Anchor job denied until reporter looked less Asian; fired meteorologist still "keeping options open"; staffers appear to win bid to oust manager of D.C.'s WPFW; blacks, Latinos more upbeat than whites on economy; 2 seek funding for more inclusive Riptide study; Washington Post calls "Redskins" too offensive to tolerate; Whitlock reprimanded by ESPN for comments on SI writer; book, PBS documentary usher in Hispanic Heritage Month; NABJ joins Unity, Univision, AAJA as Ford grantee; complaint: "Africa not allowed to tell its own stories" (9/13/13 and 9/14/13)Updated September 14
Anchor Job Denied Until Reporter Looked Less Asian
Fired Meteorologist Still "Keeping Options Open"
NABJ Joins Unity, Univision, AAJA as Ford Grantee
"The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) is proud to announce it has received a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation," NABJ announced on Thursday.
"The goal of the grant is to increase diversity in media staffing and coverage of social justice issues through training, education, recruitment programs and scholarships to NABJ’s Annual Convention and Career Fair.
"The grant is part of the Ford Foundation's Media and Justice Initiative, which seeks to increase and improve news coverage of issues of inequity, injustice and disparity that are often ignored by the mainstream media.
"This grant will help in the development and implementation of NABJ C.A.R.E.S., a members-only web portal that will offer job search, continuing education, training and networking opportunities for members entering or returning to the workforce. . . ."
The grant was one of the last awarded asCalvin Sims, a former New York Times correspondent, completed a six-year stint as program officer for the Ford Foundation. He is now president and CEO of International House, "the New York non-profit program and residence center with a mission to promote cross-cultural understanding and peace and prepare leaders for the global community," in the words of an International House announcement.
As previously reported, Unity: Journalists for Diversity received $150,000 in August "to undertake a broad national effort to expand and strengthen a coalition of diverse journalists' associations to advance diversity and inclusion in media coverage, staffing and ownership through a series of meetings, conferences, and training sessions."
Also in August, Univision News won a one-year, $500,000 grant from the foundation to strengthen and expand its Documentary and Investigative units.
The same month, the Asian American Journalists Association was awarded $200,000 to launch "Diverse and Inclusive: News of the Heartland," a project to address the lack of news coverage of minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Nebraska.
Sims' successor has not been named.
Complaint: "Africa Not Allowed to Tell Its Own Stories"
"There is not a lot of money in African journalism. As an African journalist, I know this all too well,"Simon Allison, a South African freelance journalist based in Somaliland, wrote Wednesday for Pambazuka News, a pan-African web forum for social justice in Africa.
"An illustrative example: I was in South Sudan in November 2012, on a trip I was financing myself. Weeks in flea-ridden hostels culminated in a four-day stay at a refugee camp near the border with Sudan. I was the only reporter there and pleased with myself for getting a story that no one else had. Not so fast. On my last day there, a small plane descended unannounced on the tiny airstrip and disgorged four foreign correspondents in their khakis and combat boots. They represented two of the biggest and best-known international media outlets. They spent a total of two hours in the camp. One of them had filed his story even before he left.
"As they hijacked my interviews, I chatted to their fixer who whispered to me that they had spent $8,000 to hire the plane for the morning. To me, this was an unimaginable sum: their morning cost more than four times my entire two weeks in South Sudan. And, of course, they missed the story. In four days I barely scratched the surface of what was going on in the camp, but in their two hours, they could not even get beyond official statements.
"For aid workers and the camp's refugee leadership, this was a common complaint: journalists, invariably foreign, screeched in for a few hours and got the story wrong.
"This echoes a common lament among African journalists, politicians, policy-makers and civil society activists, which goes something like this: one of Africa's biggest problems is that it is not allowed to tell its own stories. The agenda for African news is decided in far-off Western capitals — London, Paris, New York — and written by dashing foreign correspondents who do not understand the local complexities and base their narrative on sweeping, misleading generalisations. Sometimes the reports are wrong or distorted. Sometimes their depictions and analysis are borderline racist. (Sometimes, foreign reporting on Africa is excellent; but in general it is hit and miss.) The broader point remains that Africa is not setting its own news agenda.
"The end result is that Africa continues to be defined by stereotypes: it is poor; it is conflict-ridden; it is starving and dangerous. It is the helpless continent, or — if those invariably white editors are in a good mood — it is 'Africa rising', the positive generalisations just as sweeping as all the negative ones which came before. . . ."