By Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt (mh151@columbia.edu) is cjr's senior editor. The stories mentioned in this Reporting Race package are available at www.jrn.columbia.edu/workshop.

In 1997, after President Clinton called for a national conversation on race, KRON-TV in San Francisco decided to do its bit by producing an in-depth "About Race" series. It was supposed to avoid "preaching, sensationalism, and unnecessary conflict, whatever that is," Craig Franklin, news special projects producer for the NBC affiliate, told the Columbia workshop. It would run sporadically over the year, but kick off with five parts, nearly sixty minutes in all, in the February '98 sweeps period. A daunting assignment. So daunting, Franklin said, that he dreamed he'd been assigned to vacuum the long-term parking lot of the city airport, row after row.

To make matters worse Franklin, a white male, was paired with a video editor named Karyne Holmes, a black woman with whom he was then not speaking. The two had worked together on a project about former Negro League baseball players, though "worked together" may not be the best description.

Holmes, who had a powerful emotional interest in the baseball piece, felt that her producer was too controlling, and too jealous of the bonds that seemed to form between her and the old players they were interviewing. As deadline loomed Franklin, who found himself increasingly disagreeing with his partner on the direction of the piece, began to boil. It got worse. Franklin blew up and questioned Holmes's competence; Holmes called Franklin a racist.

Then, three chilly years later, the two found themselves thrown together on this new mega-project on, of all things, race. Holmes picked up the tale at the workshop: Franklin eventually came to her, she told the assembled journalists, and said, "We need to talk." He said this, as Holmes described it, in a way that was more statement of fact than demand.

The pair took a long walk down busy Van Ness Avenue and negotiated a treaty. "We decided that from this day on, no matter what came out of this project, we were going to be honest with each other, and we were going to be respectful," Holmes said. "And that was enough for me." Slowly, the two became partners in more than name. The race project moved forward and, in terms of both ratings and quality, became a success. It won several awards, including the George Foster Peabody.

At the workshop, Holmes read from a thank-you note that Franklin had sent to her after the series ran. And she publicly expressed her gratitude to him – "I'm indebted to this man here to my left," she said. "He knows what I'm talking about."

"If I get emotional or this subject gets emotional, it's okay. We're from California," Franklin joked at one point.

Most of the journalists at the conference figured that diversity fatigue is a given. It exists in newsrooms and out among the readers and viewers. But another thread in the conversation was just how well challenging and solidly reported stories with racial and ethnic themes can play. Gary Pomerantz, who wrote a series about complex black/white relationships titled "From the Heart: Race in Atlanta" for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says his e-mail "melted" with the huge flow of reactions to the series (most of them favorable, many telling their own stories about relationships between races). And on the paper's Web site, AccessAtlanta, only the death of Princess Diana beat the record for feedback. In San Francisco, Franklin and Holmes's "About Race" series tied the ratings for the previous year, when the sweeps-week kicked off with more conventional stories about the safety of drinking water. On ABC's 20/20, producer Karen Saunders watched the Nielsen minute-by-minute ratings climb and stay high through her piece about the practical and the on-the-job problems black women have with their hard-to-manage hair. The show now tries to keep more such race-and-lifestyle stories in development, she says, "because the ratings and letters from the viewers are so very positive."

Annie Nakao of the San Francisco Examiner heard some "you're-not-African-American-so-how-dare-you-write-about-this?" responses to her thoughtful making the grade series about the academic underachievement of middle-class African-American youngsters. But she heard much positive reaction too. The National Association of Black Journalists, for example, gave her a first prize/news for the series in its annual awards competition in July. Tom Brokaw's powerful "Why Can't We Live Together?" special on Dateline NBC, examining white flight from a Chicago suburb, reached nearly 11 million viewers, beating all three other major networks (which, admittedly, were showing re-runs). On ABC's Nightline, the Nielsen national rating for Michel McQueen's "America in Black and White" report about the phenomenon of "colorism" – in which the degree of prejudice among both whites and blacks correlates to the tone of the skin – hit 5.7, well over the 4.4 average Nightline rating for 1997.

People do not wake up and say, ‘Oh, how I wish to discuss racial problems today,' McQueen pointed out. Yet like a troubled married couple for whom divorce is not in the picture, she said, they seem to yearn at some level for quality discussion.

Before the workshop began, Sig Gissler, the Columbia journalism professor who organized it with the support of the Ford Foundation, had asked the news "gatekeepers" about the state of reporting on race and ethnicity in their shops. Many saw a gathering of strengths. Generally they felt that top management had grown more committed to serious coverage, that their newsrooms had become more diverse, and had begun listening harder to the variety of voices in their communities.

On the other side of the ledger the editors and news directors, all of whom had applied to attend the workshop, worried about excess timidity and failures of imagination. Because people think they don't want to hear about race, the participants agreed, a journalist needs powerful tools – the strong narrative, the increased sophistication, the kind of sensitive and honest reporting that peels another layer off the onion. Readers and listeners "think they've heard it all," Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kaufman said to the group. "The bar has been raised for these kinds of stories."

Along with imagination and guts, hurdling that bar can require a lot of time. Elizabeth Llorente of The Record, in northern New Jersey, illustrated the point with a series about racial tensions in Palisades Park, New Jersey. In that town longtime residents felt threatened by two new groups of immigrants – poor Guatemalan day laborers, who crowd street corners every day, waiting for contractors to offer work, and well-to-do Koreans, who have increasingly bought up the downtown. To tell full and nuanced stories about both groups and how they do and do not fit in to Palisades Park, Llorente had to invest the hours.

She had some trouble warming up the Guatemalans. While Llorente speaks Spanish, the day laborers spoke a Mayan dialect. From the jungle, they regarded the reporter as a city slicker. They didn't understand newspapers, let alone one printed in English. Some were illegal, and thus wary. Llorente stood with them on the corners, visited their English classes, and just talked. "We had written about THEM, in capital letters," she told the workshop. "We had never asked, ‘Who are you? Tell us about this journey from Guatemala. How did you get from the jungles to Palisades Park?'"

The Koreans, meanwhile, did not want to make waves. They steered Llorente to their spokesmen, the usual suspects. So did the old-line white residents, who didn't want to advertise their resentments. Again, she visited workplaces and homes, went to schools and on picnics, off and on for weeks. Thanks to that investment, the stories arrived deeply reported and well told.

At the San Francisco Examiner, a team of reporters was given the luxury of time for the paper's "New City" project, a continuing series that laid out the vast demographic changes under way in San Francisco. Annie Nakao led off the series by writing about Ralph Barsi, an elderly man who showed her the index-card records he has kept of every family that has lived on his block since 1945. People with names like Poletti and Ciucci and Quinlan moved out, while Wongs and Ngs and Luises flocked in.

To get Barsi talking, she drank coffee in his Italian-American social club and homemade brandies in his garage. She advised editors at the workshop, "Give your reporters time. Time allows your reporters to get out of the office and hang out at community listening posts, where real people can be found."

Not all the stories dealing with race were about racism. One piece by Karen Saunders, a 20/20 producer, that was honored and discussed at the workshop was a "getting-to-know-you" sort of story, "Beautiful Bodies." It reported on the difference in how black and white women feel about body weight. Black women (and their men), the story reported, are more comfortable with more body. The piece was highly praised as a story that reached the "water cooler level," the kind that people talk about.

When the subject is attitudes about race, in all their subtlety and camouflage, the stories showcased at the workshop demonstrated TV's X-ray power. In one scene in her Nightline piece on "colorism," Michel McQueen meets with college psychology students who had agreed to a test. The test involved getting their impressions of people with varying shades of skin color in several photographs. We see a young woman say that she thinks the dark-skinned girl in picture A looks, "well, sluttier," than the girl in picture B. Then we learn that A and B are the same photo of the same girl, except that in one picture the skin tone was digitally altered. We see a young man explain that a dark girl in another picture looks heavier, and therefore less likely to be successful and happy, than the very same girl with lighter skin. It is one thing to read about this and quite another to see these reactions mouthed on TV by fresh-faced college students.

The X-ray effect was particularly evident in Tom Brokaw's "Why Can't We Live Together?" special on Dateline. Brokaw goes with a woman, Sally Formus, to a shopping center in the heart of Matteson, the attractive Chicago suburb that she had moved away from after blacks began moving in. By now the piece has noted how white flight can lead to a downward spiral – in which real estate values can drop and draw poorer people in, followed by troubles. But it has also questioned whether the motor of such spirals is the influx of the new residents or the sudden flight of the old ones. Or the perceptions and assumptions that spur that flight in the first place? In Matteson, the incoming black families were stable and middle class, and the piece makes clear that there was no downward spiral except in the minds of some white residents.

The woman tells Brokaw, "I don't feel safe to come here any more." In his unthreatening way, Brokaw establishes that she has never had a problem in the shopping center, nor has anyone she knows, nor has anyone she ever even heard of. He goes on:

"You know, we keep hearing rumors about crime here, crime in Matteson going up because more black people have moved in. Real estate values have gone down. Schools are terrible. We've gone back and checked that very carefully. Crime really hasn't changed significantly. Real estate values, in fact, have not only stayed steady but they've gone up some. And the school records are really about the same as in other places. Does that surprise you?"

"No," says Formus, looking uneasily out her car window at the mostly black shoppers. "It's just what I see when I come here."

At the workshop, journalists recommended using colleagues of different backgrounds, not as ethnic thought police, but as sounding boards on sensitive pieces. Nakao, for example, said she would never have attempted making the grade if she had not been able to discuss her reporting with black reporters and editors at her paper. The journalists spoke of creating a "safe space" for frank discussion. This can be easier said than done.

Even at the Columbia workshop, some participants felt it took the full three days to approach full-candor mode, to cast off the chill of political correctness. By day three, one white news director, William Otwell of WTNH-TV in New Haven, Connecticut, was complaining that he had been "taken aback" by generalizations that had been voiced about white managers early in the workshop. And by the way that some blacks at the workshop, as he saw it, had been quick to criticize a white reporter on a question of ethics. And how an unsubstantiated assumption of racism in one discussion about story judgment had been allowed to stand unchallenged. "The parameters seemed set," he said.

Gissler, former editor of The Milwaukee Journal, decried the "condition of mutual withholding" that governs so many newsroom discussions that circle around race. "The journalists of color are fearful of being tagged as the diversity nag, the boat rocker. The white journalists are fearful of saying things that will be misconstrued and they will be tagged racist, which is the atomic-bomb word for white people. The net result is, we have discussions that don't really get down to kind of layers we're at right now.

"I think there's a connection between the unleashing of these emotions and the advancement of journalism," he said. "If there is anything I want you all to do it is go back to the newsrooms and talk with each other."

Several people reacted: One black journalist told Otwell she empathized with his sense of being locked out of the conversation. "This so often happens, quite frankly, to minorities." Journalists must move beyond their comfort zones, she said, and put their thoughts out on the table. Michel McQueen said that for her "Driving While Black" piece for Nightline, an early story about racial profiling on the highways, she insisted on working with a team that included a white producer who was skeptical about it. "He pushes against me, I argue with him," she said. "He's not afraid of me."

"I said, ‘I need you to be the white guy. If I can be black for you, you can be white for me.'"

In a dinner speech, Mark Willes, chairman and c.e.o. of The Times Mirror Company and former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, told the participants that he was not into the let's talk-about-it school of diversity journalism. Willes prefers the let's-do-it mode. He reminded the group of the business imperative for readership diversity – survival. The Latino population of southern California, for example, is about 40 percent, he said, and growing fast. If the Times doesn't find a way to reach that part of the population, "we basically will become marginalized in our own communities."

Willes likes props, and he used some of Times Mirror's ski and snowboarding magazines to demonstrate what a niched media world we live in, and how, if we intend to reach readers in any particular niche, we first have to understand that niche's culture and language. (A "knuckle-dragger," he instructed, by way of making his point about language, is a skier's word for a snowboarder.) Once you understand the language and culture, he said, you have to find "the specific something" that the people in the niche are looking for, to pull them into your publication.

At the Los Angeles Times this specific something is called The Latino Initiative, a concerted effort to integrate coverage of the concerns and culture of Latinos into all parts of the newspaper. It is a serious effort, launched in late December 1998, that involves a dozen Spanish-speaking reporters and a photographer who cover all aspects of Latino life, from business to religion to TV. It includes regular profiles, a new columnist, and a new bureau.

But: Is it working, in terms of penetration into the Latino market? "It has not moved the needle," Willes said.

Why not?

Here Willes turned to another prop. He pointed to a stack of ninety copies of a special reprint of stories from the Latino Initiative. That stack was placed next to another stack of ninety copies of the entire paper – and dwarfed by it. So you see, Willes said, that "despite the fact that we have over ninety articles in the first three months of the Latino Initiative, they get lost. Because the paper is so big and complex."

The solution? To bring the Latino Initiative to the attention of potential Latino readers. "If we are going to succeed with that market," Willes said, "we have to find a way to market to that market, so that we can tell them about the journalism we have." Diversity by itself "is nice," he continued, "but it's hard to sustain. Until the diversity effort is imbedded into a total business plan, it's just going to be hanging out there, and the risk of failure is too high."

You can't discuss matters of race and ethnicity in America for three days and not stir emotions. Toward the end of the workshop, not long after participants saw Brokaw's "Why Can't We Live Together?" piece, with its bleak portrait of stubborn attitudes, a veteran black journalist's voice began to quaver. "I find this conversation in many ways both pleasing – I'm glad there are nice people out there – and extraordinarily frustrating," she began. "I've been in journalism for thirty years. And I hear the same stereotypes, and we talk about the same problems. And I have to say . . ."

Soon she was apologizing for crying, but still crying, and wondering out loud about what was the point of all the struggle for integration and understanding. "I have good white friends. I probably live in more integrated relationships than most people in this country," she said. "And I'm saddened by this country. I'm horrified . . ." She left the room, sobbing. Someone went to comfort her.

The moderator, also a black woman, did not blink an eye or miss a beat, but went right back into the discussion. Since there was a lot of work to do.

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