SNAPSHOTS
Brief portraits of five New York media figures, developed
out of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's
"New York media elite" class and written by students
in the class.
CATHIE BLACK
'It's easier for women these days -- but it's not
easy'
When
Cathleen Black entered room 607B at Columbia University's Graduate
School of Journalism, she smiled graciously and took her seat,
careful not to interrupt the class's conversation about the social
habits of the New York media. Black expressed interest in hearing
what the students had to say, nodding as they spoke. Yes, there
is a media establishment, she finally said, and yes, they do socialize:
"I was just at The Pierre for lunch today."
"There is a gigantic concentration
of brilliantly talented people in this city in particular, who
do kind of set the agenda for the country," she said.
At Hearst, where she oversees the
development of some of the most powerful publications in the magazine
business, including Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar,
Esquire, Good Housekeeping, and O: The Oprah
Magazine, Black says editors constantly work to keep all Americans,
not just New Yorkers, in mind for their coverage. "It is very
dangerous to start thinking that all of this country is like the
people that you're having dinner with that night."
Black believes more doors are open
to women than were a decade ago -- but she signals that there
are still some barriers at the top. When asked whether she encounters
gender-related challenges, she offers a resounding "yes" and a
knowing look. "It is certainly easier for women these days," she
says, "but it's not easy."
Still, Black stands as an example
that making it is more than possible in magazines. Her recent
record with Oprah's wildly successful magazine is a case in point.
-- Caryn Meyers
DAVID HALBERSTAM
'There's been an adaptation to what sells,
to what the market is'
Twenty-two
years ago, in The Powers That Be, David Halberstam wrote
about the role of the national media as the primary shapers of
national thought. He chronicled the rise and reign of media pillars
like The Washington Post and Time magazine, tracing
the parallel destinies of these powerful giants and that of the
nation. Along the way he urged the press to be more responsible
in its role as a power player in the arena of public policy.
Today, with a few companies dominating
the media landscape, Halberstam's insights read like visionary
text. Surveying today's media landscape, the veteran writer says,
"I think to the degree that there's been a decline in the profession,
it's due to a change of values," adding, "Throughout much of the
media, there's been a far greater process of accommodation to
values that ten years ago, twenty years ago, would've been considered
frivolous.
"Some editors out in rural America
would claim their readers and viewers didn't care about Vietnam,
they only cared about the price of corn or the interest rates.
And the New York editors could say, quite accurately, that they
should care about Vietnam and that soon enough they would care.
So those news judgments were based on high professionalism and
agreed-upon standards.
"I think that era is largely gone,"
Halberstam says. "The media world is much more fragmented now.
Power has passed from print to television and the television values
have changed it all quite dramatically. The values now evident
-- especially in what are called the news magazines -- are not
especially New York values; if anything they're Hollywood values,
so whether the executive producers live in New York or L.A. makes
no difference."
-- Evan Serpick
ANDRE
SCHRIFFREN
'The new media elite act like Hollywood moguls'
Andre
Schriffren pines for the old-school New York media elite. He misses
their voices, their ability to make or break a book or idea, their
informed and principled approach to the craft of book publishing.
Everywhere he goes these days, he bemoans the loss of those arbiters
of culture, whose decisions to publish a book or not were informed
mainly by their own personal, individualized concerns.
"There are very few people, if any,
in the large houses who are able to say, 'I want this book to
be published even if we lose money on it,'" he says. "They just
can't do that. That power has been taken away from them."
It has been taken away, he says, by the new media
elite.
"If an elite consists of people
who get paid a great deal of money, who are able to spend a great
deal of money, who live in increasing luxury and increasingly
look and act like Hollywood moguls, then an elite is still there,"
he says.
-- John Giuffo
GERALD BOYD
'What I don't quite appreciate is why race is
so difficult to talk about'
Gerald
Boyd is both exhausted and exhilarated by talking about race.
On the one hand, the New York Times deputy managing editor
-- the first African-American on the paper's masthead -- wants
to know why he, unlike some of his colleagues, is bombarded with
questions about diversity in the media. On the other, he spearheaded
the Times's fifteen-part series last year, "How Race Is
Lived in America," and speaks forcefully about why a diverse newsroom
is a better newsroom. Boyd can't seem to get away from talking
about race, but it's unclear that he even wants to.
The child of a low-income family
in St. Louis, Boyd won a St. Louis Post-Dispatch scholarship
to the University of Missouri. He joined the Post-Dispatch
full-time upon graduating in 1973. He covered city hall, consumer
affairs, and housing in St. Louis, and then the paper sent him
to Washington to cover Ronald Reagan's White House. After jumping
to the Times a decade later, he quickly ascended the ladder,
becoming an assistant managing editor in 1993 and deputy managing
editor in 1997.
"I think it was pretty profound
when I went on the Times's masthead," Boyd says. "I don't
think you can be a news organization in this day and age and be
relevant without practicing diversity, and also appreciating it
and understanding it."
The Times's most recent push
in that direction came in the form of the series on race in America,
which ran over several weeks in the summer. Articles in the series,
on such topics as intra-race racism and race relations in the
Army, were designed to combat what Boyd perceives to be "racial
fatigue" on the part of the reading public.
"Here we had the story of race in
America. It is, was, and remains the most vexing domestic story
we face as a nation, and yet people weren't talking about it,"
Boyd says. The challenge facing those who worked on the series,
he says, was how to "think out of the box and find new ways into
subjects that people are either tired of or don't think might
be relevant to them."
The editors and reporters working
on the series, a group that included whites and people of color,
learned to push through their fears of talking about race, Boyd
says. And if they could do it, he extrapolates, then why can't
everybody else?
"What I don't quite appreciate is
why race is so difficult to talk about," he says. "What we really
evolved into over a period of months was a sort of openness and
honesty that said, 'We might be naïve about something, but
that doesn't necessarily make one a racist.'"
Of course, without a diverse newsroom,
these discussions couldn't even get under way, he posits. Although
the Times has no racial or gender quotas for hiring reporters,
the paper has what Boyd terms a "serious commitment" to diversity.
And having a diverse staff, he emphasizes, isn't just for the
sake of appearance; it's smart journalism and smart business.
(It should be noted, though, that Boyd is the only minority news
executive among thirteen on the editorial masthead.)
"How can you set out to cover, as
a metro story, what is going on in New York City and not have
a diverse staff?" Boyd asks. "If you're not doing that, you're
putting your franchise in peril. If you look at the changing demographics
in this city, this region, and this country, and if you want to
be around for the next fifty years, then you'd better preach diversity
and practice it."
For a paper like the Times, where
many reporters attended the same universities and now live in
the same neighborhoods, maintaining a diverse staff is crucial,
Boyd says. A reporter's background -- and race, gender, and ethnicity
-- can become one of the few things that differentiate his or
her worldview from a colleague's.
"Chances are that social and economic
differences [among reporters] close after a period of time," Boyd
says. "I live on the east side of Manhattan. I take a cab to work.
I don't hang out on the block in Bed-Stuy, so that kind of difference
is lost."
-- Victoria
Still
LARRY KRAMER
'Being a journalist is all about trying to make the world better'
"Because the leading paper in this
world, because the president of the United States, because the
mayor of New York refused to pay attention to us when we told
them what was going to happen, a billion people minimum are going
to die."
Statements like that are among the
reasons the AIDS activist Larry Kramer regards himself as a "pariah"
and a "loose cannon" among his peers. Some members of the press
call him the angriest gay man in the world. The words of this
sixty-five-year-old author and playwright about the government's
inattention to AIDS were delivered more with melancholy than with
rage in a recent conversation with Columbia journalism school
students.
"I'm not bitter, I'm very sad,"
says the founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, his voice gravelly
and slight from the disease he himself has lived with for two
decades. Kramer, whose latest book is Reports From the Holocaust:
The Story of an AIDS Activist, was recently hospitalized for
the first time for his illness. He sounded defeated as he recalled
his experience at New York University's Medical Center.
"I had a chance to witness what
all our work has accomplished and what it hasn't," he says.
That a billion people will die from
the disease was reported by the Harvard AIDS doctor William Haseltine
in 1992. Yet, according to Kramer, the U.S. government has done
little in the way of funding AIDS education, pushing to get quicker
drug approvals, or acknowledging the AIDS pandemic internationally.
But Kramer presses on. He advises
journalism students to be strong enough to be unpopular when writing
on the topics that capture their passion. "This country is all
about fighting evil," he says. "It's not about the media elite.
The media elite is evil. Being a writer, being an artist, being
a creative person, being a fighter, being an activist, being a
journalist is all about trying to make the world better. The rest
is bullshit."
-- Leslie Akst
