photos of the authors,” Lloyd Grove wrote Thursday for the Daily Beast. The Times followed up with letters from readers who objected to the Times effort.
• “Zachary Kiesch is joining ABC News as a correspondent based in New York,” Chris Ariens reported Wednesday for TVNewser. “Kiesch joins from WNYW, the Fox-owned station in New York City. Before FOX 5, Kiesch was a general assignment reporter at NBC station WRC in Washington. . . .”
• “The strategic cafeteria table-esque segregation of Black press on red carpets is one of many micro-aggressions we face as Black journalists,” Keyaira Kelly wrote for Hello Beautiful. “And while being placed at the tail-end of a carpet is more indicative of the predominately White media system and its value assessment of Black press, these oversights are even more hurtful when they come from your own people. The fact is, too many of our Black celebrities are simply not supporting us. . . .” (video)
• “The $1 billion terminal project for Kansas City International Airport has revealed some uncomfortable truths about the lack of diversity in many local labor unions,” the Kansas City Star editorialized on Wednesday. “Labor leaders argue that this should be a ‘100 percent union job,’ and minority leaders want to make sure that Edgemoor, the developer, makes good on its pledge to ensure at least 35 percent participation for women- and minority-owned businesses. . . .” It added, the “reality is that this can’t be both an all-union project and include 35 percent minority- and women-owned firms. The latter should be a priority. . . .”
• Former Missouri Republican Party chairman and all-around controversy magnet Ed Martin has been fired from his gig on CNN as Donald Trump’s go-to defender, Martin confirmed Thursday,” Kevin McDermott reported Friday for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “. . . . he hasn’t appeared on the network since mid-December, when, on his radio show after a contentious CNN show, he referred to African Americans who were on the CNN panel with him as ‘black racists.’ . . .”
• The Tampa Bay Times praised police Friday for staging a ceremony to thank those who helped in the investigation that led to an arrest Nov. 28. Four “seemingly random killings within a one-square mile area terrorized the neighborhood for 51 long days last fall. . . . Three victims were African Americans. Tampa police placed relations at risk in years past by pulling over people in African-American neighborhoods simply for riding bicycles — a ‘stop-and-frisk’ style approach that positioned officers as people who harass without reason rather than as trusted partners in fighting crime. That image, by all accounts, seems to be changing, helped by new bonds forged during the investigation. . . .”

• 

  Organizers of the memorial service for civil rights journalist Simeon Booker, scheduled for Jan. 29 at 10 a.m. at Washington’s National Cathedral, are asking men to wear bow ties as a tribute to Booker. He died Dec. 10 at 99.

• “In this week’s podcast, we go deep into what we’re calling Racial Impostor Syndrome,” defined by one listener as feeling “like fakes,” Leah Donnella reported Wednesday for NPR’s “Code Switch.” “. . . We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. . . .”
• “Hurricane María Exposes Problems Within Puerto Rico’s Solar Panel Industry,” headlined a story Tuesday by Eliván Martínez Mercado of the Center for Investigative Journalism, concluding a 10-article collaboration between “Latino USA,” Latino Rebels and the center. They produced original bilingual stories about Puerto Rico after the hurricane. Julio Ricardo Varela of Futuro Media Group, which produces “Latino USA,” tweeted on Thursday, “We won’t stop telling the stories from #PuertoRico, but just needed to list these stories because @cpipr team is an exceptional group of journalists, and was honored to help them publish English versions of their reporting. . . .”
• “Advocates for an award-winning journalist trying to win asylum in the United States because he says he received death threats in Mexico accused U.S. immigration officials Friday of unjustly detaining him based on a disputed 1999 incident,” Nomaan Merchant reported for the Associated Press. “An attorney for Emilio Gutierrez Soto said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are trying to discredit the journalist, who in October accepted the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award from the National Press Club in Washington on behalf of Mexico’s journalists. . . .”
• “On January 8, El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper, published a opinion piece by Wilda Rodríguez called, ‘¿Qué quiere ‘el judío’ con la colonia?’ (‘What does “the Jew” want with the colony?’),” Latino Rebels reported Thursday. “The piece (which is no longer on END’s site) was widely condemned by Puerto Ricans on the island as well as organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.”
• “The United States has condemned Sudan’s arbitrary detention of journalists after reporters from the French news agency (AFP) and Reuters were arrested covering a street protest Friday,” the Voice of America reported Saturday. “. . . Abdelmoneim Abu Idris Ali, 51, of AFP and at least two other journalists, one a Reuters Sudanese stringer, were taken away by authorities Wednesday as they reported on a demonstration against rising food prices. . . .”

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View previous columns (after Feb. 13, 2016).

• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2017 — Where Will They Take Us in the Year Ahead?
• An advocate for diversity in the media is still pressing for representation, (Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2017)
• Morgan Global Journalism Review: Journal-isms Journeys On (Aug. 31, 2017)
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2016
• Book Notes: 16 Writers Dish About ‘Chelle,’ the First Lady
• Book Notes: From Coretta to Barack, and in Search of the Godfather
• Journal-isms’ Richard Prince Wants Your Ideas (FishbowlDC, Feb. 26, 2016)
• “JOURNAL-ISMS” IS LATEST TO BEAR BRUNT OF INDUSTRY’S ECONOMIC WOES (Feb. 19, 2016)
• Richard Prince with Charlayne Hunter-Gault,“PBS NewsHour,” “What stagnant diversity means for America’s newsrooms” (Dec. 15, 2015)
• Book Notes: Journalists Follow Their Passions
• Book Notes: Journalists Who Rocked Their World
• Book Notes: Hands Up! Read This!
• Book Notes: New Cosby Bio Looks Like a Best-Seller
• Journo-diversity advocate turns attention to Ezra Klein project (Erik Wemple, Washington Post, March 5, 2014)
• Book Notes: “Love, Peace and Soul!” And More
• Book Notes: Book Notes: Soothing the Senses, Shocking the Conscience
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2015
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2014
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2013
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2012
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2011
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2010
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2009
• Diversity’s Greatest Hits, 2008
• Book Notes: Books to Ring In the New Year
• Book Notes: In-Your-Face Holiday Reads
• Fishbowl Interview With the Fresh Prince of D.C. (Oct. 26, 2012)
• NABJ to Honor Columnist Richard Prince With Ida B. Wells Award (Oct. 11, 2012)
• So What Do You Do, Richard Prince, Columnist for the Maynard Institute? (Richard Horgan, FishbowlLA, Aug. 22, 2012)
• Book Notes: Who Am I? What’s Race Got to Do With It?: Journalists Explore Identity
• Book Notes: Catching Up With Books for the Fall
• Richard Prince Helps Journalists Set High Bar (Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com, 2011)
• Book Notes: 10 Ways to Turn Pages This Summer
• Book Notes: 7 for Serious Spring Reading
• Book Notes: 7 Candidates for the Journalist’s Library
• Book Notes: 9 That Add Heft to the Bookshelf
• Five Minutes With Richard Prince (Newspaper Association of America, 2005)
• ‘Journal-isms’ That Engage and Inform Diverse Audiences (Q&A with Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter Institute, 2008)