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1,300 Applications for Four Positions

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September 28, 2012

NPR hiring for new race-relations reporting team; Tom Arviso Jr. sole candidate to lead Unity board; joblessness of young black men worse than it seems; Obama administration scored for lack of openness; Univision says "Fast and Furious" caused Mexican deaths; Milwaukee's Kane decides to take buyout after all; Don Terry joins Southern Poverty Law Center; FCC move could add to minority-owned mobile space (9/28/12)

NPR Hiring for New Race-Relations Reporting Team

Tom Arviso Jr. Sole Candidate to Lead Unity Board

Tom Arviso Jr., publisher of the Navajo Times in Window Rock, Ariz., and member of the Native American Journalists Association, is the sole candidate for president of Unity Journalists, the group announced this week.

The coalition of Hispanic, Asian American, Native American and lesbian and gay journalists groups meets next weekend to elect officers who, some of the candidates say, plan to make the return of the National Association of Black Journalists to Unity their top priority.

The group must also select a new executive director. Walt Swanston is Tom Aviso Jr.filling the job on an interim basis after the recent departure of Onica N. Makwakwa. NABJ left the group last year over financial and governance issues, and attendance at the summer Unity convention dropped sharply without NABJ's participation.

Arviso said he had been nominated by the presidents of the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Elections for president of the Unity board are rarely contested. However, two board members of the Asian American Journalists Association are vying for the vice president's slot: Doris Truong, outgoing AAJA national president and multiplatform editor at the Washington Post, and Janet Cho, a business reporter for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland who is a former AAJA national secretary and national vice president for print. She lost to Paul Cheung in the summer's election for national AAJA president.

Truong wrote:

". . . I am committed to restarting the conversation about bringing NABJ back to the UNITY fold. I will work with NABJ to outline areas that need mutual agreement and will keep alliance members apprised of progress.

  • "I have experience with executive searches that will position us to make a strategic hire in our next UNITY ED [executive director].

  • "I bring my strong sense of branding and knowledge of social media. I will make sure that UNITY's online presence gets more traction for issues of importance to our partners as well as to the journalism industry at large."

Cho wrote that she was ". . . concerned that we are falling short of our potential as the foremost coalition for media diversity and inclusion.

"As a UNITY officer, I would strive to better communicate with our members; work toward reconciliation and reunification with our founding member, the National Association of Black Journalists; and boldly remind the media industry that the strength of this alliance is much greater than a quadrennial convention."

In April, Arviso and Cho voted against changing the name of the coalition from "Unity: Journalists of Color" to "Unity Journalists," saying that consultation with members was needed before such a decision.

Truong voted for the change, saying it "sends a clear signal that we welcome our brothers and sisters in NLGJA. UNITY continues to be an organization that strives for inclusiveness, which is even more clearly reflected now."

David Steinberg, immediate past president of NLGJA, is running for Unity treasurer. "This is a critical time for UNITY, with our longtime executive director having left and issues raised by NABJ's departure still unresolved," Steinberg wrote. "We have an opportunity to remake this alliance in a way that will benefit all our organizations while also providing the leadership that's needed to focus our industry on the value and necessity of newsroom diversity."

There are no candidates for secretary, but an NAHJ member is expected to fill the post.

Arviso became managing editor of the Navajo Times in October 1988, editor and publisher in 1993, and was named CEO of the Navajo Times Publishing Company in 2004.

In 2003, when the Navajo Nation Council voted for the newspaper to become Navajo Times Publishing Inc., Arviso said no other tribally owned newspaper had ever succeeded in gaining its independence from its tribal government. Last week, he accepted a Robert G. McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership from the Associated Press Media Editors.

Joblessness of Young Black Men Worse Than It Seems

"The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment," Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek's economics editor, wrote on Friday. "(That's 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country's active-duty military. That much is well known.

"What's less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.

"That's the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference. . . ."

Obama Administration Scored for Lack of Openness

"On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama ordered federal officials to 'usher in a new era of open government' and 'act promptly' to make information public," Jim Snyder and Danielle Ivory reported Friday for Bloomberg News.

"As Obama nears the end of his term, his administration hasn't met those goals, failing to follow the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, according to an analysis of open-government requests filed by Bloomberg News.

"Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg's request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act."

Meanwhile, Margaret Sullivan, the new public editor at the New York Times, wrote of Obama Thursday that ". . . it's worth acknowledging that he has also authorized the federal government to engage in an unprecedented crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers here in the United States, relentlessly pursuing and initiating new cases against journalists and their sources.

"Consider the Times reporter James Risen, whose 2005 work with Eric Lichtblau on the federal government's use of warrantless wiretapping was perhaps the most important national security journalism of the last decade. Mr. Risen has been under constant pressure from the Justice Department to reveal his confidential sources. Federal prosecutors say one of those sources is the former C.I.A. official Jeffery Sterling, whom they accuse of leaking secrets about American efforts to sabotage Iran's nuclear program to Mr. Risen for his 2006 book 'State of War.'. . . "

Last December, the American Society of News Editors noted that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Openthegovernment.org issued a joint report that reviewed several aspects of Freedom of Information Act compliance by the 15 largest independent agencies and cabinet-level departments. "Their answer appears to be that the improvement has been slight, at best" [fifth item], ASNE said.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. walks out of a Feb. 2 hearing of the House C

Univision: "Fast and Furious" Caused Mexican Deaths

"The consequences of the controversial 'Fast and Furious' undercover operation put in place by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2009 have been deadlier than what has been made public to date," Univision News announced on Thursday. "The exclusive, in-depth investigation by Univision News' award-winning Investigative Unit — Univision Investiga — has found that the guns that crossed the border as part of Operation Fast and Furious caused dozens of deaths inside Mexico.

"Univision’s Investigative Unit identified massacres committed with guns from the ATF operation, including the killing of 16 young people attending a party in a residential area of Ciudad Juárez in January of 2010. This and many other shocking new revelations about Fast and Furious will be presented in a special edition of Univision Network's newsmagazine 'Aquí y Ahora' (Here and Now) this Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT (6 p.m. Central). The Univision News special will be aired with closed captioning in English to expand the reach and impact of this eye-opening investigation.

"Univision News' Investigative Unit was also able to identify additional guns that escaped the control of ATF agents and were used in different types of crimes throughout Mexico. Furthermore, some of these guns – none of which were reported by Congressional investigators – were put in the hands of drug traffickers in Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. A person familiar with the recent Congressional hearings called Univision's findings 'the holy grail' that Congress had been searching for."

Milwaukee's Kane Decides to Take Buyout After All

Eugene Kane has changed his mind about giving up his Metro column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to return to reporting, covering the Milwaukee Public Schools. Instead, he is taking a buyout.

Eugene Kane

Thomas Koetting, deputy managing editor/local news, wrote in a staff memo on Wednesday, ". . . Eugene Kane also will work his last day at the newspaper this Friday, but his 31-year association with the Journal and then Journal Sentinel will not come to an end. Eugene will write a weekly column for the Sunday Crossroads section, and will continue to maintain his blog. He has been a valuable voice in our community, particularly in his nearly two decades as a local columnist. He took principled stands on lightning-rod issues, and for many readers was a singular advocate for matters close to their hearts and minds. He handled more challenging exchanges with readers than the rest of us combined, and did it with grace and honesty. His community outreach, especially with young people, was exemplary."

Kane told Journal-isms by email that he had discussed his situation with family members and concluded, "The buy-out is the best deal going and they will also pay me to write a Sunday Op-ed column. Like one of my advisers told me: 'That's a no-brainer!' "

He wrote on Facebook Friday, "Lots of love from FB friends about my decision to leave Journal Sentinel. I really appreciated it! Many younger FB folks congratulated me on my 'retirement'. C'mon; a middle aged black man like me can't afford to retire. I'm still going to be in the mix with my Sunday column and more. Bet."

Don Terry Joins Southern Poverty Law Center

Don Terry, whose career includes stints as a writer for the Chicago Tribune magazine and as part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team for the New York Times, started work this week at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates and publicizes hate crimes from its base in Montgomery, Ala.

"I'm a senior writer for the Center, primarily for our magazine, Intelligence Report," Terry wrote Journal-isms by email on Friday. "My first day was Monday and they put me right to work following up on a murderous militia."

"Before heading South, I was freelancing since March when the Chicago Don TerryNews Cooperative — and my job there — vanished. While I was reluctant to leave Chicago and my family, the minute I walked into the SPLC newsroom, which overlooks the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, I knew I was in the right place. As I said in announcing my move, I just can't get over that my ID badge quotes Martin Luther King: '...Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters And Righteousness Like a Mighty Stream.' "

Terry told his Facebook friends, "I'm still doing journalism and fighting for social justice. What more can a guy from Hyde Park want in a gig?"

As a magazine writer, Terry was honored for such pieces as "Hiding in Plain Sight," in which he and photographer Terrence James "followed the trail of an alleged mass killer from the dusty streets of Kigali, Rwanda, to tree-lined suburban Chicago," as his editor, Elizabeth Taylor, described it to readers in 2005, and "User Friendly" in 2003, about the Chicago Recovery Alliance, one of the largest needle-exchange programs in the country.

He was also based in his Chicago hometown for much of his 12-year tenure at the Times.

At that paper, he was part of the "How Race Is Lived in America" team that won the Pulitzer in 2001 for national reporting. He wrote "Getting Under My Skin," a memoir of growing up biracial.

FCC Move Could Add to Minority-Owned Mobile Space

"The government took a big step on Friday to aid the creation of new high-speed wireless Internet networks that could fuel the development of the next generation of smartphones and tablets, and devices that haven't even been thought of yet," Edward Wyatt reported Friday for the New York Times.

"The five-member Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a sweeping, though preliminary, proposal to reclaim public airwaves now used for broadcast television and auction them off for use in wireless broadband networks, with a portion of the proceeds paid to the broadcasters."

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council hailed the move. It said in a statement, "Demand for commercial wireless spectrum is increasing so rapidly that it soon will overtake the supply.

"That phenomenon, 'spectrum exhaust,' would be especially detrimental to minorities, who have led the nation in the rate at which they have adopted mobile wireless and its applications to job search, health care, education and civic engagement. In all of American history, wireless is the first technology for which minority consumers have a head start – an encouraging high tech and civil rights development that MMTC has named the 'Minority Wireless Miracle.'

"There is no time to lose. To ensure that consumers can enjoy the use of new wireless spectrum as rapidly as possible, MMTC strongly encourages the FCC to expedite the rulemaking process so that the auctions can conclude by December 2013."

The FCC plans to invite public comment on auction procedures, including how to structure ownership opportunities for designated entities such as minority entrepreneurs.

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