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How To Find Black
Journalists
By Ariel Hart
News organizations are forever straining to find African-American new hires. But if they really want to make a difference, here's an idea: rather than fight over the cream of a scarce crop, why not seed the ground?
Student-run newspapers at many historically black colleges and universities are in a sorry state. Free-speech concerns abound, especially where journalism advisers aren't journalists. On average, according to preliminary figures from a study paid for by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, these papers run only monthly. None runs daily. And at a quarter of the schools studied, including the prestigious Tuskegee University, there is no student-run paper at all.
The study's author, journalism professor Reginald Owens of Louisiana Tech University, says funding shortages and fear of unfair coverage play into a cycle that dooms what could be a prime source of African-American journalists. Black colleges sometimes keep their student press on a short leash because administrators fear critical coverage by the mainstream (and mostly white) press, and do not want to provide a source of stories. And student journalists at predominantly black colleges report censorship problems proportionally more often than those at majority-white colleges of similar size, according to Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which provides legal advice to student newspapers.
Cherie Whitfield, a communications student at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, thinks advisers want to quash "anything critical to their administration or to the school." Last year Whitfield tried to start a paper through the communications department. The department's director admits he told Whitfield she should write only positive stories to get the support of the administration. Then Whitfield learned that the school already had a newspaper, The Shaw Journal, which this year will be published more than twice a year for the first time in the last five years. "I had no idea," Whitfield says. The university's public relations officer is among its advisers.
Pearl Stewart, who advises ailing college papers as "roving journalist" for the Black College Communication Association, notes that the general funding crunch at black colleges affects the quality of their student papers. According to an analysis of four-year colleges by the National Center for Education Statistics, per-student endowment at black colleges averages some $3,500; at other schools about $12,760.
Filling in the money gap for student-run newspapers at predominantly black colleges is not on many news organizations' radar screens, however desperate those organizations are for minority hires. "It is impossible for me to go to a college that doesn't have a program and get them to start a program," says Joe Grimm, a recruiting officer at the Detroit Free Press.
Still, a very few organizations have focused some of their diversity development on building quality programs that can develop student journalists. The Freedom Forum funds the Black College Communication Association and Pearl Stewart's "roving." The Scripps-Howard Foundation has committed an initial $2.3 million toward building a top journalism and communications program at historically black Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia.
Some black-college papers have shown what can happen when a school supports its press. The Campus Echo, in North Carolina Central University, has doubled in size and staff size since Bruce dePyssler came on as adviser last summer. The Echo is a hard-hitting monthly with a professional look and a $40,000 budget.
NCCU's chancellor, former civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers, praises the Echo. "Even if stories are critical," Chambers says, "it markets the university by showing people that we are a believer in free speech."
And the Echo is critical. After Chambers criticized NCCU cheerleaders' outfits, the Echo printed a cartoon showing the chancellor in a miniskirt. The student who drew that cartoon, Echo photo editor Rashaun Rucker, has a photography internship this summer at the Winston-Salem Journal. He knows he owes the job to his work at the Echo. "That's the first thing they asked," he says, " 'Do you have previous experience? Even a college paper is fine.'"
Would that more students -- and more newsrooms -- were so lucky.
Hart is research assistant to the dean at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
TECHNOLOGY CORNER: SMOOTHER SEARCHING
By Sreenath Sreenivasan
Keeping track of journalistically useful Web sites is not easy. Here are two suggestions for improving your searching. Neither is perfect, but they're free.
Google.com
There are search engines and then there is Google. If you are tired of results that say "8,374 pages found," try the search engine that relies on a hidden "voting" system to narrow your choices. Google provides three options: one, a traditional search with several sets of results; two, a directory search, similar to Yahoo!; and three, an "I'm feeling lucky" search, which takes you directly to the one Web page that Google's software calculates most people are looking for. Try it with "American Cancer Society" -- the "lucky" option will take you right to cancer.org, the society's site.
About.com
Once known as the Mining Company, this site stands out because of its use of human "guides" -- experts that show you around a particular topic.
Some 700 guides tackle 50,000 subjects -- from action-figure collecting to zoos. For journalists new to a topic or looking for information on deadline, a guide's page can highlight helpful sites and suggest further reading. The guide for U.S. newspapers, for example, is an editor with fifteen years' experience.
Sreenivasan (sree@sree.net) teaches new media at Columbia and "Improving Your Surfing" seminars around the country.
PRIVATE GUNS, PUBLIC RECORDS
By Bear Jack Gebhardt
Back in July 1999, Dave Greiling, executive editor of the Fort Collins Coloradoan, published the names of the 263 people in Larimer County who had recently been granted "concealed carry" gun permits. Not surprisingly, this stirred the ire of the state's gun faithful, including that of a state legislator who introduced a bill prohibiting any future such disclosures in the state. In February, as the bill was waltzing its way through the Colorado legislature, Greiling published another 344 names. This time he stirred not only local ire but also that of Rush Limbaugh and a vocal segment of the nation's gun lobby. They complained all over the Internet, with at least one Web site publishing the names, home addresses, and phone numbers for Greiling, his publisher, and other executives of the Coloradoan, a Gannett daily with a weekday circulation of 28,000.
But until the law changes, he'd do it again. The decision to publish the names, Greiling says, didn't come from simply looking around for something to print on a slow news day. A new county sheriff, Jim Alderden, had been elected in 1998 by focusing his campaign partly on the reluctance of the old sheriff, Richard Shockley, to issue concealed carry permits. Shockley required applicants to show "just cause" to go covertly packing, and had issued only about forty permits in eight years. In the first year after Alderden took office, more than 600 people had been issued permits.
"On an issue as highly charged as guns," Greiling wrote in an article explaining his decision, "everyone has the right to know who may be carrying a weapon." Providing such information, he argued, is a newspaper's job. Some of the objections to the publication of names had centered on the idea that printing their names might subject gun owners to some increased danger. "But that flies in the face of the contention of pro-gun advocates," Greiling wrote, "that if the bad guys think you may have a gun, it will deter them from criminal activity."
In March the bill prohibiting the publication of names of concealed carry permit holders passed the Colorado Senate, and in April it was awaiting the governor's signature, which seemed likely. First Amendment advocates were not happy. "What I see this legislature doing, and what I see being done around the country is a basic whacking back of public openness," says Judith M. Buddenbaum, a mass media law professor at Colorado State University. "This trend toward legislating government secrecy is dangerous."
Gebhardt lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
A GOOD-LOOKING COLUMN
By Aparna Surendran
Joyce Purnick, in her Metro Matters column in The New York Times, found a subtle way of protesting those ubiquitous physical descriptions of women in the public eye that tend to appear in print (latest case in point, "Bad Hair Day Hall of Fame," a series of photos of Hillary Clinton in the April Capital Style). Purnick's March 13 column, an account of the Inner Circle, an annual political lampoon attended by influential types, described the attire and hair-do's of only the men. New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy was spotted "smoothing his salt-and-pepper pompadour" while interim New York City schools chancellor Harold O. Levy was "wearing a tuxedo, a vest of kimono silk, and a fish-shaped tie." Neither of the two women mentioned in the column -- Hillary Clinton and New York governor George Pataki's aide, Zenia Mucha, got the physical once-over.
Reporters "never talk about the appearance of the men," explains Purnick. "Basically, the column meant 'cut it out with the women unless you want us to do it to the men.'" She may have been a bit too subtle, however. "Most people somehow missed it," Purnick says.
Surendran is an intern for cjr.
LEE HILLS, 1906-2000
By David Villano
Through nearly three decades as editor or publisher of The Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press, Lee Hills helped build the foundation of modern news reporting. His "news first" edicts were legendary. During World War II, when newsprint was rationed, editor Hills persuaded the Herald's publisher to cut back on display advertising to allow extra space for war coverage. As publisher, Hills is said to have contacted the Herald's city desk to report an auto accident -- one he had caused.
Later in his career, Hills helped arrange the merger of Knight Newspapers and Ridder Publications. As Knight Ridder's first chairman, he spread his gospel of fairness, accuracy, and integrity to a generation of journalists, and helped turn the craft of newspaper reporting into a disciplined profession.
Villano lives in Miami.
