March 7, 2007
Mira Lowe to Ebony and Jet; John Gonzales to AP
Mira Lowe, Newsday's associate editor for recruitment, and John Gonzales, a federal courts reporter, have both resigned from the paper, Editor John Mancini told the staff on Tuesday, bringing to eight the number of journalists of color to leave the paper since December. In addition, Newsday reporter Herbert Lowe, though he has not resigned, said he would follow his wife to Chicago.
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Jason Miccolo Johnson/NABJ
Herbert and Mira Lowe, shown at the 2005 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Atlanta, are headed to Chicago. |
Lowe told Journal-isms her job would be to help Ebony and Jet "build an editing infrastructure. Right now they have a copy desk of one— and to elevate the quality of the editing so that it is relevant, timely and lively."
Monroe said in his memo, "Mira is a strong journalist and editor, as well as a veteran recruiter (she helped manage the Tribune Company's METPRO program for young editors). Her first day is March 26," Monroe wrote.
In addition to her Newsday work, Lowe has been active in the National Association of Black Journalists, especially during the 2003-2005 tenure of her husband as president. She was known then as the "first lady" of NABJ. Monroe was the association's vice president for print, and the three worked closely together.
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| John Gonzales |
"This is Mira's day," Herbert Lowe said when asked about his own plans. But, "obviously, I'm considering all of my options, and most important to me is the option I went for on Oct. 2, 1999, which was to spend the rest of my life with my wife, and I plan to be able to do that, and find work so I can continue to support her at the level she has been accustomed to."
He noted that he and his wife had both been featured in Ebony and Jet and that it was rare that subjects of the articles have a chance to work at the publications.
Many of the journalists who left the Long Island newspaper over the last two months cited cutbacks, diminished opportunities and uncertainty over the ownership of the Tribune Co. publication as reasons for bailing out. The six to leave previously were J. Jioni Palmer, Errol Cockfield, Wil Cruz, Walter Middlebrook, Ray Sanchez and Curtis Taylor.
"Those things caused me a great deal of concern as well," Gonzales said of the reasons the others cited, "and I hope the legacy of the paper is served well.
"The good thing about this is I'm leaving for the right reasons. I'm leaving for a job I would have taken in the best of times at Newsday."
Gonzales also said he hoped Newsday would continue to cover people of color in the circulation area. "Long Island is very diverse, and Long Island is a place where segregation exists." The paper will have "to consider how to cover this issue and how they invest in doing service to the complexities of it," Gonzales said.
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Hispanic Journalists Pull Out of Accrediting Group
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists voted on Saturday to "immediately" pull out of the major accrediting council for college journalism programs "in protest over their failure to vigorously apply the standards that would have been required for significant diversity gains in the 10 years of our membership."
The Asian American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association left the body last summer, saying the dues it required were too high. The Native American Journalists Association never joined, leaving only the National Association of Black Journalists among the so-called "diversity groups" as members.
Saundra Keyes, president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and Jackie Jones, who represents NABJ on the council, told Journal-isms on Wednesday they took exception to the argument that the council was not serious about diversity.
"With great respect for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the organization and the board, I'm astonished and saddened that this would be the reason," Keyes told Journal-isms. "There's no question that regardless of what organization we might" represent, "we're all disappointed that the growth and the progress are not what we want them to be." But she noted that the council successfully sought funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to produce a best-practices handbook on diversity for journalism programs, and that diversity had been incorporated into a number of accreditation criteria. She said that for herself and her two immediate predecessors, Jerry Ceppos and Bob Giles, diversity "is such a deeply held personal and professional value."
"I would much prefer to have the organizations at the table," Keyes said. "There are people who will remain interested in diversity questions. There are people who will still care; I hope they'll come back."
Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the University of Texas at Austin, who has most recently represented NAHJ on the council, said it was not she who recommended that NAHJ withdraw. But she said, "if you looked at the population of journalism professors, you do not see as much growth by minorities as you do by white women." The council itself is not very diverse, with herself the only Latina, she said. "I don't have the sense that there's a lot of energy behind this issue," she said.
In the 2005-06 academic year, in 18 accreditation visits, four schools were found out of compliance on the council's "diversity and inclusiveness" standard, according to the council's executive director, Susanne Shaw. Flunking one standard is usually not enough to deny accreditation.
"The sticking point is that the Council is not prescriptive," Jones of NABJ told Journal-isms via e-mail. "Programs are measured by whether they meet the standards and live up to what they say their programs do, but it is not the Council's place to tell a program specifically it must hire X number of faculty of color or how to structure syllabi to reflect diversity in the curriculum.
"It's true that the Council has struggled over whether to discipline programs that have failed the diversity standard repeatedly and, as many organizations have, has struggled with the expanded definition of diversity, which includes disabilities and sexual orientation. But the issue is front and center regularly during the Council's deliberations. It's not an ideal world, but I think the Council takes diversity very seriously."
Keyes said the body's finance committee is examining the dues structure that AAJA and NLGJA said they found onerous. AAJA's annual dues were $5,000.
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Dred Scott Lives On in a Florida Weekly
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| Jonathan Cunningham |
The decision has resonance for Jonathan Cunningham, African American music editor and columnist for the alternative weekly Broward-Palm Beach (Fla.) New Times, who calls his column "Dred Scott!"
"I picked the column name specifically because of how monumental that court decision was (and still is today), and because I live in a city called Plantation, Florida. (Go Figure)," Cunningham wrote to Journal-isms. "So I put the name Dred Scott! in print every week, so that it doesn't die out, and as a reminder that we Africans still have to fight for our freedom, journalistically and socially. It won't be handed to us easily."
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| Tony Ortega |
Cunningham, 26, was singled out by his editor, Tony Ortega, as a "budding superstar" when Journal-isms asked Ortega about diversity on Monday as he assumed the editorship of New York's Village Voice.
"You should also know that I have a head full of dreds and that plays into it as well," Cunningham added by e-mail. "It took me a long time to come up with a column name, but Dred Scott fits perfectly. The night I picked it, PBS was running a special on monumental Supreme Court decisions and after I saw it, I was like, Eureka! It seemed like the ancestors were speaking to me. I've known about DS forever, but I honestly feel honored to carry his name forward in 2007. Life is funny like that."
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More Details Emerge on Village Voice Meeting
More details were reported Wednesday about the fateful Feb. 28 staff meeting at which Village Voice editor David Blum insufficiently addressed staff concerns about diversity. He was fired two days later, and Voice owners announced on Monday that Tony Ortega was the new editor.
Rachel Sklar wrote Wednesday in the Huffington Post, that it "seems clear that Blum's response to complaints about the lack of staff diversity were perceived as 'defensive,' and that it was made worse when he responded to the one black staff member at the meeting, deputy managing editor Adamma Ince, who said she felt 'alone' (the two other black staff members were not present at the meeting).
"According to sources, Blum responded that there was only so much he could do in the face of an industry-wide shortage of qualified applicants, hotly competed over by many outlets with similarly vanilla staffing, and that journalism schools were overwhelmingly white, borne out by his own experience [at] Columbia, which was '98% white.' Some staffers felt his remarks reflected a narrow viewpoint. Some felt that particularly strongly. We do know that some sort of complaint was filed with the union following the meeting; we do know that it was expanded to include the dismissal of minority staffer Corina Zappia the next day; we don't know [its] current status."
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Writer Backs Charges Against Atlanta Paper
Elliot Jaspin of Cox News Service, who uncovered a 60-year pattern of expelling African Americans from communities around the country and accused the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of trying to undermine his series about it, has found support for his argument in the Atlanta alternative newspaper Creative Loafing. |
| Book is based on Elliot Jaspin's newspaper series |
In the issue dated Wednesday, senior editor John F. Sugg, who once worked at the Journal-Constitution, wrote: "The AJC, according to Jaspin, has failed to fully report Forsyth's history," a reference to Forsyth County, which is in the paper's circulation area. "A search of the newspaper's archives backs that up."
Sugg agreed with Jaspin that for years, the daily soft-pedaled the "racial cleansing" that took place. "Only recently has the tune changed at the AJC. On Jan. 14 — in an article tucked away far inside the newspaper on page 11D — the daily newspaper flatly declared, 'Virtually all blacks were driven out of Forsyth County,' and 'threats from whites forced blacks to flee the county.
". . . That's what makes Jaspin's book so special," Sugg wrote of "Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America," which builds upon the four-part "Leave or Die" series Jaspin wrote last year. "Rarely, very rarely, do media consumers get a chance to pry open the newsroom lid and watch journalists squirm. Jaspin has done just that. The last chapter of 'Buried in the Bitter Waters' is an exquisitely detailed chronicle of how the AJC tried to torpedo his work."
In an earlier reaction to Jaspin's book, Atlanta magazine blogger Doug Monroe defended the Journal-Constitution, saying, "As somebody who worked at the AJC for 13 years, I find Jaspin's accusations extremely difficult to believe. If anything, the paper has been obsessed with race."
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Latino, Black Voices Available for "Sunshine Week"
"Latin American Elites Voice Support for Openness, but Word and Deed Must Coincide," by Sam Terilli, Sallie Hughes and Luis López Preciado of the University of Miami; "The People Have a Right to Know," by Mirta Ojito of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and "An Opportunity to Influence Change" By Eleanor Stocks, president and founder of the Greater Dayton African American Chamber of Commerce are three of the opinon pieces available to news organizations as they prepare to commemorate next week's "Sunshine Week."The week is a national initiative intended to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. It is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Resources are also available in Spanish.
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Cherokee Freedmen Challenge Vote to Oust Them
"Descendants of people the Cherokee once owned as slaves said they will challenge a special election that kicked them out of the tribe," Justin Juozapavicius wrote Wednesday for the Associated Press. |
| Kenneth Cooper |
"They also promised to lobby the U.S. government to cut federal ties to tribe, a move that could cost the Cherokee Nation millions of dollars.
". . . One Cherokee Nation official called those threats a scare tactic brought by people more interested in seeing the Cherokee Nation lose funding than seeing the will of the people done."
As reported on Monday, at least two black journalists, Sam Ford of Washington's WJLA-TV and Kenneth Cooper, freelance writer and former national editor at the Boston Globe, are descendants of the black people known as Cherokee Freedmen.
Cooper told his story in a column for Thursday's editions of Boston's Bay State Banner:
"Just like the dispute over admitting the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson's family into the association of his white descendants, the Cherokee referendum reflects a national failure to resolve the central trauma in American history: slavery, which in the 21st century still orders relations, inflames emotions and colors attitudes.
"Cherokees are once again mimicking bad American practice, against their own tradition, just as they did by owning slaves. Cherokees believe any degree of Cherokee blood is enough to make you one, that is, unless you were thought to be black. White society's old 'one-drop' rule apparently rules in that case."
- Steve Hammons, American Chronicle: Who
is a Cherokee? Many Americans have Indians in the family tree
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Short Takes
- Ben da la Cruz of washingtonpost.com won first prize in
the National Press Photographers Association's online photography contest for
"Being
a Black Man: Off the Cuff Being Black," part of a series last year in the Washington
Post.
- Members of the National Association of Black Journalists were among the
winners
in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors' writing and section contests,
according to Gregory Lee, who chairs the NABJ Sports Task
Force. They include columnist Milo Bryant of the Colorado
Springs Gazette; Jeff Martin, Wichita (Kan.) Eagle; Anwar
Richardson, Tampa (Fla.) Tribune; Lonnie White,
Los Angeles Times; Tim Smith, New York Daily News, part of
a project team; Michael Lee of the Washington Post, part
of an investigative team, and Gregory Lee, who shared in an award to the Boston Globe,
where he is senior assistant sports editor.
- Alison Bethel, who left her job as Detroit News Washington
bureau chief less than a year ago to become executive editor of the Washington-based
weekly Legal Times, its No. 2 job, is changing jobs again. "I'm moving to Nassau to be the managing editor of The Nassau Guardian.
The managing editor is the top editorial position at Caribbean and British
papers," she told Journal-isms on Wednesday. She leaves Legal Times March 30. "This kind of fell into my lap and turned out to be a
proposition I just couldn’t refuse. And the bottom line is I get to run my
own paper and look at the ocean every morning and I am only 45 minutes via
plane from my family" in Miami, she added later, "whom I haven’t lived that close to in 22 years!"
- "Editor Graydon Carter has chosen Vanity Fair's first-ever
guest editor, naming Bono to edit the magazine's Africa Issue,
which he is doing on behalf of (RED),"
a group that helps fight AIDS in Africa, Vanity Fair announced on Tuesday.
"As guest editor, I want Africa to appear an adventure, not a burden, and
put faces and personalities to the statistics we read elsewhere," Bono said
of the July issue. "It will be a very nuanced look at Africa.
We'll be telling great stories about Africa's successes and turnarounds. We
certainly won't ignore the continent's problems — but we'll cover African
music, art, and literature. We want to really surprise people in a positive
way," he said in the release.
- "An Evansville TV forecaster accused of walking out of a local department
store with clothes she had not paid for has requested an investigation into
the incident by the NAACP." Gavin Lesnick reported
Saturday in the Evansville (Ind.) Courier-Press, referring to Kami
Boyd, an on-air meteorologist for WFIE-TV, an NBC affiliate.
- "Wall Street Journal staff reporter Lee Hawkins has been
assigned to work as an on-air contributor at CNBC Television as part of the
Journal's content sharing agreement with the network. Mr. Hawkins will remain
an employee of the Journal," a news
release said on Monday.
- Bob Johnson, creator of Black Entertainment Television,
is "founder of what I consider the worst thing to happen to black girls since
the straightening comb and hair weave," Barry Saunders, columnist
for the Raleigh News & Observer, wrote
on Friday. Johnson spoke at the University of North Carolina business school.
"Some people — OK, maybe just me — compare the insidious effects
of Johnson's 'Booties Every Time' (as cartoonist Aaron McGruder
so aptly dubbed it) network to electronic crack," Saunders wrote.
- The International Federation of Journalists protested Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe's public linking of a newspaper editor
with the guerrilla group FARC. The president's attack on Carlos Lozano,
editor of the weekly VOZ, "put the journalist's life at risk from reprisals
by extremists," the group said
on Thursday.
- The exhibit "Black Ink," which opened in 2005 at the T.T. Wentworth
Jr. Florida State Museum in downtown Pensacola, traces the history
of the black press in Florida and in Pensacola, the Pensacola News-Journal
reported
last week.
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