Fall 2018: The Race Issue by Columbia Journalism Review

fall 2018

The Race Issue

Unfinished The stories left untold in America’s newsrooms

Gustavo Arellano • Alexandra Bell • Ilia Calderón • Rebecca Carroll Jelani Cobb • Lou Cornum • Eric Deggans • Paul Delaney • E. Tammy Kim Vann R. Newkirk II • Mayukh Sen • Errin Haines Whack

Real Journalism Matters

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Table of Contents EDITOR’S NOTE 8 Missing the Story By Jelani Cobb

Field Notes 13 View from a Paper Route By Paul Delaney 14 The Many Voices of Journalism By Gisele Regatao 17 Diversity as a Second Job By Vann R. Newkirk II 19 Where Food Writing Leads By Mayukh Sen

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We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause

The past and future of America’s black press CARTOON

20 Beat Bias By Hannah K. Lee 24 The First Choice By Rebecca Carroll

By Alexandria Neason

Las Noticias en Español

The uncertain fate of Spanish-language news networks DATA

26 Decades of Failure By Gabriel Arana VISUAL ESSAY 70 Alexandra Bell’s

Revelations

By Gustavo Arellano

The Complicated Philosophy of Jay Smooth A cultural critic and multimedia savant breaks up with his radio show after 30 years

By Karen K. Ho 128 End Note ON THE COVER Installation view of Alexandra Bell’s piece “A Teenager With Promise.” Photograph by Darryl Richardson.

“Nobody gets extra points for getting out of their car.” David Simon offers four lessons on how journalists can do better with race

By Eric Deggans

told TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

“So much of journalism is about the choices we make about who will be seen and heard; the race beat is recognition of the fact that images and voices have seldom told the stories of my community.” —from My Life on the Race Beat on page 122

Covering the Koreas How misreading a culture changes the story

By E. Tammy Kim

Across the Language Barrier How journalists reach readers in translation

By Alice Driver

112

Charlottesville One Year Later A violent white supremacist rally reshaped a city’s idea of itself. Has the local press changed?

By Brendan Fitzgerald

A LVA RO D O M I N G U E Z

122

My Life on the Race Beat

When “minority affairs” become the center of coverage

By Errin Haines Whack

SPECIAL REPORT: DIVERSITY IN NEWSROOMS

Journalism’s Bad Reflection Ten newsrooms across the country have particularly notable discrepancies between the makeup of their staffs and the demographics of their communities. What does this mean to people who live in these cities—and what has to happen to fix it? Honolulu, Hawai‘i Seattle, Washington Los Angeles, California Baltimore, Maryland Queens, New York Denver, Colorado South Bend, Indiana Houston, Texas Orlando, Florida Jackson, Mississippi

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Contributors Gabriel Arana is a contributing editor at The American Prospect. His work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Salon, The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City. Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times opinion section and the author of 2012’s Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Pomona College Museum of Art, and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. She is a recipient of the 2018 International Center of Photography Infinity Award and a 2018 Soros Equality Fellowship. She holds an MS in journalism from Columbia University. Rebecca Carroll is the editor of special projects at WNYC, a criticat-large for the Los Angeles Times, and a columnist at Shondaland. She is also the author of several books about race and blackness in America, including 1997’s Sugar in the Raw. Jelani Cobb is the director of Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Eric Deggans is National Public Radio’s first full-time TV critic, chair of the Media Monitoring Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists, and author of 2012’s Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. Paul Delaney is an award-winning reporter, editor, and journalism educator. He worked for 23 years at The New York Times and was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists. Alice Driver is a bilingual journalist, translator, and video producer based in Mexico City. Her work focuses on migration, human rights, and gender equality. Brendan Fitzgerald is an associate editor at CJR, where he directs the United States Project. His writing has appeared at Literary Hub, The Believer, Montana Public Radio, and The Morning News. He spent six years as a reporter and editor at C-VILLE Weekly. Karen K. Ho is a freelance business, media, and culture reporter based in Toronto and New York. She is a former Delacorte Fellow at CJR. E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and essayist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications. She coedited 2016’s Punk Ethnography.

Alexandria Neason is CJR’s senior staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow. Previously, she was a reporter at The Village Voice and covered education for the Teacher Project, a partnership between Columbia Journalism School and Slate. A team she worked on won the 2016 Education Writers Association award for news features. Vann R. Newkirk II is a politics writer for The Atlantic, where he covers a wide range of topics including civil rights, the environment, and policy. He is a recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors’s 2018 ASME Next Award for outstanding achievement by magazine journalists under the age of 30. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland. Gisele Regatao is an assistant professor of journalism at Baruch College, City University of New York. Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award–winning food and culture writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bon Appétit, and elsewhere. Errin Haines Whack is an awardwinning journalist who is the National Writer for Race and Ethnicity at the Associated Press. She is based in Philadelphia.

TK CREDIT

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JELANI COBB

The cost of the status quo

Missing the Story

AUTHOR

Jelani Cobb ILLUSTRATOR

Nicolas Ortega

ive years ago, I came across an article in The New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the neighborhood where robberies took place. But there was a notable wrinkle: Confronted by armed antagonists, the article sighed, many people refused to surrender their belongings, even when they had only a few dollars on them. The article tsk-tsked at community members for tempting fate. A criminologist offered a suggestion that it was “nuts for the victim to refuse.” A few dollars, readers were told, are not worth one’s life. The article stuck with me in part because I’d once lived nearby that area and understood the realities of crime there. But I also was struck by the ways in which the efforts of a journalist, an editor, an expert, and even neighborhood residents seemed only to further a narrative of liberal condescension, missing crucial facts about life in this place. Here’s what I knew: people who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about. The few dollars in their pockets may represent their only way to get to work; surrendering cash is not only an immediate loss but also one that jeopardizes a future paycheck. More crucially, people who

are known to be easily victimized likely will become frequent targets, a reality that may make their neighborhood virtually unlivable. What to the journalist seemed inscrutable was, to many residents, reasonable. It was not lost on me that the journalist who wrote the story was white and that the neighborhood was largely black and Latinx. The article represented not simply a case of a journalist missing a story. The story, to me, spoke to the problem of what happens when the demographics of the Times—and American newspapers in general—look nothing like the demographics of the communities they cover. The people who are most likely to appear in these kinds of stories are the least likely to have a say in how those stories are told.

onversations around diversity in media have tended to focus on cozy niceties. “Diversity” is often partnered with the word “inclusion” in our racial vocabulary. Since the conflicts of the 1960s, it has been increasingly apparent that our political, educational, and media institutions should not appear to be monochromatically white. But appearance is not the real problem. A democratic media is. A half-century ago, members of the Kerner Commission—an advisory board formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to a series of race riots—spelled out the role of a mostly white media in failing to cover the cause of unrest. It called on news outlets across the country to diversify. In the decades since, including “diverse” perspectives in media and elsewhere has become broadly acceptable—eight out of ten Americans view ethnic diversity as “at least somewhat important” in the workplace. Yet 50 years after Kerner, we still see chronic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in print and broadcast media. In 2017, only 16.6 percent of journalists at daily newspapers were people of color; in the US population, more than 37 percent of people are nonwhite. According to a 2015 poll, more than three-quarters of the guests on Sunday morning shows were white. There is currently only one person of color, CNN’s Don Lemon, hosting a weeknight primetime show on the three biggest cable news networks. This underrepresentation

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of minorities is a more polite way of saying that there is an overrepresentation of white people in media—79 percent of people working in the publishing industry are white. Two years ago, the dearth of people of color at the Oscars generated the satirical #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. A #NewsroomSoWhite hashtag would now be equally fitting.

here is something awkward about this kind of racial census taking—journalism is difficult and our media outlets, we like to think, are staffed by people who have the skills to get the job done. This is often the case. But it leaves a question unasked: How many people who have the skills to do this work never even get the opportunity to try? I came to journalism through alternative newspapers in the Washington, DC, area. I contributed to The Hilltop, Howard University’s student paper, and wrote for a small black-owned weekly, where I learned the fundamentals of writing on deadline. My first job at a majority-white publication was at the Washington City Paper, in 1996. David Carr, who would go on to become a crucial voice in media criticism at the Times before his death, in 2015, arrived at the City Paper from its sister publication, The Twin Cities Reader. The City Paper traditionally had chilly relations with much of the city’s majority black population. In addition to the lack of minority representation on staff, the paper’s critical coverage of the mayoralty of Marion Barry was often read as thinly veiled racial condescension. Carr, with characteristic insouciance, set out to diversify the staff. He started a paid internship program and put out feelers for writers who might be interested in working at the paper. His first class of interns included me; Holly Bass, now a writer and playwright; Neil Drumming, currently a producer with This American Life; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who would go on to win a National Book Award. Carr did not pat himself on the back for his recruitment style. (To my knowledge, he never even spoke of it outside of an article he wrote explaining the importance of newspaper and magazine internship programs at a point when many outlets were eliminating them.) But equally important was the fact that he did not hire any of us in pursuit of a vague,

JELANI COBB

What happens when the demographics of the Times— and American newspapers in general—look nothing like the demographics of the communities they serve?

frankly condescending ideal of “inclusion.” He explained in straightforward terms that he worried that there were specific stories missing from his newspaper. He wanted a better publication and believed our work would help him build one. And we did. Years later, in 2013, I attended the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association and participated in a panel on media diversity. My session was scheduled to immediately follow a panel, always wellattended, on best-selling magazine issues. The theory was that the huge lead-in would generate a spillover crowd for the diversity panel. Instead, people streamed out of the room, leaving just a handful of outlets left to discuss the disappointing number of people of color in the industry. Afterward, I talked to people from magazines in Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Washington, and Los Angeles—places with large black populations—and learned that none of them had any black writers on staff; the only black journalist at Atlanta’s regional magazine had left a year or so earlier. Not only were outlets overwhelmingly white, it seemed, based on the lousy showing at the conference, that few people were concerned about inequality. The implications of the media’s

representation problem could not be more clear. As race emerged as a central theme of the 2016 elections, crucial decisions about coverage were being made in institutions employing few of the people Donald Trump maligned. Euphemisms appeared when unblinking assessments of racism and religious bigotry were warranted. A persistent theme of “economic anxiety” was cited to explain away an animosity that was clearly connected to much darker objections. As a corollary to this, the work of journalists like Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Jamelle Bouie—which pointed to the centrality of racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters—came under attack. (Subsequent studies have validated their contentions.) Debates over the role of race in political coverage remain deeply predictable and dispiriting—as in the story of crime in the Bronx, where white journalists dominate, the most familiar and comfortable narratives hold sway. There’s another reason why diversity matters. The media exists in a climate of unprecedented hostility. The relationship between the White House and the press, frequently rocky, has devolved into a circumstance in which the president of the United States has referred to us as the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s attacks are facilitated by the fact that, in the past two decades, trust in the media has plummeted. This is a crisis of democracy, since the press’s role as a guardian of democracy is founded upon the trust of the public. But at least some portion of that distrust is a product of people who rarely see themselves or their stories depicted in the media they consume. A great deal must be done to rebuild public trust. But it can begin by including the voices of all Americans. The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people. cjr

LOW E R L E F T, L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E SS ; A L L OT H E RS, G E T T Y I M AG E S

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Field Notes FROM THE RACE BEAT

FIELD NOTES

WHAT HASN’T C HA NGED

View from a Paper Route By Paul Delaney

CHRIS KINDRED

eventy-two years ago, I worked the paper route on the west side of Montgomery, Alabama, delivering the Alabama Journal to my neighbors, who were mostly African-American. One afternoon, in 1946, I met, and would eventually befriend, the son of my white subscribers. We were both 13. This summer, a trip back to Montgomery, and to my old route, got me thinking not only about that boy, but also about what has, or hasn’t, changed in Montgomery, and in America, since 1946. And it’s reminded me that it was that paper route that introduced me to journalism, a profession that I would love for the next six decades. I didn’t realize it then, but the daily trek covered about two miles. As a teenager, it was a snap. Also, in those days, everybody in my community walked: no one in my family, and few blacks in Montgomery, owned cars. (My uncle Freddie bought one in the late 1940s, but when he went to take the test for his driver’s license, the white bureaucrat informed him point-blank that he would never be given a license. My uncle dutifully took the test each time he was eligible and, as the man promised, he was never granted a license. Nevertheless, Uncle Freddie cheerfully drove his Chevy around Montgomery until he died, without

ever being stopped by police or getting a traffic ticket, as far as we knew.) My route began a block from my home, but I had to walk a half mile in the other direction in order to pick up the bundle of Journals. The workday began right after school, at the “paper shacks” on West Jeff Davis Avenue, just a few blocks away from a shirt factory that employed dozens of African-American women, including, at one point, Rosa Parks, who

frequently walked past our house on her way to the job. At the very end of the route, the last street within the city limits, sat a small community of white people. One street. It was there that I met and became friends with this white boy. First, we’d meet at his house. Then, later, he would join me at the corner, where he’d accompany me as I threw papers onto the porches of his neighbors. He shared his bicycle

with me, since I did not yet have one. Eventually, he ventured farther out onto my route, to the edge of the black neighborhood, where he’d accompany me the rest of the way. We would ride his bike alongside the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks and across a freight train trestle. We’d wave at passengers and engineers on the L&N’s newest train heading north, the Humming Bird, on its daily evening run between New Orleans and Cincinnati. He and I did not realize it, but our friendship was not only against the norm, it was against the law. Segregation was strictly enforced as the law of the South. I had no idea how his parents and neighbors felt; they certainly could have put an immediate end to the friendship (or worse) if they had chosen. Our relationship ultimately came to a natural end when I quit being a newspaper carrier and went to work for Thomas Photography Studio, where I learned to develop and process film. I never managed to take pictures well enough to become a photographer, but the experience, along with being a paperboy, contributed to my eventual interest in pursuing journalism and settling on it as my lifelong profession. Nor can I say that I was inspired by the Alabama Journal. Both the Journal, and its sister daily, the largercirculation Montgomery Advertiser, historically supported racism and segregation well into the 20th century. Both ignored substantive black subjects in their main news sections and both ran “colored pages” on Saturdays, the least-read paper of the week. Ultimately, the Journal was among the first of the dailies to fall victim to changing reading habits that killed off many newspapers, mostly afternoon publications. I’ve often wondered what happened to my paper-route friend. Did he go on to make other black friends and become a southern white

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liberal, defying his community? Was he strong enough to fight for change? Or did he fall in line and join his contemporaries in perpetuating racist activities in attempts to fit in and fortify the old ways? As a journalist and educator (I returned to Alabama to become chairman of the journalism department at the University of Alabama for a short spell), I met a number of white people, some my students, who were appalled by the state’s past and present racist tendencies. At a reception, Frank Johnson, a federal judge who issued major rulings against segregation, lamented that horrific past and presciently but fearfully predicted that white liberals were fast disappearing in Alabama. Montgomery has changed for the

better, but many of my relatives and old friends say not by much. The city remains plagued by deep racial divisions. A few black people now hold jobs formerly denied them; a few live in fashionable, formerly allwhite neighborhoods. While there no longer are widespread, widely accepted lynchings, black people say they still feel unwelcome. While nearly every major southern city has elected a black or nonwhite mayor, Montgomery has yet to do so. So I wonder: Where is my boyhood friend, and how does he stand on these crucial subjects? Does he look back on our time as I do, as a moment of hopeful promise, much of it unfulfilled? The year was 1946. We were 13 years old. cjr

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The Many Voices of Journalism

By Gisele Regatao

rowing up, I was in awe of a painting called Abaporu, or, “Man who eats human flesh.” A distorted human figure sits next to a cactus under a bright yellow sun. Abaporu, painted 90 years ago by Tarsila do Amaral, an artist in Brazil, helped create a cultural movement: anthropophagy, driven by the idea of eating up foreign influences and spitting out something new. Abaporu transformed Brazilian culture, from visual arts to Tropicalia music, and may be the most recognizable piece of art in Brazil. Few people in the United States were familiar with it until recently, when an exhibition of Amaral’s work was shown for the first time in North America, at the Art Institute of Chicago, then the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I thought it was a good story: A Latin American artist finally being recognized in the United States 45 years after her death. I pitched the story to National Public Radio. After listening to a work sample, Tom Cole, my editor, had reservations: “I worry that show producers might not like your accent,” he wrote.

CHRIS KINDRED

FIELD NOTES

My accent? It’s mild; Americans can tell right away that I am not a native English speaker, but foreigners can’t. I moved to the US from Brazil 20 years ago, though most people can’t tell where I’m from. I sometimes stress the wrong syllable, or pronounce vowels differently from other speakers. My son does a great imitation of how I say “blood” (it rhymes with “plod”). My partner and friends rarely correct me—they think the way I say certain words is cute. So when Cole raised this as a concern, I was shocked; I knew accents could be taboo for some radio people, but I thought NPR would be thrilled to have a piece about a Brazilian artist by a Brazilian journalist. Plus, I’d voiced stories for WNYC and PRI’s The World many times before. I told him I wanted to give it a try. I went ahead and reported it—I attended the press preview at MoMA and interviewed the cocurator and other sources. Months later, after editing the story, Cole told me that the piece wouldn’t air, in part because of space and in part because of my accent. In another email, Cole wrote: “For the record, I like your accent—we need to hear different voices on the air.” Historically, the media has been uncomfortable with accents, even regional ones. Radio created an idea that voices should be uniform— announcers were to sound like more authoritative versions of regular people, typically white men, speaking in a measured, polished English, often from the mid-Atlantic region, that gives little indication where the person is from. Over the years, the tone of voice on radio and TV has become more conversational, though certain intonations remain standard. But accents are an important part of representation. Ultimately, they reflect who belongs and who doesn’t—and what the voice of our country sounds like. Thirteen percent

of the US population is foreignborn—the highest proportion since 1910—and many more people have regional accents. Amy Caples, a former TV and radio news anchor who teaches voice classes at Temple University in Philadelphia, says that local television stations in her city now feature journalists with different backgrounds who don’t speak what’s considered the “standard broadcasting voice.” But if you watch the national news, she adds, the “measured” voice still reigns. “That authoritative vocal quality, that’s what people expect.” Virtually no anchors speak with accents from non-English speaking countries. (Foreigners who sound British get a pass.) After decades of criticism, media companies—NPR included—are realizing that their newsrooms don’t match the communities they serve and they need to be more inclusive by promoting women and people of color to decision-making positions.

But having reporters and hosts with a foreign accent on-air remains a subject that many national news organizations would prefer to avoid. Calls and emails to CNN, NBC, ABC, and iHeartMedia inquiring about their approach to accents went mostly unanswered. The people I did speak with, at NPR and CBS, denied discriminating based on accent, but declined to provide numbers or names to discuss details. In my case, several people at NPR eventually apologized for the reason my piece was killed. Edith Chapin, the executive editor of NPR News, told me that the company does not have a policy regarding foreign accents for reporters, hosts, or sources, and that public radio’s mission is to include all voices and dialects. Chapin added that she had never before been confronted by the scenario raised with my piece. “It’s inconsistent with our journalistic practice,” she said. “And we are sorry.”

“As an organization, we have faults,” Keith Woods, the vice president for newsroom training and diversity at NPR, said. “But one of them is not an openness to the world, and the voices of the world.” Other journalists express similar frustration. Javier E. Gomez, who is Puerto Rican, has worked as a broadcast journalist and actor in New York since 1995; he has always struggled with his accent. Over the years, he has taken several speech and voice coaching classes, but he has drawn a line at accent reduction. “I felt like losing my accent was losing myself,” he says. Gomez says that he has never applied to on-air positions at major networks in English because he has had the sense he wouldn’t have a chance of being hired. He now hosts a weekly show in Spanish for BronxNet, a public cable programmer, and also works as a substitute anchor and host on the BronxNet’s English programs. Cable television brought people like him into the industry, but, based on who he sees on screen, commercial broadcast TV has been resistant to putting people with accents on camera. “The process has been very slow and very uneven,” he says. To ban someone from the airwaves for their accent can be illegal. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers it to be a form of national origin discrimination. In 2017, the EEOC received 130 complaints from people citing unfair treatment as a result of their accents—twice as many as in 1997. Television and radio can get tricky; the law says that an employer may not base a decision on someone’s foreign accent if “effective oral communication in English is required to perform job duties and the individual’s foreign accent materially interferes with their ability to communicate orally in English.” Yet what is considered “effective,” in a communications field, can be subjective. This is complicated further by

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Radio created an idea that voices should be uniform—to sound more like white men.

research showing that some Americans are not comfortable hearing certain accents. A 2010 study at the University of Chicago, in which peoplewith different speaking styles

read from the same script, concluded that a foreign accent undermines a speaker’s credibility to listeners. In the study, participants were told that speakers were reciting from a script and that they were not the source of the information they conveyed. Still, participants judged as less truthful the statements coming from people with foreign accents. “In general, when information is processed less fluently, people tend to misattribute that difficulty to the credibility of the source,” Boaz Keysar, a psychology professor and one of the authors of the study, says. In a second experiment, researchers told participants that they were being tested specifically on whether accents undermine credibility, and this time, the results were different: statements with mild accents were rated just as truthful as those by native speakers. Participants, once made aware of their prejudices, “don’t want to be perceived as people who are biased,” Keysar says. (Still, heavily accented statements were rated as less truthful.) The study did not address whether people perceive certain accents to be less credible because they are not used to hearing them. Media organizations, of course, could provide a means of exposure. In doing so, they might shift perception in the same way museums do when they introduce audiences to Abaporu and Tarsila do Amaral. Eventually, Americans might even end up hearing accents in an anthropophagical way: a voice consuming foreign influences and producing something new. In my piece that never aired, Stephanie D’Alessandro, cocurator of the exhibit, says: “I am at a point in my career and as an American that I think in 2018 we really need to be open to many other stories besides the stories that we know.” It now seems ironic that I ended that piece saying: “Sometimes it can take a while to get those stories told.” cjr

FIELD NOTES

CA REER PATH

Diversity as a Second Job

“

By Vann R. Newkirk II

s the sun set in Charlottesville, Virginia, two days after a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman, I ducked out of an event hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I ran past a statue of Robert E. Lee that, the previous day, had sparked protests and counterprotests, and headed to my car. There was plenty to do on the two-and-ahalf-hour drive across the hills to my home, in Washington, DC; I had to lay down a few voice notes with my observations about the people I’d met and the fears they’d expressed. I had to check in with my editors at The Atlantic. I had to call my wife and infant son to let them know that I was fine. And I had to find some way to decompress—to find a place to put the emotions that Klan robes, swastikas, and Confederate flags had unearthed. But first I had to do a few things for my “second job,” the collection of unspoken responsibilities involving diversity, inclusion, and development that I’ve inherited as a journalist of color. In the parking lot, I fired off a series of texts to other black journalists at The Atlantic, with whom I’d attended a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists the day before, in New Orleans. With my car’s air conditioning battling against August heat, I conducted an informal debrief on which promising black

place, by necessity, in the shadows. There are informal coffees, meetups, and Slack channels. This remains the case even as diversity has become a corporate buzzword that employers sense they must embrace. Why should the “second job” still be required?

journalists from the convention might come to work at the magazine. I then reached out to a larger group of writers of color, colleagues, friends, and people I mentor. This was another kind of debrief. Dozens of times, I sent the same question: “You okay?” By the time I got on the road, it was dark. It seemed a fitting moment for my second job to come into stark relief: NABJ was founded in 1975 as a collective of people working the same second job. The organization was an effort by black journalists who—with their own elbow grease and, more often than not, their own money— aimed to expand their ranks. They sought to do so even though it was a time when joining a black professional organization might have been dangerous for a career in lilywhite newsrooms. These journalists performed their second job while also working as reporters and editors to fearlessly peel back layers of racism and rot at America’s core—a job with its own attendant dangers. But the second job represented survival. Then, as now, America’s newsrooms woefully missed the mark not only when it came to the raw numeric measure of diversity, but also in terms of developing and promoting writers of color. Then, as now, journalists of color had to take a page from the playbook of the Carthaginian general Hannibal: either find a way or make one. Still today, they are usually uncompensated for this work, and much of it takes

ersonally, I have a flat spot right in the front of my head from trying to break down walls my entire career, forcing diversity of thought and opinion into newsrooms and onto the air.” That was how Gwen Ifill, a revered PBS NewsHour anchor who died in 2016, once encapsulated her life’s work. The league of women and people of color who were directly or indirectly inspired by her leadership is a who’s who of journalist superstars. Shortly after Ifill’s death, Kenya Downs, a NewsHour reporter, reflected in an open letter on what she owed her predecessor: “I promise to uphold your legacy by being a hand or a model for some other woman who one day may see me, or may see a woman who looks like me or like you, and know that she can too.” There are active and passive elements, Downs noted, to the roles played by unofficial ambassadors to marginalized communities. Visibility is itself important. For many of us, that means being seen doing work that addresses that very marginalization. But visibility also means assuming the pressures of being a kind of public face for everything our outlets do that remotely relates to race, gender, or sexual identity— good or bad. Active outreach, recruiting, networking, peer counseling, and even in-office conflict management are often daily duties, too. Flat spots, indeed. Second jobs beget second jobs. Downs wrote about the way in which Ifill not only connected networks of marginalized journalists, but also reached through time, expanding those connections exponentially.

Recruiting and mentoring two promising candidates means that those two can recruit four; then we get eight, and so on. At its best, this process means that the power of a lone journalist to effect change in newsrooms, in the course of a lifetime, is mathematically unbounded. But if newsrooms do not build viable pipelines to support those recruits, the result can be a bottleneck of frustration. Too often, young job candidates of color who have demonstrated initiative and talent are denied a chance to work alongside peers with shinier credentials. Too often, those who make it through the front doors of newsrooms find the paths to advancement closed. Journalists of color tend to earn less than their white colleagues—as several studies commissioned by unions at the largest newspapers in the country indicate—even as newsroom managers take credit for their diversitybolstering hires. And, factoring in the unpaid demands of work as

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unofficial diversity and inclusion liaisons, minority journalists might actually be working twice as hard for half as much money. The tragedy of the second job is that, most of the time, the people whose careers are propelled forward by the labor and assistance of other journalists of color find themselves trying to break down the same walls as their mentors. In theory, the second job should one day create the conditions in which journalists of color don’t have to do it. In reality, the necessity never ends.

f course, there’s an easy way to fix all of this. Outlets should hire more people of different ethnic backgrounds, aspire beyond “representativeness”—a low bar—and make genuine attempts to cater to communities of color. Outlets should pay their journalists wages on par with their white, male colleagues for their work, and they should provide ample mentoring

and opportunities for advancement. Contrary to popular belief, these things are not at all difficult—in fact, the presses and news stations run by and for communities of color have managed to do it throughout their histories without too much fuss. Further, savvy editors can supercharge the second job, providing formal support structures for journalists of color who choose—and the element of choice is critical—to bring their extracurricular talents to bear in the name of advancing the outlet and its journalism. My place of employment, The Atlantic, after responding to feedback from a handful of black journalists who were exhausted from their efforts during last year’s NABJ convention, has begun a concrete process to turn recommendations and informal mentoring into an official pipeline. After two New York Times writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ron Nixon, cofounded the Ida B. Wells Society, to train and support aspiring investigative journalists, the Times signed on as a partner with the group. These efforts are a start for translating moral support into material support. There are more distant frontiers that aren’t beyond reach, such as directly compensating journalists for their efforts to diversify their workplace or mentor others. Today, as journalists find themselves without guaranteed protection from discriminatory policies, and attacks on the free press—including those from the highest levels of government—have become more common, communities of color are particularly at risk. I find my own second job as urgent as ever. I read clips and identify rising stars. I reach out to those reporters. I mentor more students than I probably have time for—several times a week, I distribute how-to guides for pitching and send feedback on resumes—and I continue to check in with colleagues, as I did a year ago in Charlottesville. The second job is fulfilling because we are

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building something. We are building structures of resilience that are broad and deep, designed to weather any coming storm. All of journalism has

been constructed at least partially on support structures, and all of journalism chooses to ignore the second jobs that built them at its own peril. cjr

BE ATS

Where Food Writing Leads

By Mayukh Sen

n the winter of 1994, Dorothy Kalins decided that she was so bored with food magazines that she would start her own. “They were just totally deracinated,” Kalins recalls of the “Big Three”—Condé Nast’s sibling publications, Bon Appétit and Gourmet, and Food & Wine. “They were removed from the roots of the food.” Kalins, a former editor-in-chief of Metropolitan Home, found the magazines’ collective sensibility service-oriented to a fault, pushing “dopey” stories with spreads about “six ways to make pork chops and low-fat cassoulet.” Recipes were the grist; occasional sojourns to faraway lands were mostly in Europe, if writers dared to leave the country at all. Kalins had a vision of a better way. “We would go to the ends of the Earth and shoot the food coming out of the kitchen of the people who cooked it,” she says. Her new magazine, Saveur, launched that May. The masthead was small and uniformly white, but Kalins was determined to cover food cultures that a white American readership may have previously seen as esoteric. Leaf through the first issues and you’ll find stories about a family of tea farmers in China’s Fujian province, spices of the city of Madras in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a diaristic account of a trip to the Moroccan city of Tangier. Saveur’s first cover story was devoted to Oaxacan cooking. In it, the writer, Peggy Knickerbocker, goes out of her way to dispel antiquated American notions of Mexican food: “Mole is not, contrary to popular opinion, ‘chicken in chocolate sauce.’” Over seven years at Saveur, Kalins, who left the magazine in 2001 to become the executive editor of Newsweek, noticed the Big Three begin to absorb her magazine’s editorial DNA. Kalins and her team had positioned food at the center of culture; under Saveur’s influence, food writing expanded its purview. But the same period also ushered the demise of the glossy food magazine. Gourmet published its last print issue in 2009; Food & Wine may be better known today for its yearly festival in Aspen than its magazine. Bon Appétit remains in existence, though Condé Nast cut it back to 10 issues per year. In place of the Big Three, however, there has been a digital democratization of food writing—Eater, part of Vox Media; Munchies, of Vice; Food52, a site for home cooks that also has an e-commerce arm; and Civil Eats, a daily news website. In 2011, Lucky Peach, David Chang’s print magazine, flipped

the idea of the glossy food magazine on its head, devoting entire issues to ramen and breakfast. Food writing has gradually become something more journalists want to do, a new way to tell stories about culture. I began to see a space for myself in this industry when I read Eater’s “Life in Chains” series; each essay is achingly personal and tethered to a writer’s experiences in an American chain restaurant. John DeVore, in “Finding Home at Taco Bell,” writes lucidly about his affinity for what some could dismiss as a “garish facsimile of an entire nation’s culture”— an attraction informed by his tangled relationship to his mother and his Mexican heritage. When I read Lucky Peach, I was captivated by John Birdsall’s essay about modern American food’s gay male innovators, and Kevin Pang’s essay on the need for more humane prison food. The magazine folded in 2017, but its impact has remained powerful. When, in 2016, an editor at Food52 contacted me about a staff writer position, I saw an opportunity to tell stories like these—reported essays that brush up against the politics of identity and inequality. Although I maintained some skepticism—I still perceived the food world to be the domain of the white and moneyed, of which I am neither—I knew that, in its finest form, food writing could function as both vivid storytelling and bracing cultural critique. I decided to take the job.

n November 3, 2016, I published a feature on Food52 about Madhur Jaffrey, America’s foremost authority on Indian cooking. We made a point of running the story days before the election, so that it wouldn’t get lost. Looking back, I wonder what traction the story would have gotten had we published it later. After the electoral votes were counted, the story of Jaffrey, a woman of color

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5 2 1 6 3

1 Fischer-Baum, Reuben, Aaron Gordon, and Billy Haisley. “Which Words Are Used To Describe White And Black NFL Prospects?” Deadspin, May 8, 2014 2 Phillips, Carron J. “NBA Draft Coverage Is Full of Coded Language and Lazy, Borderline Racist Comparisons.” New York Daily News, June 23, 2017. 3 Deadspin 4 Deadspin 5 McGrath, Dan. “A Diagnosis, as LeBron Fever Sweeps the City.” The New York Times. June 24, 2010. 6 Tyler Eastman, Susan, and Andrew C. Billings. “Biased Voices of Sports: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in College Basketball Announcing.” Howard Journal of Communications 12, no. 4, 183-201. Accessed November 10, 2010. 7 Machado, Yolanda quoted by Anderson, Tre’vell. “‘There Is Room for Everyone’: 14 Film Critics on Making Media More Inclusive.” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2018.

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8 Ellwood, Mark. “How To Get an Authentic Experience Every Time You Travel.” Bloomberg, February 15, 2017. 9 Jet, Johnny. “8 Exotic Places That Are Easier to Get To Than You Think.” Forbes, October 26, 2017. 10 Larsen, Reif. “Finding Yourself in Los Angeles.” The New York Times. Accessed July 23, 2018. 11 Mazhar, Nasir quoted by Stansfield, Ted. “Nasir Mazhar: Just Don’t Call It Streetwear.” Dazed, January 6, 2016. 12 Bain, Marc. “Why Isn’t Streetwear Just Called Fashion?” Quartz, January 7, 2018.

and an immigrant, had newfound political relevance almost overnight. Over the next year, through my conversations with food writers and editors of color, it became apparent that Trump’s victory had made food publications wake up. Food writers of color told me that they were startled by the degree to which editors asked them to write about their identities. “The election was a weird turning point for a lot of publications,” Amanda Kludt, the editor-in-chief of Eater, says, as we discuss the hiring of writers of color. “I think it’s been a gradual understanding that it’s not just the right thing to do, but if you’re looking at your own self-interest, you want to reach as many people as possible and reach as many parts of the country as possible.” But sometimes this came to feel like a burden, as journalists were asked to serve as interlocutors for an otherwise uninformed audience. “There were a lot of struggles to understand myself for most of my life,” Nneka M. Okona, an Atlantabased food and travel writer who is Nigerian American, says. “Food was my pathway to beginning to find my way, beginning to accept myself. But only writing pieces that delved into the pain of that began to feel really exploitative after a while.” Other journalists express frustration with editors’ misplaced expectations. “They want it from their perspective,” Korsha Wilson, who writes about food media, race, and class, says. “They want me to be the face of it, but when it comes time for me to tell it from my point of view, they’re like, no, no, we wanted you tell it how we would tell it, but black.” To see more work by writers of color gain traction is exhilarating, but it can also seem a touch reactive— something that could be slotted in as a temporary solution to a broader national crisis. These companies might be well-intentioned in their efforts, but on the

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Beyond the moral imperative, commissioning writers of color is a shrewd business decision.

masthead level, there isn’t always an infrastructure to support diverse storytelling in a consistent way. Today, when catastrophe strikes, it usually arrives in the form of misguided coverage that brings to the fore the homogeneity of staffs. “It can be very difficult when you’re working with an editor who doesn’t understand cultural nuances,” Nicole Taylor, who has written for The New York Times and Esquire, says.

“I realize that I sometimes have to fight for certain phrases or things. A lot of times, the editor just doesn’t know that.” A notable editorial lapse came in August 2017, in the Times coverage of Taiwanese bubble tea. The piece, which ran in the Business section, originally had the headline, “The Blobs in Your Tea? They’re Supposed to Be There,” presupposing an audience utterly dumbstruck by the concept of tapioca balls floating in tea despite decades of market saturation in America. “Remember the first time you went to a Starbucks, and had no idea what to do?” Joanne Kaufman asked in the first version of the article. “These days, bubble tea, an Asian import, seems to be going through the same consumer learning curve, as entrepreneurs bring their exotic menus to malls and big American cities.” Blowback on social media to the article was swift; readers pilloried the Times for framing bubble tea as peculiar and unfamiliar to the American palate when, for many readers, it was anything but. The response resulted in a mea culpa from the paper a day later; describing tapioca balls as “blobs,” editors confessed, framed the drink as “strange and alien.” A misstep can also take the form of a tone-deaf tweet: in August 2018 Food & Wine called concha, a Mexican sweetbread whose grooves resemble those of a seashell, a “brioche-like roll.” The phrase relies on a Eurocentric point of cultural comparison, using the name of a French pastry to describe a Mexican confection that the tweet doesn’t even name. (The next day, the site’s senior audience engagement editor, Meg Clark, said on Twitter that she was “deeply sorry and will do better in the future.”) “We’re very much still in this responsive, reactionary moment,” Stephen Satterfield, the founder and editor of Whetstone magazine, a print quarterly, says. “There is a

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newness to this so-called diversity for these publications.” Satterfield, who is black, launched Whetstone in 2017 with an IndieGoGo campaign. Frustrated with traditional, predominantly white, publications, he wanted to create space for writers to examine “the origins of the things we eat and drink, seeking to better understand people through their food and traditions.” Beyond the moral imperative, commissioning writers of color is a shrewd business decision, Satterfield says; if food publications can’t diversify the tenor of their coverage, they risk not engaging a potentially vibrant segment of readers. That compromises their bottom lines. Watching food media over the past couple years, he says, does not make him optimistic. “I need to be convinced that this isn’t just reflective of a business opportunity through the lens of contemporary conversation—this moment that can be capitalized on.”

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hen I joined Food52, I was the lone person of color on a masthead of seven white women. I wondered how I would fit in. It is a question I continue to grapple with, among others: Who gets centered in the narratives that food media peddles? How much does that have to do with what mastheads look like, and who the people on those mastheads imagine their audiences to be? In February 2017, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the cofounders of Food52, issued a statement about the ways in which the company intended to redress a lack of racial equality in its workplace. The letter stated that the company was, at the time, 92 percent white. In January 2018, they published a follow-up letter updating readers on the progress of their efforts, stating that their staff had been reduced to being 76 percent white. Less clear was the effect that change had on what

stories the site published. “I feel a great responsibility, especially as a queer person of color, to commission and publish writers who represent a wide variety of races, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds every week,” Eric Kim, now a senior editor at Food52, says. He adds that he has received “a hundred percent support from everyone” for this mission, and that half of his hiring committee was comprised of people of color. I left Food52 in October 2017 another writing job, and have since gone freelance. This past April, I won a James Beard award for a profile I had written for Food52 on Princess Pamela, a black Southern woman who owned two soul food restaurants in New York City then vanished. Another winner was Osayi Endolyn, for her column in the Southern Foodways Alliance’s quarterly print magazine Gravy, where she served as deputy editor. (She has left that job.) Endolyn, who is black, stresses that both she and I were on the mastheads of the publications for which

we won awards—a position that gave us a degree of power to fight for our stories. She doubts that her writing— charged, honest, often describing being gawked at by white waitstaffs—would have been published otherwise. “What it means to be nominated for an award like that is that you first had the opportunity to write those pieces,” she says. “The awards are only so much an indicator of change as the pool of pieces there are to choose from.” As we look forward to where food writing can go, I am skeptical about whether publications can expand their editorial purviews rapidly enough to reach the same audiences they may have once alienated. I fear that the level of recognition bestowed by the James Beard Awards will fade. I can only hope that food media does not fall back on the tendencies that once jolted a generation of editors like Dorothy Kalins to act. We can’t forget how much what we eat tells us about the world. cjr

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JO B MARKET

The First Choice By Rebecca Carroll

didn’t set out to become a journalist, but I have always loved language and the power of storytelling. At 6 years old, I wrote and performed a one-woman show, about a vibrant young woman who lived alone and dusted her bookshelves all day with great focus and care; my parents gave it five out of five stars. For a while, I thought I might become a playwright or a screenwriter. (I still think I might.) I lived in a small New Hampshire town where I was the only black person for miles around, and I had an intense desire to not merely know what was going on in the world outside, but to be of that world—and others of my creation. Storytelling was how I could enter, marvel at, and thrive in those worlds. Every Sunday, my parents would go down to the local grocery store to pick up The New York Times. Unfolding its inky and cumbersome layers, I perused the news stories, but I was drawn most to the texture and nuance of the Arts & Leisure section. I’d delight in the open secret of searching Al Hirschfeld’s theater caricatures for “Nina” (his daughter’s name). Then I’d move on to Style, the magazine, and finally, the Book Review. I interpreted none of this as capital-J journalism, but rather as access to a broader, more astute guide to cultural relevance. The Times was then, oddly, a kind of aspirational genre to me, not in the how, but in the what. What I couldn’t have known, or challenged, when I was growing up, was the extent to which the commitment of the Times to “objectivity”

upheld America’s status quo. And so, as I read, I was effectively learning to internalize the normalcy, as a black girl in this country, of not being seen. On its own, the meaning of the word objectivity is fairly straightforward, demonstrating a lack of bias or prejudice. But when paired with journalism, it becomes a matter of priority: the selection of what’s worthy of coverage and whose stories are valuable. Setting priorities requires gatekeepers, and in the field of journalism, gatekeepers were— and still are—disproportionately white men. This worked out pretty nicely if you were a white journalist who wanted to push a white agenda because, in the rules of dyed-inthe-wool journalism, objectivity always was the white agenda. Less convenient for black journalists interested in, say, racial justice or a full representation of black life. To this day, black journalists are too easily dismissed as “race warriors” incapable of distancing ourselves from systemic racism. Meanwhile, choices about what gets covered of the black community too often perpetuate a notion that we are a monolith, connected to the same, singular experience.

went to the University of New Hampshire for three semesters, and while I was there, I wrote for the college newspaper. The school was demographically representative of the state: out of 10,000 students, roughly 33 were black, including me. My editor was white. My pitches for stories about the need for a black

student union, the history of black presence on campus, and racial profiling were routinely rejected for not appealing to enough of the student body. But could I do a story on the black students who had defied all odds to attend UNH on basketball scholarships? Or perhaps I’d like to write about my own beleaguered experience in a personal essay? Clearly, to my white editor’s mind, what I was proposing was not journalism—not “objective” reporting— it was personal-interest storytelling. I finished college across the state line, at Hampshire College, with a degree in literary journalism. By then, I had become enamored of New York magazine and the Clay Felkerian model of literary journalism— intellectually irreverent and lush with humorous insights and experiences. It was called New Journalism, developed in the ’60s and ’70s as a kind of counter to traditional, objective journalism. The writing was provocative and conversational, often the product of extensive interviews and months-long research. It provided an opportunity to be fully ensconced in the rhythm and tenor of its subjects. It was the kind of journalism I longed to pursue. But it was a paradoxical calling: there were no black writers at New York and seldom any stories that centered black culture. New Journalism, despite being a kind of rebel movement, was steered almost entirely by white men—writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Pete Hamill. Later, Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem were allowed into the club. But whether objective or subjectively objective, capital- or lowercase-J, this journalism consistently demonstrated that it was synonymous with “what matters to white men.” I used my college thesis, a collection of single-voice narrative interviews with black women writers, to sign with a book agent. She sold my idea

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to a major publisher. It seemed I might be on the path to making a dent in the world of New Journalism. But between 1994, when my first book was published, and 2012, I sent probably more than half a dozen cover letters, resumes, writing samples, and references to New York for various writing and editing jobs. Sometimes I would get an interview, most of the time not. I was never hired.

Here’s the thing: neither traditional journalism nor New Journalism has ever been for us, black people.

ven if New Journalism offered a better model for black journalists, it has remained largely unwelcoming. This antipathy came on display in 2016, when, during a writers conference, Talese made a comment about not being able to identify any women writers who inspired him. An inevitable Twitter storm ensued, and Talese was dragged for being sexist and tonedeaf by, among others, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times journalist. In an interview about the event and her comments, Hannah-Jones said that after his talk, Talese had pressed her about how she got her job with the Times. (The following year she would receive the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”) When the Times covered the controversy, its own struggles with objectivity were laid bare; Talese was quoted calling Hannah-Jones “duplicitous,” which elicited criticism from readers. Dean Baquet, who had become the paper’s first African-American executive editor two years prior, issued a statement on the article. “Nikole was treated unfairly,” he wrote. “Too often, we are clumsy in handling issues of race and gender and this story was another unfortunate example. We have made strides in our coverage and culture, but the best solution is to continue building a more diverse, inclusive newsroom.” (Baquet may have been referring to the fact that, not long after he took

the helm, in a review, Alessandra Stanley referred to Shonda Rhimes as an “Angry Black Woman” and described Viola Davis, the star of How To Get Away With Murder, as “a performer who is older, darkerskinned and less classically beautiful.”) Since Baquet became executive editor, there has still been deeply problematic, if not openly racist, coverage of black people, and fairly few black journalists guiding coverage—Monica Drake, who was appointed assistant managing editor early this year, is the first African-American woman on the paper’s masthead. After the 2016 election, the Times labored for an uncomfortably long time over whether or not to label President Trump, with his well-documented history of racism, a racist. The Times continues to use euphemisms like “racially charged” to describe events that were clearly racist. It’s a demoralizing observation to bear as a black reader, and an almost impossible reality to navigate as a black journalist. Here’s the thing: neither traditional journalism nor New Journalism has ever been for us, black people. Howard French, in a 2016 piece for The Guardian, writes movingly about his experience as a young black

reporter starting out at the Times, but he also offers a clear account of our lack of representation in the industry: “Naturally enough, the history of black people in journalism shadows the history of race in America itself, which across the ages has slowly and ever reluctantly ceded space to people of African ancestry,” he explains. “In the public sphere, this happened first in entertainment, meaning song and dance, then in sport, all areas where black people still enjoy heavily disproportionate representation. The opening eventually reached journalism, which for most of its history in America had been a strictly segregated industry.” And if journalism remains segregated, can we call it objective? Two years ago, I finally had a piece published in New York—a Q&A with Van Jones, a CNN commentator. The article was well received, and I felt readers got something out of the conversation that they might not have with a different (white) interviewer. But I wasn’t the magazine’s first choice. At the bottom of the initial query from the editor, I saw a prior email thread that had likely not been forwarded to me intentionally: the writer originally assigned the interview was a regular New York contributor whose byline I recognized—a white guy. There was no indication of whether he withdrew voluntarily or if there was another reason for changing writers. But it struck a loud and familiar chord. New York has published more black writers in the past few years, yet the staff is still predominantly white and the editorial vision is established through a white lens. The first choice of white editors for a writer to conduct a Q&A on a black public figure, for a special issue reflecting on America’s first black presidency, had been a white man. That promises something neither new nor objective. Maybe it’s time for an overall, new journalistic blueprint. cjr

n 1979, the American Society of News Editors pledged that, by the year 2000, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in newsrooms would match that of the population at large. Noting that this was “the right thing to do” and in the “industry’s economic self-interest,” ASNE stressed the particular importance of lifting people of color into management. Newspapers have failed spectacularly at achieving that goal. According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 10 percent of newspaper leadership. Despite being in majorityminority cities, the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are both 81 percent white while The Washington Post is 70 percent white. Minorities make up 72 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but only 33 percent of the Los Angeles Times. According to the Radio Television Digital News Association, the numbers in other media look slightly better, if still not impressive: in 2018, about a quarter of staffers in TV newsrooms are people of color; in radio, it’s 11.7 percent. The American Society of Magazine Editors doesn’t track racial and ethnic diversity, though its industry’s mastheads remain stacked with old white men. The structural forces that contribute to the problem are well-known and largely reflect how race and privilege intersect. The main entry points into the profession—unpaid internships and journalism schools— tend to favor people who come from wealthy backgrounds.

Many jobs are never posted; hires are made through existing networks, in which people tend to affiliate, and empathize, with those like themselves. When people of color do manage to get hired, they find a lack of formal mentorship and they are infrequently promoted into management positions. When job cuts come along—in the past 10 years, the newspaper workforce has been sliced in half— minorities are often among the first to go. The solutions to these problems are also well-known. Trade groups and minority journalist organizations have issued report after report, recommendation after recommendation, about how to make journalism more inclusive. Among the editors-in-chief at media outlets that have succeeded in cultivating diverse staffs—and in turn, telling rich stories about life in America that draw broad audiences—the key, they say, is leadership. “It’s not up to people of color to do this work alone,” Dodai Stewart, the former editor-inchief of Splinter News and a vocal advocate for diversity in media, says. “The people who have the power are the ones who need to fix this.’” But white editors can be afraid. Most “teachable moments” about diversity in journalism, she points out, are the major coverage blunders—The New York Times profile of Michael Brown, a teenager shot and killed by police, referring to him as “no angel;” The Hollywood Reporter cover story on the “great eight” actresses in cinema that only featured white women—and the enormous blowback generated on social media. “Basically, editors don’t want to be singled out as racist and have the Twitter mob come after them; they don’t want to

be politically incorrect,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of Teen Vogue, says. Alas, there is no primer for talking about diversity. “People in positions of power in media have to check their privilege and be willing to listen to people of color, to be open and non-defensive, to be willing to be wrong,” Mukhopadhyay says. “That’s rare in this profession because the higher up you go, the more right you think you are about everything, and the more you surround yourself with yes men.” “It’s very hard for white men in positions of power to relinquish—or even recognize— their privilege,” Meredith Talusan, the executive editor at Them, an intersectional queer publication launched by Condé Nast last fall, tells CJR. “It requires white, male editors to be aware that they likely got to where they are not strictly because of merit.” Part of the corrective, Talusan says, extends beyond professional circles. “To empathize with people who are not like you— to really see them—you have to become their friends.” Racial and ethnic minorities are projected to overtake whites in America by 2045. For news organizations, a lack of diversity is a matter of social fairness and of relevance. Job applicants with the top credentials—Ivy League degrees, internships at prestigious publications, recommendations from prominent editors—will most often be white, but hiring managers would be wise to consider the life experiences of people of color, who have insight and access that others don’t. Ultimately, the value of diversity to journalism is not about skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. It’s about the stories people can tell. In 1979, the American Society of

News Editors pledged that, by the year 2000, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in newsrooms would match that of the population at large. Noting that this was “the right thing to do” and in the “industry’s economic self-interest,” ASNE stressed the particular importance of lifting people of color into management. Newspapers have failed spectacularly at achieving that goal. According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 10 percent of newspaper leadership. Despite being in majorityminority cities, the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are both 81 percent white while The Washington Post is 70 percent white. Minorities make up 72 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but only 33 percent of the Los Angeles Times. According to the Radio Television Digital News Association, the numbers in other media look slightly better, if still not impressive: in 2018, about a quarter of staffers in TV newsrooms are people of color; in radio, it’s 11.7 percent. The American Society of Magazine Editors doesn’t track racial and ethnic diversity, though its industry’s mastheads remain stacked with old white men. The structural forces that contribute to the problem are well-known and largely reflect how race and privilege intersect. The main entry points into the profession—unpaid internships and journalism schools— tend to favor people who come from wealthy backgrounds. Many jobs are never posted; hires are made through existing

networks, in which people tend to affiliate, and empathize, with those like themselves. When people of color do manage to get hired, they find a lack of formal mentorship and they are infrequently promoted into management positions. When job cuts come along—in the past 10 years, the newspaper workforce has been sliced in half— minorities are often among the first to go. The solutions to these problems are also well-known. Trade groups and minority journalist organizations have issued report after report, recommendation after recommendation, about how to make journalism more inclusive. Among the editors-in-chief at media outlets that have succeeded in cultivating diverse staffs—and in turn, telling rich stories about life in America that draw broad audiences—the key, they say, is leadership. “It’s not up to people of color to do this work alone,” Dodai Stewart, the former editor-inchief of Splinter News and a vocal advocate for diversity in media, says. “The people who have the power are the ones who need to fix this.’” But white editors can be afraid. Most “teachable moments” about diversity in journalism, she points out, are the major coverage blunders—The New York Times profile of Michael Brown, a teenager shot and killed by police, referring to him as “no angel;” The Hollywood Reporter cover story on the “great eight” actresses in cinema that only featured white women—and the enormous blowback generated on social media.“Basically, editors don’t want to be singled out as racist and have the Twitter mob come after them; they don’t want to be politically incorrect,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive

GABRIEL ARANA

AUTHOR

Gabriel Arana ILLUSTRATOR

Mona Chalabi

In 1979, the American Society of News Editors pledged that, by the year 2000, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in newsrooms would match that of the population at large. Noting that this was “the right thing to do” and in the “industry’s economic selfinterest,” ASNE stressed the particular importance of lifting people of color into management. Newspapers have failed spectacularly at achieving that goal. According to the Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities comprise almost 40 percent of the US population, yet they make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications, and only 13 percent of newspaper leadership. Despite being in majority-minority cities, the newsrooms of The New York

Times and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are both 81 percent white. The Washington Post is 70 percent white. Minorities make up 72 percent of the population of Los Angeles, but only 33 percent of the Los Angeles Times. According to the Radio Television Digital News Association, the numbers in other media look slightly better, if still not impressive: in 2018, about a quarter of staffers in TV newsrooms are people of color; in radio, it’s 11.7 percent. The American Society of Magazine Editors doesn’t track racial and ethnic diversity, though its industry’s mastheads remain stacked with old white men. »

CJR

Checking the boxes Percent people of color by medium, 2017 US Population

Percent people of color in US: 37.1%

Percent people of color in radio: 11.7%

Percent people of color in daily newspapers: 16.3%

Percent people of color in online news sites: 24.3%

Percent people of color in TV: 24.4% SO U RC E : AS N E , U S C E N SU S B U R E AU, RT D N A

DATA COMPILED BY

Denise Southwood and Andrew McCormick

he structural forces that contribute to the problem are well-known and largely reflect how race and privilege intersect. The main entry points into the profession—unpaid internships and journalism schools—tend to favor people who come from wealthy backgrounds. Many jobs are never posted; hires are made through existing networks, in which people tend to affiliate, and empathize, with those like themselves. When people of color do manage to get hired, they find a lack of formal mentorship and they are infrequently promoted into management positions. When job cuts come along—in the past 10 years, the newspaper workforce has been sliced in half—minorities are often among the first to go. The solutions to these problems are also well-known. Trade groups and minority journalist organizations have issued report after report, recommendation after recommendation, about how to make journalism more inclusive. Among the editors-in-chief at media outlets that have succeeded in cultivating diverse staffs—and in turn, telling rich stories about life in America that draw broad audiences—the key, they say, is leadership. “It’s not up to people of color to do this work alone,” Dodai Stewart, a deputy Metro editor at The New York Times and a vocal advocate for diversity in media, says. “The people who have the power are the ones who need to fix this.’” But white editors can be afraid. Most “teachable moments” about diversity in journalism, she points out, are the major coverage blunders—The New York Times profile of Michael Brown, a teenager shot and killed by police, referring to him as “no angel”; The Hollywood Reporter cover story on the “great eight” actresses in cinema that only featured white women—and the enormous blowback generated on social media. “Basically, editors don’t want to be singled out as racist and have the Twitter mob come after them; they don’t want to be politically incorrect,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor of Teen Vogue, says. Alas, there is no primer for talking about diversity. “People in positions of power in media have to check their privilege and be willing to listen to people of color, to be open and non-defensive, to be willing to be

GABRIEL ARANA

The Wall Street Journal

Vox Media

In 2017, as part of a WSJ2020 initiative to modernize its newsroom, nearly all of the Journal’s leaders had to reapply for their positions. The goal, according to Karen Pensiero, the managing editor, was to create transparency. “Where newsrooms can get into trouble is if it’s not an open and even playing field.” She says the shakeup, which created new positions and altered existing ones, “changed conversations.” Still, the Journal’s overall percentage of minority employees has budged a mere 2 percent between 2001 and 2017, and only 4 percent among leaders.

“We need to be willing and open to admitting when we’ve made missteps and make changes to adapt and learn from those mistakes,” Melissa Bell, the publisher of Vox, says. Vox meticulously tracks diversity on staff—as well as the reasons people leave—and has implemented quarterly surveys to gauge whether people of color on staff feel included in the organization. The company also offers formal training to managers on inclusion and diversity. These efforts appear to have paid off: since Vox was founded, in 2015, the percentage of minorities at the publication has approximately doubled.

90%

26+29+ 74+V 37+ 71+V 63+V 26%

100%

editorial staff who are people of color

Newsroom staff who are white

29%

newsroom managers who are people of color

80%

37%

new hires who are people of color

SO U RC E : VOX M E D I A

HuffPost

70%

“Folks don’t really know how to talk honestly about diversity,” Lydia Polgreen, the editor-in-chief of HuffPost, says. “Editors don’t even necessarily feel they have the language to talk about what their goals are, the terms to use.” HuffPost did not make available information about its newsroom demographics. According to CJR’s analysis of its published masthead, diversity in its newsroom lags behind its digital-only peers. Polgreen stressed that it’s up to hiring managers to solve the problem. “If you’re a senior leader who really wants to make journalism better and more inclusive, you need to educate yourself.”

60%

50%

40%

Newsroom leaders who are... 30%

White

20%

10%

Asian Newsroom staff who are black

Black

2001 2017 SO U RC E : AS N E

Other

SO U RC E : CJ R A N A LYS I S

CJR

wrong,” Mukhopadhyay says. “That’s rare in this profession because the higher up you go, the more right you think you are about everything, and the more you surround yourself with yes men.” “It’s very hard for white men in positions of power to relinquish—or even recognize—their privilege,” Meredith Talusan, the executive editor at Them, an intersectional queer publication launched by Condé Nast last fall, tells CJR. “It requires white, male editors to be aware that they likely got to where they are not strictly because of merit.” Part of the corrective, Talusan says, extends beyond professional circles. “To empathize with people who are not like you—to really see them—you have to become their friends.” Racial and ethnic minorities are projected to overtake whites in America by 2045. For news organizations, a lack of diversity is a matter of social fairness and of relevance. Job applicants with the top credentials—Ivy League degrees, internships at prestigious publications, recommendations from prominent editors—will most often be white, but hiring managers would be wise to consider the life experiences of people of color, who have insight and access that others don’t. Ultimately, the value of diversity to journalism is not about skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. It’s about the stories people can tell. cjr

The Washington Post

The New York Times

Since 2013, when Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought the Post, the paper has undergone a hiring spree. Tracy Grant, the managing editor for hiring and development, ethics, and standards, says that it’s easier to diversify an organization when it’s expanding rather than contracting. “I have enormous compassion for colleagues in this space who are not adding jobs,” Grant says. “The reality of it is that it’s really hard work, and it’s impossible to do when your newsroom is shrinking or not growing. Diversity is essential to newsrooms and yet in that environment, it can feel like a luxury that people can’t afford.”

In 2017, Carolyn Ryan was promoted to assistant managing editor and tasked with overseeing a surge of hiring that brought in around 200 people. “You have to be flexible in looking at their skillset and what they can bring to you rather than this anachronistic notion of who’s going to fit in your culture,” she says. Diversity at the Times has inched forward a mere 3 percent over the past 16 years. Diversity among leadership, however, jumped from 10 percent who were people of color in 2001 to 19 percent in 2017.

80+69+ 20+V 31+V 84+81+ 16+V 19+V 80%

newsroom staff in 2001 who were white

69%

newsroom staff in 2017 who were white

SO U RC E : AS N E

84%

newsroom staff in 2001 who were white

81%

newsroom staff in 2017 who were white

SO U RC E : AS N E

GABRIEL ARANA

Years of failure Percent people of color in media, 2005–2017 40%

30%

20%

TV Online news

10%

Newspapers

Radio

SO U RC E : AS N E , RT D N A

BuzzFeed News

NPR

In conversations about journalism’s struggles to diversify, one often hears of a “pipeline problem.” But Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, thinks that newsroom leaders are simply not availing themselves of the extensive talent that’s out there. “If you’re not hiring a diverse pool, you almost have to go out of your way because there’s a very diverse pool of talented reporters and talented mid-career reporters,” Smith says. BuzzFeed is the rare media outlet where diversity on staff matches that of the US population.

“One of the things that has happened at NPR over the last few years that any organization can implement is simple attention to the hiring pool,” Keith Woods, the vice president for newsroom training and diversity, says. More and more, he’ll find hiring managers “pushing back on the idea that it’s okay to go forward when there are no women or people of color.” Still, the number of minorities at NPR has remained flat. In an annual internal diversity report, Christopher Turpin, the editorial director, noted that NPR has “done a very bad job” recruiting Latinxs, who make up only 6 percent of newsroom employees.

68+62+ 32+V 38+V 23+25+ 77+V 75+V 68%

editorial staff in 2014 who were white

62%

editorial staff in 2017 who were white

SO U RC E : B UZ Z F E E D

23%

editorial staff in 2012 who were people of color

25%

editorial staff in 2017 who were people of color

SO U RC E : N P R

CJR

In 2017, only 25.5% of news organizations reported having at least one person of color among their top three editors. Yet newsrooms are more diverse than they were 20 years ago. Hosts or anchors who are people of color

People of color who host a weekday primetime show

0 33+67+V 33%

0 25+75+V 25%

31+69+V 31%

SO U RC E : CJ R A N A LYS I S

MSNBC

In 2015, when executives aimed to dampen MSNBC’s reputation for liberalism, several shows hosted by people of color were cancelled. Some outside critics mourned their loss. “Diversity always presents challenges and opportunities,” Yvette Miley, the senior vice president of NBC News and MSNBC, says. “The problem sometimes becomes when we think diversity is a fixed point on a map—it is not. Diversity is demographics that are constantly changing and you always have to evolve your newsroom in front of the camera and behind the scenes.”

Fox News

Kevin Lord, the executive vice president for human resources at Fox News, says that the company’s recruitment process “ensures hiring managers have a diverse slate” of candidates and uses what’s called “competencybased interviewing” in an effort to weed out unconscious bias. During daytime programming, Harris Faulkner is the only African-American woman employed as an anchor for two hours of news on any of the major networks, Lord points out. But no person of color hosts a show during weekday primetime—the period when ratings are highest and networks put forth name-brand talent.

CNN

“There’s no confusion that diversity equals great business,” Ramon Escobar, CNN’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, talent recruitment, and development, says. As with its two other major competitors, however, minority representation among on-air talent stands at about half its rate in the general population. The network’s lack of diversity has been a flashpoint. In August, Soledad O’Brien, a former CNN host, replied on Twitter to a story about lack of diversity in the White House: “walk me through the senior black staff at @CNNPolitics or @cnn.” There are no people of color among the network’s senior leaders. “We have put a lot of people in place now that we’re developing as the next generation of anchors,” Escobar says.

GABRIEL ARANA

Slate

The New Yorker

“The difficulty with The New Yorker pre-internet was that you really needed people who could immediately write 5,000 to 10,000-word pieces,” David Remnick, the editor, says. “That takes a long time to cultivate.” According to the magazine’s tally, over the past five years, nearly half of the annual contracts it has offered—many of which are primarily for writing published online— have been to people of color. “The web has probably allowed us to hire, or at least publish, new people a little bit more quickly,” Remnick says. “It has a lot of short-form possibilities where people can grow, develop.”

100%

In 2014, soon after being named editor-in-chief of Slate, Julia Turner sat down with a group of staffers to talk about diversity. Among people of color, all said they had found their jobs through posted listings; the white staffers had all been told about openings by a friend. “It was eyeopening,” she recalls. Turner, who in October announced she would be departing for a new position at the Los Angeles Times, presided over a sharp jump in the percentage of minorities during her three years at the helm.

90%

Newsroom staff in 2015 who were white

80%

90%

76%

70% 60%

Writers hired in the past five years who are people of color

50%

46%

40% 30% 20% 10%

Newsroom staff in 2018 who were white

Staff writers and regular contributors who are people of color

19%

234

SO U RC E : T H E N E W YO R K E R

SO U RC E : S L AT E

Number of newsrooms that completed ASNE’s voluntary survey of diversity in 2018— out of nearly 1,700.

L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E SS

34 CJR

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

The past and future of America’s black press

We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause

AUTHOR

Alexandria Neason

n the sixties, the population of Clarksville, a small town in East Texas, was 70 percent white and 30 percent black. The area’s economy, long dependent on agriculture, was expanding to include manufacturing, but more than half of Red River County—of which Clarksville is the county seat—lived below the poverty line. In 1965, the Clarksville Housing Authority put up a series of housing projects: two buildings for black tenants and a third for white people. It was a deliberate sorting. Not long after residents had settled in, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into effect the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which held that the Department of Housing and Urban Development could no longer tolerate racial discrimination in the sale and rental of federally subsidized homes. Over the next decade, the law was tacked onto a growing list of milestones; we were post Brown v. Board of Education, post Civil Rights Act, post Voting Rights Act, post Fair Housing Act and, ostensibly, post-integration. Not in Clarksville, however. Not even close. Clarksville was divided by Main Street; black residents lived in a small area on the north side, which their white neighbors referred

to using a racial slur. A monument in the town square was dedicated “In Memory of Our Confederate Soldiers.” The town’s public housing had become, like other projects across the country, essentially a legally tolerated apartheid system: the white projects, on paved, well-maintained streets, had ranch-style buildings and manicured lawns; the black housing, on unpaved streets, had cracked floors, unvented wall heaters, and decrepit kitchens. On March 14, 1980, Lucille Young and Virginia Wyatt, two black women, sued the local housing authority and HUD. Young, a mother of six, and Wyatt, a mother of five, had applied for public housing in 1975 and 1978, respectively. Represented by East Texas Legal Services, Young and Wyatt, who had sought residence at the white buildings and were left to languish on a waiting list, asked that the court issue injunctions to grant them entry. East Texas Legal Services arranged for the suit to be a class action, seeking relief for some 40,000 black households in South Texas. US District Court Judge William Wayne Justice approved the request. Three years later, Clarksville had failed to end segregation in public housing. To solve the problem, the court forced a controversial exchange: 25 tenants in Cheatham-Dryden, one of the all-black buildings, would switch places with 25 in College Heights, which was all-white. This caught the attention of national news media, which in December 1983 produced several dispatches: A Newsday story ran under the headline “Forced HomeSwapping Outrages Races.” The New York Times published a piece, “Desegregation stirs dismay.” A United Press International reporter

CJR

quoted the town’s mayor, a white man, saying that Clarksville did not have “racial problems”; the article included no voices of black residents. Craig Flournoy, a white reporter working at The Dallas Morning News, was among the reporters arriving from elsewhere to cover the story. He noticed that the articles published by his colleagues at mainstream, predominately white, news outlets lacked historical context about race relations in Clarksville and in the rest of the South. The stories delved little into the discrimination suit, which at that point was three years old; the swap had been, after all, a last resort. As Flournoy read, what stood out most was the characterization of the two housing projects as separate but equal—an assertion he doubted. “The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post—everyone who covered it said the two projects appeared similar,” Flournoy recalls. “They weren’t, by any sense of the imagination.” When he went to visit the buildings, he says. “It didn’t take a friggin’ rocket scientist to figure this out.” By this time, newsrooms were no longer formally segregated and the nation was decades deep in legislation intended to improve racial politics. But even as legislative advances had begun to usher in, for black and other people of color, a new type of agency backed by the law, advances within news outlets were less than impressive. The beginnings of newsroom integration had little reckoning with the absence of black journalists; instead, there was tokenization, while displays of unconscious racial bias remained evident. This problem was demonstrated clearly in the assertion, made by many reports, that

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

Clarksville’s housing complexes were identical aside from the race of their inhabitants. Given historical precedent, it was almost sure to be untrue. Flournoy, who grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, would go on to publish, with his colleague George Rodrigue, a Pulitzer Prize–winning eight-part investigation into government-sanctioned segregation in public housing in Clarksville and other towns in America. But until then, Flournoy found no stories that sufficiently characterized what was obviously unequal housing. There was one, however, that he missed— a short news article with a niche audience. “Blacks who had to move were apprehensive about relocating,” the story explains. “They don’t know how the White community will react, particularly the older Blacks where the past is pretty much the present in their minds,” a lawyer is quoted as saying. A black tenant adds, “It’s no problem for me living around Whites. I didn’t know that things were that backwards.” The article, which ran without a byline, was in the January 9, 1984 issue of Jet magazine, a renowned black news and culture weekly.

A N G I E WA N G

rom its inception, the black press has been fighting. Fifty years after the American Revolution, while the country built its wealth and global prominence on the basis of violent chattel slavery, free black people living in northern coastal cities, particularly New York and Philadelphia, came to sense that their ongoing struggle for human rights and dignity would need a platform. Black churches and social societies aimed at self-improvement were not enough to improve the conditions of a people.

PIONEE RS

Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells is best known as a fearless anti-lynching journalist, but she began her political career fighting against a segregated railroad system in Memphis, Tennessee. During Reconstruction, black people there had been legally free to ride in whatever class they could afford. But Wells, an educated middle-class woman, was shocked when, one evening, she was forcibly ejected from a train. Wells was determined to protest. Though she was a teacher earning meager wages, she hired a lawyer, took her case to court, and in 1884 was awarded $500 in damages. Three years later, however, the Tennessee State Supreme Court reversed the decision. As if with a great sob welling up from discouragement and anger, Wells wrote about the case in her diary: “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them.” A week later, Wells joined a civil rights group and organized to fight white racism. In 1892, when three of her close friends were lynched, she began a perilous journey to small towns in the South, sometimes in disguise, to investigate lynchings. She published her reports in a 1895 book, The Red Record, and went on to travel the world telling the truth about lynching— that accusation of rape was often a pretext for repression and violence against black people. When she died, in 1931, Wells had earned the name “Crusader for Justice.” Mary Helen Washington is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and previously served as president of the American Studies Association.

Newspapers of the time worked against them, by pushing negative stereotypes of both enslaved and free black Americans—as violent, uncivil, and unfit for basic rights afforded to other citizens. Journalists like Mordecai Manuel Noah, the editor of The New York Enquirer, a four-page tabloid, advocated for the transport of free black people out of the US to Liberia; in editorials, he cheered in anticipation of their untimely deaths on the journey. Early ventures into black-focused journalism began with a collective of prominent preachers, orators, and abolitionists. In A History of the Black Press (1997), Armistead Pride and Clint Wilson II write that, within that group, a newspaper—owned, written, and edited by black people—emerged as a valuable tool “to give free persons of color a voice they otherwise lacked.” Like the newspapers and pamphlets that helped birth a movement for American independence, the black press would serve to unite people in a fight for their lives. Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper to be published solely by black people in America, debuted in New York City on March 16, 1827.

CJR

In a front-page essay, the paper’s editors, Samuel Cornish, a reverend, and John Russwurm, one of the first black graduates of an American college, went to great lengths to distinguish it from existing abolitionist newspapers—controlled by white people who, they wrote, “too long have spoken for us.” Put simply, they continued, “We wish to plead our own cause.” Freedom’s Journa would seek, through the universal attainment of civil rights, education, and character development, to “vindicate our brethren, when oppressed, and to lay the case before the publick.” The men sought to use the newspaper as a tool in pursuit of a common goal—full citizenship and equal rights. They reported on the conditions of public schools in New York; a state asylum for the deaf; the kidnapping and rescue of a child; and the deaths of seven white missionaries in Africa, stressing the need for more “colored” missionaries who, it was thought, were better suited for the “insalubrity of the climate.” Freedom’s Journal, explicit in its call for black liberation, set the tone for thousands of newspapers that would follow.

RU SS E L L L E E / L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E SS

O K L A H O M A H I STO R I CA L SO C I E T Y

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

The state of New York was home to 18 newspapers and magazines that emerged within the first post-emancipation years; more sprang up across the country. Titles included Rights of All, the Struggler, National Reformer, the Colored American, and the People’s Press. The Anglo-African Magazine, founded in 1859 by Thomas Hamilton, ran headlines such as “Effects of Emancipation in Jamaica” and “American Caste and Common Schools.” Hamilton also published a newspaper, the Weekly Anglo-African, that issued an exacting motto: “Man must be free; if not through the law, then above it.” As the black press developed its voice—publishing with conviction against white racism, violence, and hypocrisy—it also covered the tick-tock of African-American life: weddings, births, and deaths that white media otherwise ignored. The fight for equality in the black press was also incorporated into professional practice. Whereas, through Reconstruction, women could scarcely be seen in most white newsrooms, at black newspapers and magazines, women were on staff: Sarah Thompson, writing for The New National Era before 1900, described the challenges of traveling through the South. Nellie Mossell wrote for black weeklies and edited the women’s department of the New York Freeman. Her book, The Work of the Afro-American Woman, dedicated a chapter to female journalists. Victoria Earle Mathews belonged to the Women’s National Press Association and Lucy Wilmot Smith, who wrote profiles of female reporters for the Journalist (known today as Editor & Publisher magazine) belonged to the National Colored Press Association. Ida B. Wells, born into slavery in Holly Spring, Mississippi, began writing a column for a black weekly under a pen name while working as a teacher and later became editor and co-owner of a black daily. After three of her friends were lynched,

FIT TO PRINT The Pittsburgh Courier (left) built a reputation as one of the most widely read and circulated black newspapers in history by openly crusading for civil rights. Among the battles the newspaper fought—and won—was a 13-year campaign to integrate professional baseball. The Oklahoma Guide (above), was founded in 1892 and was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper in the American West. Its front pages boasted of its independence and growing influence, writing of its “Growing Patronage by Both Races.”

CJR

Consistent throughout the existence of the black press has been denial—just as white society ignored black society, so too did white journalists ignore their black conterparts.

in Memphis, she went on to produce the most comprehensive body of investigative reporting on the terror of white lynch mobs in America. Wells also brought attention to the sexual abuse of black women at the hands of white men. In a 1944 study of race relations in the United States, Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish researcher, wrote of the role that the mainstream press played in what he called “astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the part of the white public.” Myrdal believed that, for black journalists interested in improving race relations, “To get publicity is of the highest strategic importance.” There could be no doubt, he went on, “that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.” In the study, Myrdal cited Edwin Mims, a white professor of literature at Vanderbilt University who advocated against the practice of lynching; in 1926, Mims had characterized the black press as “the greatest single power in the Negro race.” Myrdal called the black journalists who wielded that power “a fighting press.”

onsistent throughout the existence of the black press has been denial—just as white society ignored black society, so too did white journalists ignore their black counterparts. A textbook on American journalism published in 1941 made mention of black reportage just once, in a passing reference to Frederick Douglass. Whether white society set aside black journalism because of a lack of awareness or a belief in its inferiority, or both, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff write in The Race Beat (2006), going unnoticed afforded the black press a public forum for radical speech that would have otherwise been impossible. Black newspapers, which espoused a range of political views— some conservative, some militant—enjoyed immense influence within their readership. The Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott, was among the most authoritative. Abbott, who had degrees from Hampton University and Kent College of Law, knew firsthand the struggle that even educated black men in the North endured. As a member of a printer’s union, Abbott contended with stubborn discrimination and was

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

routinely rejected for jobs. As a result, he adamantly opposed suggestions that black people move north to escape white racism and seek gainful employment, insisting instead that federal intervention was needed to improve conditions in the South. In a 1915 editorial, he wrote that it was “best for ninety and nine of our people to remain in the southland and work out their own salvation.” But a series of events—an infestation of beetles in southern cotton fields that damaged the plantation and sharecropping economy, the slowing of European immigration as a result of World War I that led to new interest in the black labor force, and increasingly violent lynch mobs— compelled Abbott to reconsider. Abbott, Ethan Michaeli writes in The Defender (2016), came to see a mass migration of black labor as an arm of protest against white violence and against the racist Southern economy. He decided to use his newspaper’s influence to encourage people to pack their bags. The front page of the September 2, 1916 edition of the Defender had an illustration—under the headline, “The Exodus”—showing black people “tired of being kicked and cursed,” waiting for a train in Savannah, Georgia. The next month, Abbott endorsed migration in an editorial, “Farewell Dixie-land.” The Defender went on to aggressively encourage black families to move, publishing positive stories about opportunities in the North juxtaposed with reports of racial violence in the South. The paper ran dispatches from black communities in many states. Thousands of readers wrote in with grateful letters. Circulation boomed, allowing Abbott to expand his staff. As black people fled the South, white journalists and state officials lamented the loss, and in some cases violently sought to prevent it. Vendors of the Defender were harassed; the police chief in Meridian, Mississippi, ordered that the newspaper be confiscated. President Woodrow Wilson, noting the national demographic shift, assigned Emmett J. Scott, the highest-ranking black man in the federal government, to produce a report on the causes and consequences of the movement. The Defender’s campaign contributed significantly to what we now refer to as the Great Migration. By 1970, six million black

people had headed north and west. As white media and political leaders have checked in and out of its orbit, the ability of the black press to hide in plain sight has wobbled. Sometimes, black newspapers sought notice. During World War II, the Pittsburgh Courier led a “Double VV” campaign—a twist on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign slogan, “V for victory,” aiming to draw attention to the hypocrisy of a country willing to fight Nazis abroad but unable to offer equal rights to its own black citizens. The Courier ran editorials demanding an immediate end to segregation, publishing photos of black and white supporters of the cause. Black families across the country posted Double V posters in their windows. In response, J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dispatched agents to interrogate black editors about their work; he tried (in vain) to charge editors with sedition. The Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Censorship opened their own investigations. Black newspapers reported unexplained cuts to their supplies of newsprint. The post office began monitoring the distribution of the black press, fearing that the nation’s enemies would use it as propaganda. Nevertheless, black newspapers and magazines thrived as the fight for equal rights drove readership in the black community. They attracted more attention from white readers, too; in the sixties, as television brought the brutal reality of Jim Crow into every living room, minds opened. But publications of the black press—still a “fighting press”—did not rise, in the consciousness of white Americans, as the papers of record on race relations; black reporters remained, to most people, something else. Pursuit of a “common good,” when it is black, never stopped provoking skepticism.

n the modern age, questions of credibility have followed reporters alongside their coverage of racial justice. On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, an 18-year-old boy named Michael Brown, who was black, was shot by a 28-year-old police officer named Darren Wilson, who is white. Brown died around noon. His body was left in the street for hours; by that evening, his neighbors and

friends had assembled a makeshift memorial with flowers and candles laid out on the pavement where his blood had splattered. Protests erupted nearly immediately. By Sunday, Ferguson was on fire, and every major news outlet was on the story. Wesley Lowery, a black reporter on The Washington Post’s national desk, was dispatched to cover the unrest. At one point, he ducked into a McDonald’s nearby the site of Brown’s death that had become a makeshift press pit. As Lowery sat, checking Twitter while he charged his phone, police entered, some heavily armed. Lowery and Ryan Reilly, a white HuffPost reporter, were asked for identification. Reilly asked the cops why they needed to see ID. The police left briefly, then returned to inform the pair that they needed to leave. Lowery began to record the exchange and, after receiving conflicting information about where to exit, asked for a minute to gather his things. At that moment, several officers moved to arrest him. Lowery dropped his belongings and tried to offer the police his wrists. But they slammed him into a soda machine, accusing him of resisting arrest. “Ryan, tweet that they’re arresting me, tweet that they’re arresting me,” Lowery recalls saying to Reilly. Reilly never got the chance, because he was arrested, too. Both men were brought to a police station and told that they had been detained for trespassing. They were held only for about 30 minutes. But when they were released from custody, they faced a barrage of criticism. Lowery had become, to his discomfort, a character in the story that he’d been sent to cover. “Once that became the case, there were a series of ways people tried to suggest the work we were doing was illegitimate,” he says. “The first was that I wasn’t a

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real journalist and after, it was the suggestion that I was too close to activists, sympathetic to protesters, and only asked hard questions of police. There were bad faith attempts amplified by the fact that I was young, outspoken, and black.” There was a clash, Lowery found, between an abstract American value of a free press and people’s unease with aggressive questioning of institutions, including the police. For detractors, Lowery’s race factored in, too. “They could project their prejudices on me,” he says. “Of course I was biased because how could a black person be fair when reporting on black people? Nobody would argue the inverse.” Black journalists like Lowery, once left out of the mainstream press altogether, often still contend with doubts about their grasp on objectivity—the existence of which has no real consensus in the profession. The gradual integration of newsrooms, which began in the late sixties, gave familiar challenges of black journalism a facelift. And even where black journalists—and other people of color—are seen on mastheads, few occupy senior newsroom positions. At the same time, as economic models in media have changed, or collapsed, many premier black press institutions have lost influence and circulation; some have shuttered. A few historical black newspapers—like the New York Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, and the St. Louis American—still publish, if to a diminished readership. Jet and Ebony magazines were purchased by a private equity firm in 2016; the former published its last print issue in 2014, and the latter was sued in 2017 for failing to pay freelancers. Early this year, for the first time in almost two decades, Essence magazine became fully

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owned by black people. New black publications have risen on the web: The Root, a division of Univision; The Grio, owned by Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios; HuffPost’s Black Voices vertical; Blavity, focused on millenials; NPR’s Code Switch, which takes a multiracial approach; and ESPN’s The Undefeated, which reports on the intersection of race and sports. Danielle Belton, the editor of The Root, finds that the work of telling stories that cover the most vulnerable communities remains a job for the black press. Reports that appear on The Root and its competitors generate attention to problems—like white people calling the police on black people for frivolous reasons—that later become

FAR FROM HOME Although it was based in Illinois, the Chicago Defender’s circulation extended well into the Deep South, as shown in the map above, which highlights data from 1919. Copies were brought largely by portermen, along railroad routes. The paper’s endorsement of an exodus from the South is widely credited with ushering thousands of people north and, eventually, west, in a period now known as the Great Migration.

dominant narratives in the mainstream. The distinct moral view of black publications gets transferred, gradually, into universally accepted moral clarity. What that pattern reveals, Belton points out, is that “objectivity” is a false premise—too much gets missed in its name. “There is this perception that the only person who can be objective is a white man, even though he comes with his own prejudices and background,” she says. “The notion of impartiality, that people can turn all their biases off and report purely, is a fantasy.” She adds, “The difference between The Root and a more mainstream publication is that we are honest with the fact that we bring with us our blackness, our femaleness, maleness, when we are reporting. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking The Root is a leftleaning blog. It’s a pro-black blog.” But the black press has evolved beyond discrete publications. A network of journalists, bloggers, radio hosts, and other prominent writers have collectively formed a kind of black media moral compass: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eve Ewing, Clint Smith III, Doreen St. Felix, along with countless reporters and writers working at local publications across the country without national acclaim. (Jelani Cobb, the editor of this issue, would also be included in any complete list.) Often, it is these journalists providing the most valuable black journalism in the spirit of the “common good” as outlined by the earliest black publications. These writers, unlike their predecessors, are bouyed by interracial confidence in their work being fair and accurate. “When I think about the black press, I think about journalists whose constituency is black people and the advancement and equitable treatment of black people,” Lowery says. “I work for a

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publication that is national in scope, but my personal constituency is black people.” Lowery’s job has brought him to cover politics, policing, and other subjects that deal with injustice, often against the black community. In July, Lowery shared a byline on a series detailing 52,000 murders in America for which no arrests were made; three quarters of those victims were black. “Journalism is about correcting the power imbalances in our country,” he says. “You have people who have been systematically denied power. One of the equalizers is the free press, which can go to the people who are powerful and ask questions on behalf of the people who are otherwise powerless.” As Lowery speaks about his position, he flips back and forth between identifying as a member of the “free press” and the “black press,” at once identifying the latter as having a distinct history and purpose while demanding its legitimization within American journalism. The “free press” has, since its beginnings, always come with an asterisk— one that has signified outright exclusion, deployment of negative stereotypes (whether conscious or unconscious), disregard for stories affecting black people, and a failure to consult marginalized groups as experts and sources. For black people in journalism, in some sense, doing the work means rattling against accepted norms. In Lowery’s view, journalism’s pursuit of truth is not at odds with the earliest black publications’ commitment to equity—what happens now is a reckoning with history. “I see my role as applying that pressure on behalf of black people,” he says. “Black people have been promised equality and equity and justice, and if they are not receiving it, it is the role of the black press to apply pressure.” cjr

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G U S TAV O A R E L L A N O

The uncertain fate of Spanish-language news networks

Las Noticias en Español

“ AUTHOR

Gustavo Arellano PHOTOGRAPHER

William Camargo

THE MORNING REPORT Patrons watch Telemundo each morning at Spigas, a bakery in Orange, California.

a’y que iiiirnos, güey,” Fumigator No. 1 pleads to his colleague. (“Let’s gooooo already, fucker.”) They’re in Orange, California, at a Mexican bakery, Spigas, where they stop most mornings; their truck stretches across three parking spaces outside. The place is packed—Spigas has only four booths—as painters, gardeners, and drywalleros wedge in to pour themselves coffee. A long glass bakery case holds Mexican and American pastries (pan dulce, empanadas, danishes the size of a face). On a small stove near the cash register, a woman makes breakfast burritos. Fumigator No. 2 won’t leave. He stares at a television, mounted on a wall beside the Spigas menu. It’s airing Noticiero Telemundo 52, the 6:30 a.m. newscast for KVEA-TV in Los Angeles. A report from Santa Ana, just down the 5 Freeway, shows the wreckage of a twin-engine Cessna aircraft that, a day before, had fallen from the sky. “They said earlier that they were going to show the crash,” Fumigator No. 2 says in Spanish, loud enough for everyone to hear. Customers

PIONEERS

Maria Hinojosa “As a little girl I understood the importance of journalism and reporting in media. But I never saw myself there. My stories didn’t appear. We were invisible from the media narrative.” Those are the words of Maria Hinojosa. Today, as the founder of Futuro Media Group, she is not invisible. She is a respected journalist, a businesswoman, a trailblazer, and one of the most trusted voices for the Hispanic community in the United States. Hinojosa’s family migrated from Mexico in 1962. She grew up in Chicago, watching the journey of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as he led people of color to raise their voices and empower others. During college, Hinojosa found her niche in radio, where she hosted a show featuring Latinxs in the arts. Later, in 1992, she started Latino USA, a show devoted to the Latino community, which still airs on National Public Radio. As NPR’s only national Latinx news and cultural weekly program, it highlights the struggles and the successes of our people. Lately, it has provided a platform for Hinojosa to be outspoken about injustice, like President Trump’s zero tolerance policy and the separation of families at the border. Futuro Media Group also produces America by The Numbers, a television series airing on PBS about America’s increasingly multicultural population. Hinojosa is a journalist who never stays silent when there is a problem that affects the core of the Latinx community. Her work makes sure that no one ever feels invisible. Ilia Calderón is coanchor of Univision’s flagship evening newscast, making her the first Afro-Latina to hold that job at a major network in the United States.

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and Spigas staff turn their eyes to the screen. Then they see what they’ve been waiting for: a grainy cellphone video of a small plane nosediving into a Staples parking lot. “Chinga a su,” someone says. (“For fuck’s sake.”) Most of the customers hang around for the rest of Telemundo’s morning combo: crime, immigration, sports, traffic updates. From behind the bakery counter, Omar López, who owns Spigas, looks on approvingly. Short and stocky, López, 40, has made Spigas part of a morning routine for people of like minds. “Telemundo tells you what’s real,” he says. “People want to see that.” Compared with most other news programs—including its chief rival, Univision (here, KMEX-TV Channel 34)—Telemundo is more fast-paced and scrappy, making an overt play for young, working-class viewers. That strategy looks good at Spigas. But this is a dependable crowd. In general, Americans have been spending less of their time watching live TV, Latinxs especially. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2006, 92 percent of Latinxs got their news from TV, while 37 percent did so from the internet; in 2016, 79 percent watched TV, and 74 percent went online. That shift in engagement, which is generational, is compounded within the Spanish-language news market by young audiences’ favoring English-language media. Latinx millennials, by Pew’s count, consume their news in English 91 percent of the time. Take Aimee Murillo, a 28-year-old from Santa Ana, who I recently found checking the news on Twitter. When asked how many of her fellow bilingual Latinx friends watch Telemundo or Univision for news, she says, “Zero.” A Spanish-language newscast is, to them, an old person’s thing. “We watched when we were kids,” she explains. “It’s something we remember existing in our periphery, but it doesn’t connect with us.” The need for their parents’ stations to make a case for themselves is dire—with declining viewership has come financial strain. Univision, the wealthier network, is valued at more than $12 billion but has reported some $8 billion in debt. In the past year, it has suffered steep revenue losses, scrapped plans for a stock market launch, and laid off of 35 percent of its digital news staff. In March, Univision announced that

A N G I E WA N G

G U S TAV O A R E L L A N O

Telemundo and Univision are making the same bet that so many other foreignlanguage news outlets in the US have, only to see their readers fall off and their children begin to favor English.

Randy Falco, the CEO, would be leaving (New York Business Journal reported that Falco had “lost favor” with some board members); in July, as the company made plans to cut $100 million in expenses, including the sale of Fusion Media Group (which includes Gizmodo, Jezebel, The Root, and other sites), Isaac Lee, the chief content officer, announced his departure. Univision’s net operating revenue, estimated by S&P Global Market Intelligence to be $949 million, still remains larger than Telemundo’s, at $844 million. In April, Telemundo opened a gleaming new headquarters in Miami—a sign of confidence, even though, a month earlier, the network had announced a restructuring that meant layoffs of more than 150 employees. If Univision and Telemundo fail, “it would be dramatic,” Lee, who is on CJR’s advisory board, says. What’s required, he believes, is envisioning a future beyond the Spigas crowd. “The Latino community would be without its principal information source that permits them to have a community in the US,” he says. “It’s hard to believe that Univision and Telemundo are so myopic that they would let that happen.”

he news divisions of Univision and Telemundo are both traceable to the first Spanish-language national newscast in the United States, Noticiero Nacional

SIN (Spanish International Network). Its debut, in 1981, with more than 100 affiliates, featured a taped introduction in English by President Ronald Reagan, who praised “the growing influence of Hispanic citizens in our communities and throughout the nation.” During the eighties, as civil war and economic turmoil swept across Latin America, the Latinx population in the US grew dramatically, from 14.5 million to 20.1 million; English-language media declared it the “Decade of the Hispanic.” SIN covered stories that resonated with the new demographic—the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Fidel Castro in Cuba, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. But in 1986, Televisa—Mexico’s largest television network, which had an ownership stake in SIN—announced that it wanted to hand oversight of SIN’s news division to Jacobo Zabludovsky, its star anchor. Critics had long dismissed Zabludovsky as a mouthpiece of the Mexican government; in protest, 20 reporters, producers, and technicians—nearly half of the SIN news staff—resigned. Within months, those staffers created their own evening newscast, for Telemundo, founded earlier that year by Reliance Group Holdings, a multibilliondollar insurance company. José Díaz-Balart, who had been the Central America bureau chief at SIN, became Telemundo’s weeknight anchor, a job he still holds. “We have a tag line—la cosas como son—‘telling it like it is,’” he says. The line refers to Telemundo’s sensibility, Díaz-Balart explains: hard news with palpable outrage. Noticiero Nacional SIN limped on. Zabludovsky returned to Mexico and continued on Televisa as if nothing had happened. Desperate for a new anchor, executives turned to Jorge Ramos (“The only on-air male still on the premises,” he joked to The New Yorker in 2015). In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Televisa’s stake in SIN violated a ban on foreign ownership of a US broadcaster; Hallmark bought the network and turned it into Univision. Ramos stayed on and was joined by María Elena Salinas. Both are of Mexican heritage; people of Mexican descent, who account for some

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two-thirds of the US Latinx population, composed most of their audience. (Univision did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.) For three decades, Ramos and Salinas were the most important faces in Latinx news in America. When, in the early aughts, NBC acquired Telemundo, becoming the first major US network to have a Spanish-language channel, it was a hopeful investment. “Telemundo is actually a distant number two to Univision and really therein lies the opportunity,” a media analyst observed at the time. For years, however, Univision continued to rely on Televisa to produce many of its popular programs. In 2009, executives announced that they would open a studio of their own, based in Miami; Luis Fernández, a journalist who had a long career in film and radio, was hired to run it. He developed hits in reality and scripted series, including Mira Quién Baila (Look Who’s Dancing) and Sal y Pimienta, a talk show. “From the entertainment world,” Fernández says, “I got the part of telling stories—and how to make them attractive.” In 2016, Telemundo, vying to compete at Univision’s level, brought on Fernández to oversee its newsroom. As executive vice president of network news, Fernández, a native of Spain, delivered a new array of viewers, casting Telemundo as a pugnacious defensor del pueblo, defender of all Hispanic people. “I wanted us fresher, newsier, and closer to our audience,” Fernández says. “Less bureaucratic. Less official-sounding.” Today, Univision is stately—Ramos, now 60 and often called “the Walter Cronkite of Latino America,” keeps on top of international reportage—while Telemundo, with its youthful news division, focuses almost exclusively on the Latinx immigrant experience in el Norte— family separations, fathers arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Mexican restaurant pamphleted with racist flyers— and its local stations keep up with community developments. Donald Trump, of course, has boosted the sense of purpose at both outlets. Yet neither has managed to beat other, better-financed English-language news organizations chasing the same stories. Nielsen figures show that, since 2011, when Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, Telemundo’s viewership has stayed roughly the same, while Univision’s has dropped by half. Ambitious, irreverent digital natives have already lined up to replace the old guard. “There will always be interest in Spanishlanguage news in the United States, but it is no longer as mainstream as we think it to be,” Julio Ricardo Varela, a cohost of Futuro Media’s “In The Thick” podcast and a founder of Latino Rebels, a commentary site, says. Latino Rebels files pieces under categories such as “Humor,” “Injustice,” and “NoMames” (Spanish slang for “You’re kidding me!”); writing is produced in English as well as Spanish. Varela, who is 49, has aimed to help build a new Latinx news community “that has grown out of a response to the programming of these two networks.” He doesn’t watch Telemundo or Univision for news because, he says, they “seem stuck in 1996.”

ne afternoon at Telemundo’s KVEA, the newsroom is preoccupied with chasing sirens. Wildfires are raging across Southern California and reporters are busy preparing for

the next broadcast. “We’re doing a segment on horses and how they’re affected,” Rubén Keoseyan, the vice president of news, says. “Many of our viewers either have horses, had horses, or care about them.” Keoseyan, who is 58, is tall, round, and professorial. He’s been at KVEA since 2012. Walking past executives’ offices, he says, “They’re barely used—the fun is in the newsroom.” He’s overseen some investment in digital products, but he downplays their importance. “If you give people quality, they’ll watch,” he says. “I’ve become platform agnostic. You gotta deliver copy.” KVEA shares its newsroom with sister station KNBC-TV Channel 4; they’re separated only by a scrolling LED news ticker that flashes AP stories in Spanish on the KVEA side and in English on the other. “We could easily cross over, but their union doesn’t allow us to come on unless there’s a catastrophe,” Keoseyan explains. Heading down to the studio, he gestures at the set—KVEA’s appears to be slightly bigger than KNBC’s.

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Keoseyan meets up with Celia Chávez, the president and general manager of Noticiero Telemundo 52. “It’s cleaved in half—KNBC and KVEA,” she says. That applies to space and funding. “It’s not like ‘Little Telemundo, here’s 5 cents for you.’ We’re exactly the same to Comcast.” That evening, they would be airing a segment as part of their “Immigration Thursdays” series—this one features an attorney who explains how naturalized immigrants could lose their citizenship. Last year, just before Hurricane Maria hit, Yara Lasanta, KVEA’s meteorologist, went to visit her mom in Puerto Rico; after making sure her family was okay, she filed two weeks of dispatches. The reports, produced from the network’s San Juan studios, were picked up by Telemundo stations across the US. (Univision closed its Puerto Rico bureau in 2014 but managed to send 25 reporters to cover Maria and create an online database for survivors seeking to connect with their relatives in the mainland.)

This kind of reporting, always essential to viewers of Spanishlanguage programs, has been visibly crucial, lately, to covering the state of American democracy. “We don’t practice ethnic media, we do mainstream media,” Keoseyan says. “I just happen to do it in Spanish.” In doing so, however, both Telemundo and Univision are making the same bet that so many other foreign-language news outlets in the US have, only to see their readers fall off and their children begin to favor English. Recently, Telemundo created apps for each of its 20 local stations; in theory, this would help broadcasters stay in the sights of young Latinxs. But for now, the content of the apps will be only in Spanish. “The writing is on the wall—bilingual,” Lee says. “They need to see it. If we don’t create content for your kids, then we are going to lose them.” What has been lost already—as immigrant interests become American interests, and new identities emerge—is not merely a matter of form or language, but of who, exactly, forms the Latinx media constituency. Back at Keoseyan’s office, reporters stream in with updates for the 6 p.m. broadcast. Their stories concern immigration, health care, crime. KVEA’s sense of its audience remains firm, out of deep familiarity. “We’re always with our community because we are our community,” Keoseyan says. Looking around, there can be little doubt. “Allí está el pan,” he says. (“There’s the bread, that’s where the money is.”) “That’s how we win.” cjr

54 CJR

A cultural critic and multimedia savant breaks up with his radio show after 30 years

The Complicated Philosophy of Jay Smooth

AUTHOR

Karen K. Ho ILLUSTRATOR

McDavid Henderson

n July, on Friday the 13th, Jay Smooth, a 45-year-old cultural critic, video blogger, and DJ was preparing to host another edition of Underground Railroad, his two-hour hiphop and culture show on WBAI, the New York affiliate of Pacifica Radio. That evening, he wore a light red button-down shirt and glasses with currant-colored frames; his hair had been buzzed so short that his head was almost bare. The son of a white Jewish mother and a black father, Smooth describes himself as having an “ethnically ambiguous” appearance—strangers have mistaken him for Arab, Latino, and white. He hurried into the WBAI office, on the third floor of Brooklyn Commons, a “radical movement-building space” in Boerum Hill, arriving at the station’s single studio, where four blackand-grey IKEA bath mats help muffle sound and a cluster of red Christmas lights indicate when an anchor is on-air. You may not have heard of Jay Smooth, but his career has influenced the way a lot of journalists—as well as people outside of media—think and talk about music, culture, and modern life. He started his show in 1991, when he was 18 years old, which makes Underground Railroad the city’s longest-running music program. (“I am the composer, arranger, and conductor of the Underground Railroad,” he’s told

TK CREDIT

KAREN K. HO

listeners.) Since then, fans have tuned into 99.5 FM to hear hip-hop interspersed with Smooth’s riffs on the news of the week; in recent years, listeners could reach him during the show via an online chatroom while he had intimate conversations with DJs and artists such as TLC, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Fugees—many of whom he first interviewed when they were in the early stages of their careers. Smooth’s ability to listen, analyze, and react—both in conversations about hip-hop and in national discussions about race—has propelled him into a rare kind of internet virality. In the summer of 2008, a few months before the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, Smooth uploaded a video to YouTube called “How to Tell Somebody They Sound Racist.” In a close shot filmed in black-and-white, Smooth, wearing a T-shirt, addresses his audience against a hip-hop backing track. “Everybody’s talking about race right now,” he says. “And when everybody’s talking about race, that means sooner or later you’re going to need to tell somebody that they said something that sounded racist.” In just under three minutes, he smartly sums up how to understand the difference between “what someone did” and “what they are.” He explains, “If that dude really is racist, you want to make sure you hold him accountable and don’t let him off easy.” Over a decade, the video has racked up more than 1.26 million views and is now required viewing material in some college classes. As the audience for his work grew—he also maintains a blog, Hip Hop Music, and a video site, Ill Doctrine—so did demand and attention from prominent media outlets. He was hired to produce videos for XXL, a music site; Fusion (now Splinter News); and Race Forward, a nonprofit racial justice organization. Smooth was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, spoke as a panelist on All In with Chris Hayes, interviewed Drake for a revealing feature in The Village Voice, and appeared on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. In November 2011, he gave a TED Talk at Hampshire College called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race.” In it, Smooth told the audience how frustrating conversations about the subject can be. “Race is a social construct that wasn’t

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designed to make sense,” he said. The rules of conduct “were shaped to defend indefensible acts,” he went on. “Being a good person isn’t a fixed characteristic—it’s a practice.” In 2016, Smooth began booking paid speaking engagements, often on topics related to race and politics. Through all his other endeavors, Underground Railroad remained Smooth’s home base, a “secular church,” he says, where he and his friends could gather every week. It also remained a labor of love, since Smooth and his colleagues were never paid for their work at WBAI. The station prides itself on serving communities typically overlooked by commercial radio stations, which means that, although the programming is high-minded, it has a tiny audience compared to those of other broadcasters. This has left it struggling financially. Today, the station receives monthly donations from listeners, but its level of funding is relatively low. On July 9, The New York Times reported that Leonard Lopate—who had been terminated in December 2017 from his show on WNYC following allegations of sexual harassment— had been hired at WBAI, for a paid position, to

KAREN K. HO

Smooth’s ability to listen, analyze, and react—both in conversations about hip-hop and in national discussions about race—has propelled him into a rare kind of internet virality.

host a new daily talk show. The idea, managers said, was to attract wide financial support. It wasn’t until a few days later that Smooth heard the news, just hours before he was scheduled to go on the air—his timeslot was 10 p.m. to midnight. Lopate’s hiring made Smooth nervous about the direction in which WBAI would be headed. “I think it’s a terrible idea,” he told me that evening, his face scrunched with concern. Smooth seemed introverted and nervous—a stark difference from his personality on the radio and in videos, where his voice booms with confidence. He said that he wanted to figure out if the decision to hire Lopate should prompt him to speak out—to management, to his listeners, to other people at the station— and he wanted to make sure he had all the facts. With only a few minutes before his show was supposed to start, Smooth sought answers. Wandering outside of the studio, he found Berthold Reimers, WBAI’s general manager. The choice to hire Lopate boiled down to money, Reimers confirmed. “How about we take sponsorships and don’t hire Leonard Lopate?” Smooth asked him.

“Well, bring me the sponsorship and let’s do that,” Reimers replied. (Reimers declined to comment on this exchange.) Soon after, in a stairwell, Smooth bumped into a gathering of producers, many of whom, like him, had been hosting shows for two or three decades. Mimi Rosenberg of Building Bridges, a show about labor and community affairs, told him about a list of names she’d been gathering for a letter protesting the hiring. It was now just past 10 p.m.; Smooth’s start time had come and gone. He signed Rosenberg’s list and walked down the hall before realizing that his booth was empty and he was broadcasting dead air.

efore he adopted the name “Jay Smooth,” John Randolph was a shy kid from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Born in 1972, his mother—a jazz pianist who made her living as a legal secretary—and his father—a poet who worked as a receptionist at Friends Seminary, a private Quaker day school—split when he was four. Randolph’s life was divided between his mother’s neighborhood, which was rapidly gentrifying, and Harlem, where his father had a low-rent apartment. For most of his childhood, in public school, Randolph participated in a gifted and talented program. In eighth grade, he won admission and a full scholarship to Fieldston, a private school that caters mostly to the children of New York’s elite. His experience there was excellent academically, but he also understood that it was a place of great privilege. “It’s a rich, white, liberal school where people can definitely be deluded about how pure and virtuous that makes you,” he says. Randolph attended at the same time as Soon-Yi Previn, Sean Lennon,

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“This regime of constant trolling, bullying, and gaslighting challenges me to figure out what I can best contribute.”

and Maggie Haberman, but his friends were mostly other boys who were also minorities, scholarship recipients, and graduates of the same gifted program. Randolph wasn’t bullied “in the traditional sense,” he says, but he felt invisible on the margins. “I was known as the kid who always looked at the floor and never talked,” he recalls. “I believed that I was a freak that would never connect with other kids.” For Randolph—deeply thoughtful, often reserved—hip-hop offered an escape in words. He memorized lyrics and found their hidden messages. He fell in love with records like 8th Wonder by The Sugarhill Gang, The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, as well as artists like Run DMC, Rakim, and Big Daddy Kane. “The beat that they’re rapping over is a scavenger hunt,” Smooth said in 2013 during a talk at the XOXO Festival. “An endless world for me to lose myself into when I was growing up.” By the late 1980s, hip-hop was becoming popular in the mainstream white world, too. “There was a sudden point when every kid at Fieldston was blasting Kool G Rap out of their Saabs,” he recalls. The music of the South Bronx was also the perfect haven from what was a difficult

childhood—Randolph’s father had mental illness and suffered from alcoholism. “What I had modelled for me growing up is, whatever positive regard you get for yourself in the world, that’s a facade that you’re successfully keeping up,” Smooth says. In 1989, at 16, Randolph needed a job. A McDonald’s rejected his application. His mother, a longtime listener to WBAI, heard Anthony J. Sloan, a producer and arts director, announce on the radio that the station was hiring production interns. In addition to producing the evening news, Sloan was also behind Randolph’s favorite programs: Creative Unity Collective, a black political sketch comedy show, and bi-annual specials dedicated to Prince. Randolph prepared a voice audition. “Reading something off a piece of paper happened to be something I was really good at,” he says. He was hired. Sloan, responsible for teaching Randolph how to do his own engineering and cut his own tape, says that his student transformed like Robin Williams’s character in the 1987 movie Good Morning Vietnam. “It was just like that,” he recalls. “On the air, Randolph sounded like a 35-yearold. He didn’t sound like a kid.” Sloan, who would attend Randolph’s graduation from

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Fieldston, quickly saw how thoughtful this “older spirit” was, as well as his dedication to hip-hop. “He was calm, collected, and carried himself in a mature fashion. There was no messing around.” After several months, Randolph—by then 17—wrote a proposal for a hip-hop show so impressive that management initially thought that it was ghostwritten by Sloan. The timing was also good; WBAI had been looking for ways to expand its audience. “I wanted to do something that correctly represented the music and culture,” Randolph says. Commercial hip-hop radio stations like Hot 97 didn’t exist yet; to hear the latest music, fans had to go to stores and buy records, or hear tracks at dance parties. “I wanted to live up to the same standard of all the underground shows that I grew up on,” he says. The leaders of WBAI gave him the go-ahead. Underground Railroad debuted on February 3, 1991, during Randolph’s senior year of high school. (“If I was choosing a name now, I’d probably say that it’s kind of presumptuous for me to imbue this project with everything Harriet Tubman did,” he says.) His stage name came from something his father said in response to hearing one of his pausebutton mixtapes: “The boy’s smooth.” Sloan

executive produced the program in its first year. “There was no nervousness,” he recalls. “I think he had it from the beginning.” (Starting in the early 1990s, Glenn “G-Man” Holt joined Smooth as an occasional co-host of Underground Railroad, until he died, last summer.) Since then, Smooth has had to find ways to earn a living. He was a counsellor and assistant teacher at a group home for kids up in Westchester; he took some dot-com jobs—first in customer service, then in programming—and he played online poker. In 2007, he landed an interview facilitator position at StoryCorps, a nonprofit that records pieces from the lives of people “of all backgrounds and beliefs.” The job helped Smooth realize that he wanted to do creative work that could develop the skills he had learned from radio into a new kind of storytelling—first person, straight-to-camera essays. Around this time, Smooth shared an apartment with Jason Reynolds, a StoryCorps colleague. Reynolds remembers his roommate shooting and editing in his room for hours. When Smooth was done, Reynolds was astonished—there was a dramatic personality difference between the timid person he knew and the assertive character he saw onscreen. “It was like Clark Kent and Superman,” he says. “It was amazing.” These videos would become Smooth’s first posts to Ill Doctrine. It didn’t take long for video to become Smooth’s medium of choice, a new place to confront offensive rhetoric and racist speech. “One of my favorite things about hip-hop is its everlasting love of language,” he says in the introduction to a video on the problematic use of the phrase “no homo.” He continues, “One of my least favorite things about hip-hop is our everlasting fear of being gay.” In another video, about respectability politics, Smooth lays out the problem with advocating that systemic injustice against black Americans can be solved through changes to their own behavior (often suggested as insulting counsel, like “pull up your pants”): “Advice that’s valid in the abstract but totally useless in context.” He’s also done media criticism about Bill O’Reilly’s anger over Nas and spoken out about domestic violence in the hip-hop community. For Smooth, video blogging was also a way to become more comfortable with himself. Before he started Ill Doctrine, he didn’t have any mirrors in his apartment except one, in his bathroom. “I didn’t have it inculcated in me to care about or like my physical appearance,” he says. But he is conscientious about how his work is received—creating videos, in particular, can be a high-stress undertaking—so adjusting his facial expressions and body language on camera became a natural part of the production process as he strove for perfection. His videomaking was successful enough to earn him money, although, given his inclination toward independence, he has not always enjoyed working in partnership with media companies. “It dilutes and distorts the process, even if they’re not making specific demands,” he says. Smooth has also struggled with the dynamics of television news panels. “With very few exceptions, no one can really go on one of those shows and genuinely listen to a question—listen to it—and give a genuine answer,” he says. “It’s very difficult to have a real,

intellectual, curious conversation.” In 2015, during an appearance on All In With Chris Hayes to discuss a Starbucks campaign called #RaceTogether, Nancy Giles, a CBS journalist, teased Smooth about the “brother-like” way he talks. “I’m a rap guy,” he replied, and then flashed her a tight smile. She accused him of co-opting certain “black” mannerisms. In response, Smooth blurted out, “I’m actually black, but you assumed otherwise, and this is the sort of awkwardness we can look forward to in Starbucks.” After the show aired, Smooth became a trending topic on social media. The attention upset him, and he channeled those feelings into a video: “It was the longest 30 seconds of my life.”

n that July night at WBAI, after rushing into the booth, Smooth started the episode of Underground Railroad, belatedly, with “Stand!” a 1969 song by the rock-soul-funk band Sly and the Family Stone. (“In the end you’ll still be you / One that’s done all the things you set out to do.”) After playing a few songs and talking about politics in Europe, he made note of Lopate’s new show. “On the topic of taking a stand,” he said, “I do not want any sort of silence on my behalf to indicate any sort of support or acquiescence to this decision.” He took a deep breath, then told listeners that he was “vehemently opposed” to WBAI’s decision. He expressed hope that Lopate’s hiring would be reconsidered. It wasn’t. On July 16, Leonard Lopate at Large premiered. A few days later, Smooth informed WBAI management that he was leaving, less than a year before his 30th anniversary at the station. He announced his decision on Twitter with a screenshot of his Facebook profile,

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showing his change of employment status at WBAI: July 1989–July 2018. On a rainy evening two weeks after his last show, Smooth and I met up at a coffee shop in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. In ending Underground Railroad, Smooth said, he felt obligated to live up to his values. Confronting WBAI’s management “set in motion a process that led to me choosing to leave the station right then and there,” he explained. “When you’ve put your heart and soul into trying to make something work and built all these deep friendship and connections in this place, it takes a lot to reach the point where you just say, ‘I think I just gotta cut this off and walk away.’” Smooth found solace in friends and supporters, who include notable journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, hip-hop luminaries like Just Blaze, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Chuck D, and comedians like Aamer Rahman. His father’s health has improved, and they are now on good terms. But in the days after he pulled Underground Railroad, he felt unmoored. Jiun Kwon, his partner of many years, had died in 2015; at her memorial, he’d said, “I feel like I don’t know what to do now because she was the person I wanted to talk to about everything every day.” With Underground Railroad no longer in his life, the gap had him wanting another creative outlet to engage him in conversations on hip-hop and social justice. Early this year, he hosted a media literacy series for Crash Course, a popular educational YouTube channel with more than 8.2 million subscribers. Recently, he has been creating audio Easter eggs called “Secret Transmissions”—podcast episodes he produces and uploads to sites like Mixcloud and HearThis.At. Smooth remains popular online—he has

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tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where he posts videos like his conversation with Tarana Burke, the creator of #MeToo. He earns money through a Patreon, a crowdfunding platform designed to provide creative people with recurring financial support, and through his speaking gigs. Yet keeping up with news, especially the Trump administration, is not easy for him. “This regime of constant trolling, bullying, and gaslighting challenges me to figure out what I can best contribute and what is the work that I can maintain in a healthy way for myself,” he said. He’s careful not to call himself an activist, though he aims to provide “a support system for people who are out there doing the work and trying to push forward,” he explained. “I hope to make videos and do other work that you can use as a reference.” Smooth told me about his father, whose demons and circumstances had kept him from making the most of his creative talents. With that in mind, Smooth is proud of where he’s landed today—rather than bylines in certain publications or benchmark YouTube subscription numbers, he largely measures the success of his work by being able to do what his dad didn’t. I asked Smooth if he had plans to quit media and try something new. He laughed. “That’s always a looming possibility in my mind,” he replied. But taking on any kind of full-time employment is something he would do only if it were the right fit. “It’s not just about having some noble ideas, it’s about my fragile psyche,” he explained. “It’s enough of a struggle for me to believe I should be putting myself out there. I’m not selling my life path as something that is or should be replicable, but it’s just, it was the path for me.” cjr

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Simeon Booker When asked about his time as the first black reporter at The Washington Post, in the 1950s, Simeon Booker said, “If it was a social experiment, I think I passed the test.” Yet covering news in a city that was so racially divided nearly killed him. Entering the newsroom, he was greeted by some colleagues with hostility; on the streets of Washington, he encountered worse. Police and politicians questioned his press credentials. When he needed a ride back to the office, cab drivers zoomed past. Robert Barrett, the chief of the DC Metropolitan Police Department, threatened him physically. Friends commented that Booker’s push to succeed elicited a fatigue so great that it cast a pallor of death on his face. Rather than allow his desire for respect in the newsroom to defeat him, Booker set a goal: he would leave the Post if he ever got a banner headline. Otherwise, he later recalled, “I felt I would be regarded as a loser, someone who failed the chance, who couldn’t make it as a daily journalist on a white newspaper.” When that byline finally appeared on the Post’s front page, in 1953, Booker bought a used car for $150, drove west, and went to work for Ebony and Jet, published in Chicago by John H. Johnson, for black readers. In his new job, Booker pursued strong civil rights coverage, starting in 1955 with his reporting on the Emmett Till murder and trial. He retired in 2007, as Washington bureau chief—at the age of 88—marking the end of a celebrated career. W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past and The House at the End of the Road. He is a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.

“Nobody gets extra points for getting out of their car.” Today, 16 years after it premiered, The Wire stands up as one of the best dramas on television. Eric Deggans talks to its creator about how he captured a community that wasn’t his own—and what journalists can learn from his storytelling.

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avid Simon has produced some of TV’s most groundbreaking series. But he has never forgotten that he started as a journalist, with more than a dozen years spent as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, mostly on the cops beat. His first book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991), became an NBC series, and his second—written with Edward Burns, a homicide detective in Baltimore—The Corner: A Year in the Life of an InnerCity Neighborhood (1997), was made into an HBO miniseries. By 2002, he had created a series for HBO about the war on drugs in Baltimore hailed as one of the best dramas in the history of television: The Wire. Still, Simon always thought he’d be back in newspapers before long. “The whole time I was doing The Wire, I thought ‘When this is done, I’m gonna go to The Washington Post,” he says, referring to a standing job offer there. For him, The Wire’s story was “journalistic,” making the argument, rooted in real experiences, that the “War on Drugs” was ineffective and had become a war on America’s underclass. The Wire fleshed out characters often left out of narratives elsewhere—especially in Baltimore’s poor, black neighborhoods—humanizing people in marginalized places. President Barack Obama namechecked it as his favorite show. So what can a white recovering journalist from Montgomery County, Maryland, tell today’s reporters about how to cover people of color and underserved communities? In a recent conversation, edited substantially for length and clarity, Simon, 58, offered some answers.

DAVID SIMON used his experience on the police beat to shape his scripts.

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Develop an ear for cultures that are not your own.

SIMON I had a different advantage than many other people working in television. They made me a police reporter for a metropolitan daily in a majority-black city. So there was a fundamental sort of fork in the road for me. Either I’m going to become one of those police reporters who is wholly dependent on the police department for information, or I’m going to learn how to listen to people in cadences other than my own. It wasn’t just about race, it was also about class and it was about ethnicity. I can’t remember hearing the “n” word once in my entire time growing up. That’s a pretty sheltered life in America; I didn’t even hear it thrown around by white people. When I came to Baltimore, 30 miles north, I heard race discussed and invoked in ways that I never had growing up. By the time I hit the ground writing scripts, I wasn’t trying to write black or white or Irish or Italian cop or noncop. I was writing people I knew. I was really trying to stream actual voices and stories that I had come to know over those years into script form. And that made it a lot easier than sort of sitting back and going, ‘Oh it’s time to write a black narcotics detective. I wonder what he would sound like?’ I’m just writing people I know. DEGGANS Sounds like part of your success, which journalists can emulate, is taking time to get to know a beat and the people who are part of that beat. SIMON This is really hard, now that journalism is so thinned out. But one of the great things that happened to me is I never got promoted. I just kept finding more and more resonance in what I was covering, and I got better at it. One of the things that happens nowadays in journalism is—you did good at being the police reporter, it’s been eight months, you’re now covering the election. You know that’s a recipe for the Peter Principle. But it’s also a recipe for never getting below the surface. The Wire is the work of somebody who went through a 15-year period of buying into the system, then evaluating the system over time, and then critiquing the system.

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Hire a diverse newsroom stocked with people who are willing to be in situations where they are outnumbered.

SIMON This is a little bit hard; to critique my own hiring by The Baltimore Sun. When I got to the Sun, there were four police reporters. One of them was African-American. It was a city that was (nearly) 60 percent black at that point. Maybe putting me on the police beat was a little bit of an affront. A paper that was more racially sensitive, that was thinking ahead, even in 1982 or 1983 (might have done things differently). The way they looked at it, the police beat was where we put all entrylevel people and you’re an entry-level person. They figured they’d move me off pretty quickly if I did okay. But I ended up staying there. Is it a healthy and viable thing for most newspapers to not make a pluralistic newsroom a priority? I don’t think so. One of the things Baltimore taught me, and I made sure to teach it to my kids: if I’m going to do this beat right, I have to walk into places and be the only white face or one of two or three white faces in a room full of people who are not white. Is it going to bother you to the point where you’re not going to be able to do your job? Even among white folk who are well-meaning and intent on making human connection, some get scared when suddenly they’re cast into the place they’ve never been before in their life—which is as a minority. I had to get to the point where this not only doesn’t bother me but it doesn’t affect me in any way. This is my day-to-day. And it wasn’t about race, it was about levels of poverty. That did not come naturally. It came by force of the beat itself; the beat demanded that. If I wanted to hear anything

from anyone other than the police, I had to be able to walk into a rowhouse and convince people very quickly that I’m not a cop and I really want to hear what you have to tell me about what happened last night. And there were reporters who did not want to open that door. DEGGANS But when it comes to a lack of diversity, couldn’t people say that about The Wire? Other than a few scripts from your friend, the African-American writer David Mills, you didn’t have black writers, did you? SIMON I asked David Mills to be a writer every single season of The Wire. And he did write two or three scripts for us. But the great ambition of David Mills was to get a network show. I tried out some other people—the truth was Ed Burns and I were writing the drug war of Baltimore. He had policed it; I had covered it. We felt like we had it structurally—we understood what the story was from beginning to end. We attempted to hire novelists (note: authors such as Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos filled out the writing staff ); we felt like we were doing something new with structure so I tended to not want to hire anybody in TV. I thought about going out to a couple of black novelists and I sort of explored that with agents and found that they had their own stuff that they were trying to develop. Not surprising.

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3 Embrace important truths about race, class, and culture, even if they are uncomfortable.

SIMON We’ve created an American economy that doesn’t actually need its underclass. And Baltimore is a prime example of that. If that’s the case, it is infinitely easier for the drug trade—which is a factory that’s operating 24/7 and is hiring every goddamn day—to acquire adolescent and adult black males. And so what happens a lot in the entertainment industry or in the journalism pipeline is people are running scared. They’re writing tight. It’s from a liberal logic: I don’t want to add to this stigma. So I’m going to actually avoid looking at the entire problem. I didn’t make the drug dealers on The Wire black because I was saying something racial. I made them that way because the drug trade in Baltimore, on that level, was predominantly situated in African-American communities. I was chasing the real. If they only represent a cohort to you, if you’re inclined to a fundamental racism, you see every 14-year-old drug dealer as only a drug dealer. If you’re inclined to liberal apologia, then they’re always going to be victims without agency. They’re never going to be that person who—yes, they were profoundly marginalized by class and by race—and yet there were fundamental choices they made, too. DEGGANS Your earlier point reminds me of a speech that Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin makes in The Wire to a young sergeant, saying cops have gotten disconnected from neighborhoods in the war on drugs, because in war, everyone on every corner is your enemy. Have journalists gotten disconnected, too? SIMON I greatly resented—really resented—whenever a reporter, and it was invariably white, would make a big deal about how they had taken on some level of imagined or real personal risk in reporting a story in Baltimore. They wanted a pat on the back or extra valuation in the newsroom for having gone to a world other than their own in their imagination and brought back some narrative. It was, like, Fuck you, what do you think, you went to Beirut? You’re supposed to be saying this is part of your city. People live here. They’re completely capable of being as innately human and nuanced as people living anywhere else.

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And I’m capable of capturing them because I’m a reporter in this city. It should go unstated that nobody gets extra points for getting out of their car. That notion of, My God, this is a dangerous and foreign land is as cynical and calculated and cowardly as a journalist can manage. DEGGANS Is it fair to say The Wire was more about class than it was about race, anyway? SIMON I think so. We were talking about the people who got left behind at the turn of the century by the American economy and by American society. And so I think being poor in America and being born into poverty, white or black, and being marginalized economically, does have a pathology. It is compounding and it’s generational. And the underclass, white or black, exhibits pathologies that are profound. But I don’t see it as a construct of race, and honestly, I assumed everybody else knew that. The fact is, there are two Americas, and The Wire was about one America and not the other. I used to say all the time as a quote: “Look, there are, let’s say, 479 dramas about one America. For a brief, five season period, we did a drama about the other America that got left behind.” We’re never going to attend to it, ever, if you make it invisible.

Don’t let the focus on a middle-class target audience push you away from covering marginalized communities.

DEGGANS Do news outlets get so caught up in reaching advertisers and subscribers that they turn away from important stories? SIMON You ever heard the story that ended me at The Baltimore Sun? When I knew it was time to go? There was a buyout on the table. I’d come back to the paper after researching The Corner. I had an offer from The Washington Post, I also was being offered jobs on NYPD Blue, and I was offered a job on Homicide. But I still wanted to stay at The Baltimore Sun. I grew up there; I have the home phone numbers of 600 cops. But my stories had become much more narrative, and I’m much less interested in reporting what you, the white reader with two point three kids, wants. There’s this whole untapped world of narrative and humanity and emotion that I just want to pull through the keyhole because it’s really interesting. So I had this one story—the cannibalization of bulk metal. Guys, virtually all of them drug-addicted, were lugging radiators to the scales at scrap yards, to sell the metal. If you don’t think being a drug addict is the hardest job in America, just watch that. So I said I want to do a magazine story on these guys. I went around with them and I wrote the piece up. And it went up the editing ladder. It finally hit the top ranks of editors, and they freaked out because these guys were stealing. I said, ‘Of course they’re stealing. That’s in the piece. Can we not walk beside them because

they are petty thieves?’ This is addiction. This is desperation. One editor said, ‘I need you not to sympathize with them.’ There’s plenty of room in the piece to say, ‘Yeah, what you’re doing is wrong and you are doing damage.’ It says all that. But what it also says is these guys are funny, human, and desperate. And they have wit. That was the moment when I realized some people are just never going to get it. DEGGANS You’ve been a pretty vocal critic of President Trump. What do you see journalists doing right and wrong in covering him? SIMON I

think the critical mistakes were made at the beginning of his campaign when he was creating viewership, particularly on cable. And when live coverage of his every utterance was a profit center for journalism. He and his ideas received disproportionate coverage. It was a fundamental failure of institutional journalism. I think, in some ways, journalism came out of that election cycle with an existential crisis—that Trump helped them solve. You’re a journalist; now, you wake up every day knowing that a fundamental element of America is entirely dependent on your ability to stand up to this man. There’s been a lot of good journalism about what’s gone wrong and what is dishonorable about this American moment. On the other hand, I think what’s problematic is that this president

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has figured out the deconstruction of how information is transmitted in our society. Social media is such that a lie can travel a full day’s journey before the truth ever gets its boots on. And it can be sustained through falsehood and manipulation, so that it almost doesn’t matter what trained and careful journalists say. It’s why I was engaged on Twitter. Opinions are already being formed and shaped long before they can be addressed seriously by journalists. DEGGANS You got kicked off Twitter earlier this year. Twice. SIMON The reason I got thrown off Twitter, and the reason I regard it as a rigged game, is that the people running that website, they want to wash their hands of the idea that they have to be in some way the evaluators of what is slander and what is not and what is true and what is not. The only intelligent response to much of what occupies Twitter as provocation has to be to call some users out for the elemental inhumanity on display. I was kicked off for telling somebody to die of boils. It’s basically a slightly funnier and more Yiddishkeit way of saying ‘drop dead.’ I told the guy who thought he could say that George Soros had consigned other Jews to the Nazis as a 14-year-old that he should die of boils. And they blocked me. When I got back online, I basically explained to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, ‘Jack, if this is your policy, die of boils.’ And for that tweet, he

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blocked me again. They can solve all this tomorrow, if they just said: no anonymity. Everyone has to post under their own name. You know what that’s called? Letters to the editor. Now it suddenly becomes human; now it starts to reflect actual human beings rather than political provocation and propaganda and agitprop. But they won’t do that; there’s not enough money in that. So if you’re not going to do that, get the fuck out of my way and let me tell this guy who he really is. (Note: Simon has since returned to Twitter.) DEGGANS It seems the central component to creating your characters in The Wire was trust; real people in marginalized communities had to open their lives to you and trust you to tell their stories. Journalists these days are also struggling with trust; many people don’t seem to trust them. What’s the secret? SIMON You have to come back every day. It doesn’t happen the first day or the second day or the third day. If you demonstrate that you went and talked to somebody they said you should talk to, if you never lie about what your intentions are, you stand a much better chance of shaving away the distrust until you get down to a veneer of cooperation. And then if you keep going, eventually, you might get to the area of actual trust. There’s something else that is a wonderful skill set for reporters, but reporters never use it. It’s okay to be

the idiot. How many middle class reporters, white or black, walk into the well of the American underclass and don’t suffer the temptation of showing that they are smart and that they know the answers to questions? Yeah, sometimes you gotta wade through a certain amount of bullshit. But it’s in that waiting that people learn to trust you. Because you’re listening. And also while you’re wading through the bullshit, eventually the bullshit wears out and they start telling you not only what you need to know, but also what they need to tell you. DEGGANS Do you still miss journalism? Think you might ever go back to it? SIMON I do—at any moment, even to this point, because I’ve never garnered a significant audience in television. I have this remarkable sinecure with HBO that I don’t think I can walk away from. They’re allowing me to tell stories that I think matter and that I think are good arguments. But I think in some respects, once I can’t do the kind of TV I want to do, it is time to come back to journalism. I miss the reportorial. I miss the sense of discovery. I miss the actual going out and being in the sinew of the world. You want to be the guy standing up at the campfire with the best story. cjr

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How an artist with a journalism degree shows people how to question the news

Alexandra Bell’s Revelations

n April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old white woman out for a run in Central Park was violently beaten and raped. Five black and Latinx teenagers were put on trial for the crime and convicted. In the tabloids, they were called the Central Park Five. Donald Trump placed a paid advertisement in all four of the city’s major newspapers, writing that the boys should “be afraid” and calling for restoration of the death penalty. Years later, the Five were exonerated thanks to DNA evidence and a confession from the real assailant. But when Trump campaigned for president, he brought up the case and asserted, against proof, that they were guilty. Alexandra Bell examines coverage of the Central Park Five in a new series of prints, No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter. The title refers to an open letter that Wynter, a cultural critic, wrote about police classification of black men. “I’m quite literally highlighting particular terms that I feel like are pathologizing and racialized and trying to show the ways stories are reported about black people,” she tells CJR. “Is there a way to train people how to question? To have a whole set of questions about terminology used, what photos are used, where the photos are placed? It’s what I was trying to think about,” she says. “I’m trying to reorient people around who gets to be a victim.” On one page, which reads “Teen Gang Rapes Jogger,” she points out, “There is no ‘alleged.’ There is nothing. It just says it, in big bold letters at the top. I want people to think critically about these things.” Of the Five, she adds, “It’s one thing to say, well, they were innocent and everyone thought they were guilty. It’s another thing to ask: How is the media complicit in that particular narrative and how could things have been done differently?”

PHOTOGRAPHER

Sari Goodfriend

ARTIST AT WORK Alexandra Bell at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, September 2018

“Friday, April 21, 1989 – Front Page,” photolitho and screenprint on paper. From the series No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, 2018.

“The thing that was most troubling for me with the Trump ad was that there is a way for very wealthy people to place ads and statements in papers.”

No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, 2018, installation view from Original Language, curated by Natasha Marie Llorens at the CUE Art Foundation, New York, 2018. Opposite page, from the series No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, 2018, photolitho and screenprint on paper. Clockwise: “Monday, April 23, 1989 – Page 3” “Tuesday, April 25, 1989 – Page 5” “Monday, May 1, 1989 – Page 9” “Sunday, April 30, 1989 – Page 42”

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ALEXANDRA BELL

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DA R RY L R I C H A R DSO N

“A Teenager With Promise,” 2017, by Alexandra Bell. Digital inkjet on bond paper (installation view).

ALEXANDRA BELL

G E N E V I E V E H A N SO N

“I think a lot of the markings are really about me finding ways to isolate the things that are troubling for me and problematic.”

“A Teenager With Promise,” 2018, screenprint and archival pigment print on paper. Installation view from Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, 2018.

TK CREDIT

E . TA M M Y K I M

How misreading a culture changes the story

Covering the Koreas

AUTHOR

E. Tammy Kim ILLUSTRATOR

Hannah K. Lee

MAKING HEADLINES Seoul’s line, quoted by every Korean paper, is that the divided peninsula is making an “important first step toward peace.” Will that be undermined by the American press?

orea stories are not easy to sell. But in May, since President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, had taken a macabre interest in each other, I took a gamble and flew to Seoul. Before my jet lag wore off, it was clear that it would be a newsworthy summer. Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, went to Washington to meet with Trump and lay the groundwork for a US–North Korea summit—the first of its kind—only to see Trump cancel it days later. Moon, flummoxed, took a call from Kim; then, in secret, he entered the demilitarized zone between their borders to convene in person. It was an extraordinary, rare overture. Feelings were massaged, in Pyongyang and Washington, and within a few days, the meeting was on again. To refer to the summit as “historic” or “unprecedented” (as all of us writing about it did) was accurate but emotionally inadequate. It wasn’t just that Trump would be the first US president to meet with a North Korean head of state; it’s that the two men had, until recently, traded threats of nuclear annihilation. Last year, when Trump and Kim sparred dangerously on Twitter and North Korea fired missiles into Japanese airspace, major American news outlets set aside their skepticism of Trump and embraced belligerence toward Pyongyang. A particularly reckless Foreign Policy piece was called “It’s Time to Bomb North Korea.” In contrast to this American angst, South Koreans, even with their literal attachment to the North, were not overly concerned. Hostilities bred by an ongoing but cold Korean War had come in waves for nearly seven decades. (An armistice was signed in 1953.) The Kim dynasty had made its nuclear ambitions clear all along. More to the point, around the time that Trump came to power, 17 million South Koreans occupied their streets in a show of force called the Candlelight

Revolution. Park Geun-hye, a corrupt, monarchical president, was impeached and, in May 2017, Moon, a mild-mannered liberal, was elected. Moon had served as chief of staff in a previous South Korean administration, and promised to resurrect a discarded “Sunshine Policy” with North Korea. Using the bonhomie of the 2018 Winter Olympics, in PyeongChang, he lured Kim into diplomacy—cooperating on artistic and athletic exchanges, agreeing to meet in person, and communicating via a long-dormant interKorean phone line. On April 27, 2018, after the first summit between the Koreas in 11 years, Moon and Kim issued the Panmunjom Declaration, promising “a new era of national reconciliation, peace, and prosperity.” It was thanks in large part to Moon that Trump could now cast himself as a peace seeker on the Korean peninsula. His new solicitousness toward Kim seemed good for everyone, in the sense of avoiding nuclear war. Yet the US media were unwilling to change course. It was shameful to engage with a “brutal dictator,” as Kevin Liptak wrote for CNN, or a “murderous tyrannical regime,” as Alex Gladstein, a human-rights advocate, asserted in Time, unless extreme concessions were obtained immediately. The catchy but unenforceable aim of “CVID” (complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization) became the demand du jour, and seeped into the South Korean nightly news. Ordinary South Koreans care more about peace than uranium counts, but to a disquieting extent, their media outlets and politicians pay close attention to what Americans say.

n June 12, Trump and Kim arrived at the Capella, a lavish resort on the Singaporean island of Sentosa. The summit was unlikely to result in instant denuclearization, but would anything short of that undermine future diplomacy? I wondered this as I watched the event unfold, which mostly meant streaming monotonous footage of secret service agents, packs of sweaty journalists, and tropical landscaping. The two heads of state sat with their translators for a brief photo opportunity and some awkward chitchat. The good stuff all took place behind closed doors. Finally, in the afternoon, Trump emerged

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for a post-summit press conference, holding forth from the stage of a large auditorium. Gathered to see him were the White House press corps and the lucky winners of a reporter lottery. (Some 3,000 journalists had come to Singapore from around the world.) Trump called mainly on those he knew, and their questions reflected American priorities. “The man you met today, Kim Jong-un, as you know, has killed family members, has starved his own people, is responsible for the death of Otto Warmbier—why are you so comfortable calling him ‘very talented’?” an NBC reporter asked, referring to the young American who died last year after being released from North Korean detention. Other questions: “Denuclearization—nuclear weapons and biological weapons and whatnot—is one problem in North Korea. Another huge problem is the horrible record that they have on human rights. Was that discussed at all?” “But what do you, President Trump, expect Kim Jong-un to do about the human rights record regarding the North Korean people?” Every country has its own parochial interests when it comes to North Korea. American journalists will reliably ask about denuclearization and human rights, the Japanese will ask about the dozens of its citizens abducted by Pyongyang, and South Koreans will ask about peace and reunification. “Western media is focused on the security threat and the national-security problem,” Elise Hu, until recently the Seoul bureau chief for National Public Radio, says. “For Koreans, this is about a divided country. This is about brothers and sisters on the other side.” After the Singapore summit concluded, I tuned into a Korean radio station, which interpreted the day’s events as a meaningful start and expressed surprise at those who saw things otherwise. “At the press conference, the American journalists asked such conservative questions,” one of the hosts said. “They were so focused on human rights.” The joint statement signed by Kim and Trump was pithy, and thus interpreted a million different ways. What was the meaning of “complete denuclearization”? South Korean newspapers (and North Korea’s party mouthpiece, The Rodong Shinmun) were upbeat: “Beyond Cold War wall, holding out hands of peace,” The Seoul Shinmun proclaimed.

E . TA M M Y K I M

Trump has a habit of making everything about himself, but American journalists need not do the same. Not every story should be told from the view of Washington.

“From Seven Decades of Animosity Toward Peace,” read the left-leaning Hankyoreh. It was the start of a “great journey toward peace,” according to The Kookmin Daily. The American press remained largely skeptical, if not hostile. Media Twitter, left and right, dismissed the summit as vapid, Trumpian showboating. The Washington Post observed that “it remained highly uncertain whether the young dictator” would “eliminate his nuclear arsenal” and that “the North’s brutal human rights abuses” weren’t discussed. The paper’s editorial board called the meeting “a victory for Kim Jong Un.” The New York Times labeled the joint statement “as skimpy as the summit meeting was extravagant.” The Wall Street Journal was more attentive to South Korean interests: the summit represented “an initial step” toward “ending more than six decades of enmity” and “enough for each side to claim an achievement.” It’s worth noting that most American journalists on the scene weren’t those based in Seoul, or even Tokyo or Beijing. They were the White House press corps. I asked a veteran Korean journalist employed by a major American outlet what he thought of this arrangement. (He did not have permission to speak on the record.) It made sense for White House reporters to be there and even take the lead, he said. But “the thing is, in the case of North Korea, we don’t really know what North Korea is thinking, what their intentions are. And in terms of historical and cultural dimensions, the White House

reporters at the center of this coverage don’t know a lot about the situation.”

he Moon administration worries that its peace-first approach to North Korea could be undermined by the American media’s cynicism. A bilingual reporter I spoke with at Bloomberg News in Seoul sees this as a valid concern. Just before Moon was elected, as tensions mounted between Trump and Kim, she noticed that Voice of America, an outlet funded by the US government, was blasting news about North Korea nonstop. “They were doing it so much that South Korean media was picking up on this coverage,” she says. The news began to affect the polls, giving a boost to Hong Joon-pyo, an extreme right-wing ally of Park, the impeached president. “These people were just interested in feeding Donald Trump’s vision of North Korea,” it seemed to her. Margy Slattery, a senior editor at Politico Magazine who participated in a US-Korea journalists exchange last year, recalls, “One source described US coverage of North Korea as ‘surreal’ and ‘detached from reality,’ in terms of the cartoon-like way American media outlets sometimes depict Kim Jong Un and his ‘hermit kingdom.’ The source said that such coverage can be dangerous because it gives leverage to the North Koreans by making their actions seem all the more unpredictable.” It doesn’t help that most North Korea watchers in the US, whether nuclear experts or foreign-policy wonks, show little interest in South Korea. This gap in audience—between those who can rattle off Kim Jong-un’s family tree and those engrossed by the latest scandal at Samsung—results in lopsided coverage. North Korea stories are plentiful but either grimly sensationalistic (executions, corruption, prison camps, starvation) or dryly tactical (rocket tests, nuclear inventories). South Korea stories, comparatively rare, hew to what my veteran reporter friend describes as a rerunning shortlist: “chaebol conglomerates, K-pop, kimchi, dog meat, and the aging society.” During the Olympics in PyeongChang, there was resurgent media interest in Koreans’ taste for canines. Frank Shyong, of the Los Angeles Times, critiqued this tendency from an Asian-American perspective: “I braced myself for a Western journalist to conclude that the

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practice of eating dogs was one of the main things American audiences should know about South Korea and, like clockwork, CNN delivered.”

his problem is not unique to the Koreas. In a world dominated by a single superpower, many countries are affected by the peculiar interests and biases of the boomeranging American news cycle. Sub-Saharan Africa is a prime victim, on account of neglect as much as stereotypical treatment: the baseline is no coverage at all, so stories in times of crisis get mangled. A reporter I know who worked in West Africa for many years cites the Ebola epidemic as a case in point. Most American media paid attention only when the virus came to their shores—that is, when a Liberian man infected with the disease flew to Dallas. Meanwhile, the stories told by the US press in West Africa failed to understand culturally rooted responses—traditional burial practices and faith healing were derided—and tended to ascribe victories to the Pentagon, rather than to local volunteers, despite the fact that medical units promised by the

Americans were never built. In Liberia, the net effect of this coverage was to undermine the legitimacy of President Ellen Sirleaf. The ongoing “drug war” in Mexico presents another example. According to journalist Michelle García, US outlets have focused on “sexy narco culture” as victims and investigative reporters on the ground struggle to highlight government corruption and impunity. (The same has been true in Colombia.) American accounts tend to echo the talking points of politicians and military leaders in the US, García says. Historically, this has meant that Mexican law enforcement, armed literally and rhetorically by the Americans, has been regarded as capable, while “concerns about ‘human

PI ON EERS

In February of this year, when Tahera Rahman stood in front of a camera and delivered her first live news report for WHBF-TV, the CBS affiliate in Rock Island, Illinois, it was the first time American television audiences were exposed to a Muslim journalist in a hijab. It was also a rejection of all those who had told Rahman—in ways both subtle and overt—that the opportunity might never come. Rahman, who is 27, was born in Naperville, Illinois, and committed to wearing a hijab when she was in fifth grade. There might be backlash, her mother warned her; but she did it anyway. While in college, studying journalism and preparing reels to send out for job applications, Rahman was told again that it might be best to take her headscarf off; some suggested that US viewers might not find it palatable to receive the news from a woman wearing one. Undeterred, she became the first Muslim editor of her college paper, at Loyola University Chicago, and landed work at Al-Jazeera English, Radio Islam, and the Chicago bureau of CBS Evening News. Arriving at WHBF, Rahman spent two years as a producer before being tapped to go on air. Rahman has said that she prays each night for the chance to “soften people’s hearts,” and there may be no better way to battle misconceptions than to have a Muslim reporting local stories. And, having already shattered one barrier, there is perhaps no one better suited to tear down the norms of what is and isn’t acceptable in the highly controlled market of national news. Just as important: in Rahman, young Muslim girls and boys will perhaps see a bit of themselves—and what is now all the more possible thanks to her perseverance. Sabrina Siddiqui is a national political reporter for Guardian US. She is a CBSN contributor and regular analyst on CNN and MSNBC.

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Tahera Rahman

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rights abuses’—and that’s how it was often reported, as simply a paragraph about ‘concerns about human rights abuses’— were secondary.” Thus, in 2006, newly elected Mexican President Felipe Calderón embraced his appointed role as a “brave” leader in the drug war, bypassing accusations of voter fraud and ignoring economic unrest in the country’s south. An opposite dynamic can be seen in Iran, whose leaders have long been demonized by the US press. During the hostage crisis of 1979, the saturation of American reports exaggerating Tehran’s threat to the West validated Ayatollah Khomeini’s warnings of foreign interference. “The core idea in this rhetoric is that America is the enemy seeking intervention and Iran has been able to stay independent,” Kiana Karimi, an Iranian writer and women’s rights activist, says. Recently, anxious coverage of Iran’s nuclear program— not to mention Trump’s withdrawal from the deal brokered by Barack Obama—has had much the same effect, bolstering President Hassan Rouhani’s arguments for proliferation. Ditto North Korea before the spate of summits.

uring the few months since Kim and Trump met in Singapore, years of diplomatic progress and a commensurate number of editorial takes have come to pass. In mid-September, President Moon convened again with Kim—this time, in the North Korean capital, accompanied by first lady Kim Jung-sook and a large entourage of politicians and CEOs. The summit was equal parts diplomacy and tourism, culminating in a pact on economic exchange, remediation of the demilitarized zone, cross-border rail lines, a joint bid for the 2032 Summer Olympics, and denuclearization. South Korean press accounts were enthusiastic; predictably, foreign-policy pundits and the editorial boards of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times published articles bemoaning the lack of nuclear accountability. Less than two weeks later, the UN General Assembly provided an opportunity for followup statecraft and showmanship. Trump and Moon signed a revised version of the USKorea Free Trade Agreement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with North Korea’s

foreign minister, and Trump gave a speech decrying internationalism while praising “a bold and new push for peace” on the Korean peninsula. Moon also delivered remarks and then, outside the stuffy confines of the UN, did something unorthodox for an avowed progressive: he sat for an interview with Fox News. With a smile, Moon explained to Bret Baier, a Fox correspondent, that peace was a precondition for denuclearization, reunification, and other vague but worthy goals on the Korean peninsula. Here, Moon realized, was a chance to shape the public narrative and speak directly to Trump and his supporters. It was a savvy political maneuver tinged with media critique. While more reputable outlets condemned Trump’s performance at the UN, Moon took the timeslot valued most by the White House. The Koreas will likely remain in the news as Trump and Kim plan for another summit and Kim prepares to visit Moon in Seoul. Trump has a habit of making everything about himself, but American journalists need not do the same. Not every story should be told from the view of Washington, nor should the White House press corps dislodge local reporters. America’s obsession with Kim Jong-un has, in fact, produced an expanding pool of journalists for US outlets in South Korea— and it’s their bylines I seek out as a reader. National Public Radio opened a Seoul bureau in 2015, The Wall Street Journal has grown a team there, and the Los Angeles Times recently hired a correspondent. A significant number of these staffers are native Korean speakers or at least proficient in the language; many belong to the Asian diaspora. It’s my hope that these developments will lead to more nuanced, varied reporting on the Korean peninsula, even if North Korea stories continue to be what pays the bills. I, too, have benefited from the surge in demand for North Korean coverage. The pieces I wrote over the summer were all adjacent to, if not necessarily focused on, Pyongyang. The Trumpian progression from antics to diplomacy opened a precious window of interest, and in that space— however temporary—I tried to expand what’s “relevant” to American readers. cjr

DIVIDING LINE A mural along the United StatesMexico border wall in Tijuana, Mexico, photographed in January 2017.

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ALICE DRIVER

Across the Language Barrier How journalists reach readers in translation

AUTHOR

Alice Driver PHOTOGRAPHER

Sandy Huffaker

hen Ginger Thompson, an investigative reporter who covers immigration and the drug war in the United States and Mexico, began working at ProPublica, four years ago, she felt a need for a more direct engagement with her subjects. She began to think about publishing her reporting in Spanish. In June 2017, when Thompson’s story “How the US Triggered a Massacre in Mexico,” a partnership between ProPublica and National Geographic, about a cartel’s assault on Allende, a border town, was published online in both Spanish and English, it quickly became the site’s most read bilingual feature, a distinction it still holds today. Translation had been done before, in an ad hoc manner, but this piece was transformative. “We started somewhat organically, in 2012, with a story out of Guatemala, and have since translated projects that widely impacted the Spanish-speaking community,” Tracy Weber, her editor, says. “Thompson’s story caused us to be more intentional in ensuring our Spanish speaking audience had access.” In August of this year, ProPublica launched a Spanish version of its website, which gathers its translated articles on a single page.

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PIONEERS

There has never been a lack of Native writers; there has been a problem in getting other people to read them. Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota journalist and publisher born in 1934 on the Pine Ridge reservation, in current-day South Dakota, has been a crucial megaphone for Native peoples to speak. Giago’s writerly aspirations began while he was a student at a Jesuit-run boarding school on the reservation. A prefect, not believing his impressive writing talent could be genuine, accused him of plagiarism. The prefect’s assertion—that he would “never amount to a hill of beans”—only provided fuel to his ambition. Alight with the intent to prove himself, Giago became a writer and editor at Native and non-Native newspapers. In 1981, he founded The Lakota Times, an independent newspaper, with only three people on staff. Doris, his wife, worked as a typesetter, but with so few journalists, she recalls, they all “just had to do everything.” Their approach to news—with local, community-based reporting—took off, and the trust that Giago established on his reservation made a reputation for him across South Dakota and eventually in Indigenous communities farther afield. In 1992, with the largest reach of any Native American publication, the paper changed its name to Indian Country Today; in 2011, it went digital. Giago has since returned to his local roots, working with The Lakota Journal. But his vision continues to foster many Native writers. The key, he says of his time as a founding publisher, is soul: “We had an Indian soul that was throughout the newspaper.” Lou Cornum was raised in Arizona and lives in Brooklyn. Their writing has appeared in The New Inquiry and Art in America.

Bilingual reporting and translation have become all the more important in the context of President Trump’s zero tolerance policy on border migration—especially because of the potential for stories to have a direct impact on lawmakers. On June 18, 2018, Thompson published Spanish-language audio from inside a US Customs and Border Protection facility where children separated from their parents were being held. The recording and its translation were picked up by Vox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR, as well as foreign outlets. Robert Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, played it for his colleagues on the Senate floor. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” he said. “But the audio released yesterday by ProPublica is worth a million tears.” The next day, President Trump declared that there would be an end to family separations. There is evidence that the practice has continued, but still, Thompson says, “That audio changed the conversation about that policy.” To get the language right in her pieces, Thompson goes back and forth with Carmen Méndez, her translator. “We want people to hear their voices reflected in the stories,” Thompson tells CJR. Méndez, who is from

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Tim Giago

ALICE DRIVER

Bilingual reporting and translation have become all the more important in the context of President Trump’s zero tolerance policy on border immigration.

Spain, says that she aims to capture proper dialect. From the first story, she explains, “Ginger gave me the audio recordings of people to try to transmit their voice, not only what they said—that is very important in journalism, to be precise with what they say—but also how they say it.” I can relate. As I write this, I am reporting for Longreads from Reynosa, on the USMexico border, for a story about unaccompanied migrant minors, some as young as eight, who are requesting asylum. The young people I’ve met—many of them girls—share with me the kinds of experiences that are often only fully told when there is cultural fluency and trust. I am not a native speaker—I have a PhD in Latin American literature and have spent the past five years in Mexico and Spain. But I transcribe my interviews in Spanish, translate them into English, and, when I finish writing, send the original Spanish quotes to María Ítaka, my translator and collaborator, with whom I always discuss my work. For Ítaka, it is important for her translations “to be very poetic, to be fully human,” she says. “The idea is to have empathy for others and to do it in the most faithful way.” Translators often remain in the

shadows—both because, when a translation is done well, nobody notices, and because plenty of outlets don’t give credit for translations. Yet Ítaka believes that “we must reclaim the place of the translator and know that it is very important in a global world where you want people to understand each other.”

ecause language enables reporting—and comprehension of complex subjects in the news—it is essential for local and national media outlets to have bilingual journalists. In February 2016, the Times launched an online Spanishlanguage edition with a bureau in Mexico City. (The launch was timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s visit to Mexico, which the Times wanted to cover in Spanish.) Eliezer Budasoff, an Argentinian native and the bureau’s editorial director, oversees a staff of around a dozen journalists who produce original reported stories and opinion pieces. The staff also discusses and selects which articles from the Times to translate from English to Spanish. The staff of the Times in Mexico City can be found on a quiet street in the Roma Norte neighborhood, working inside a light-filled

colonial home. When I visit, Budasoff ushers me into a high-ceilinged living room, then leads me to a space in the back of the house that has been renovated as an office. Several staffers type away at their laptops. Paulina Villegas, a Mexican journalist who was hired by the Times to write in English, tells me that she thinks she would never have gotten an interview for the job had she not been bilingual. When the Times in Spanish was launched, Villegas began to write articles in her native language for the paper for the first time, with Budasoff as her editor. Villegas, who describes Spanish as “baroque,” revels in the opportunity. One story stands out: it was about the torture and rape of women in 2006 in Atenco, Mexico. Flower vendors were protesting being evicted from a public space, and Enrique Peña Nieto—now the president of Mexico, then a governor—sent 3,500 state officers to crack down on the protesters, many of whom were raped and tortured by police. “We did this Atenco story in English, and it was a pretty straightforward news story about this new human rights resolution,” Villegas recalls. “I had so much material, so I did a completely separate piece in Spanish.” Boris Muñoz, who is Venezuelan, is the oped editor of the Times in Spanish. “We look for trends,” he says. “New aspects or little-known aspects of reality or issues that are very important for us—for example, the debate on abortion in Argentina.” These include pieces addressing women’s rights, and Budasoff tells CJR, “The fact that we not only represent diversity of origins in Latin America but also are gender-balanced has allowed us to find an opening in terms of issues that were not covered.”

lías López, who helped spearhead global expansion at the Times and is now global opinions editor at The Washington Post, was part of the team that decided to translate Sarah Maslin Nir’s 2015 Times article “The Price of Nice Nails,” about working conditions in New York City nail salons, into Chinese, Korean, and Spanish. “We were just testing the impact of language as a lever to increase reader engagement,” he recalls. There wasn’t much foreign-language chatter on social media, López says, but it was a valuable learning experience.

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Machine translation was initially considered but deemed too imperfect to be relied upon. “We found out that translation without a layer of editing wasn’t good enough,” López explains. Abigail See, a PhD student at Stanford University who is researching machine translation, says that, to produce a perfect translation, artificial intelligence must “be able to read a text and understand it at the deepest level, which involves understanding the context and, for example, the emotions behind it.” Google Translate and other applications can produce useful basic translations, she says, but they lack complex understanding of the meaning of language. As López sees it, “Any language expansion needs a rigorous editorial commitment to quality control and technical support.” Review would have to be part of the investment. In his new role at the Post, López continues to push the importance of translation. He was part of a team that decided to publish the editorial board’s first-ever article in Arabic, on August 8, after Canada criticized the arrest of two female activists in Saudi Arabia, and Canada’s ambassador was expelled from the country. The piece was edited by Jamal Kashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist working for the Post.

ALICE DRIVER

“We must reclaim the place of the translator and know that it is very important in a global world where you want people to understand each other.”

Khashoggi, who also began to translate his own columns, believed that the lack of freedom enjoyed by the press in his part of the world made translating work into Arabic crucially important. “Jamal didn’t just want us to translate his columns,” López says, “but also the works of other columnists.” Kashoggi’s fate reveals the risks inherent to translation: on October 2, after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Khashoggi disappeared; officials believe that he was murdered. His editor, Karen Attiah, published a column in which she described the “unbearable” repression he suffered in Saudi Arabia and wrote that “the mystery surrounding Jamal’s whereabouts comes amid a wave of crackdowns on dissent and activism in Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.” Kashoggi’s determination to have his writing published for his own people to read, it is widely believed, made him a target of a violent regime. Attiah wrote that she views him as “an inspiration.” Her column was translated into Arabic. Ben Taub, a staff writer at The New Yorker, made a case for Arabic translation in 2016 to Willing Davidson, his editor, while working on “The Assad Files,” about the Syrian regime’s involvement in mass torture and

killings. “We could show Syrians what decisions within their own government had led to these atrocities,” Taub says of the investigation. “It mattered a great deal to me that that was something that would be accessible to them.” To date, “The Assad Files” is the first and only story that The New Yorker has translated into another language. Taub worked with Nermin Nizar, based in Cairo. Nizar, who is 46, has worked as a literary and journalistic translator for the past 26 years, and recalls that the main challenge of working on Taub’s piece was psychological. “The details of what happened in the air force hospital where prisoners were kept were so ugly,” she says. Since Arabic reads from right to left, The New Yorker’s web development team had to build a new platform to host the article online. For Taub, the effect was profound. “This wasn’t a business decision about the readership,” Taub says. “It just was obviously the right thing to do to try and make it accessible to the people for whom it matters most.” Translation, in this and so many cases, has a moral purpose: recognizing that the stories journalists publish should be available to those who have put everything on the line to tell the truth. cjr

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Diversity in Newsrooms

Journalism’s Bad Reflection

ILLUSTRATOR

Alvaro Dominguez

hat does it mean that most newsrooms in America don’t reflect the diversity of the communities they cover? The answer can’t be good. CJR visited 10 newsrooms across the country where the mismatch between the makeup of the staff and the demographics of the coverage area seems particularly notable. What we found is both depressingly predictable—lots of talk about job pipelines and a lack of qualified candidates—and unusually candid. Editors admitted that they had, frankly, failed. The fact that the conversations about diversity are the same ones that the industry has been having for decades (really since the report of the Kerner Commission a half-century ago), shows how little progress has been made in the United States, even as the demographics of the country have changed profoundly. It is true that journalism’s failure is not unlike that of other institutions, from corporate America to college campuses to Congress, but that is as much an excuse as an observation. For the profiles that follow, we talked to newsroom managers, reporters, and residents about what a lack of diversity means to readers and to journalism itself. And, critically, we look at what now has to happen to fix the problem.

JOURNALISMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BAD REFLECTION

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“As I look out at the newsroom, I see white people.”

Honolulu, Hawai‘i H

of Civil Beat’s staff is white

25.7

of Hawai‘i’s residents are white

onolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news site, launched in 2010 with a clear mission: to do watchdog journalism aimed at affecting positive social change. “The local media here sucked,” Patti Epler, the editor, says. “And one of the reasons they sucked is they’re very ‘go along, get along.’ We don’t want to do just press releases; we really want to go deeper.” Funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire philanthropist behind First Look Media, Civil Beat would be ambitiously investigative— telling new stories about a state with complex challenges and ethnic tensions. White people are in the minority here, representing 25.7 percent of the population; the largest ethnic group is Asian, at 37.8 percent. More than 10 percent of residents are Native Hawaiian or from another Pacific island; about the same number are Latinx; black people compose the smallest racial group. Yet the staff at Civil Beat is 74 percent white, including Epler—a near perfect flip of Hawai‘i’s demographics. This surprised Emily Dugdale, a reporter and podcast producer who is Afro-Latina, when she first walked through the door a year ago. “I thought it might have been a little bit more diverse, just because of Hawai‘i,” she recalls. It was a striking first impression. “I wouldn’t say I was crazy surprised,” she adds. “Sadly, I think those are the conditions to expect in most newsrooms.” Civil Beat’s diversity problem isn’t unique when compared to media outlets in the rest of the country, yet it shows that even a digitally native operation, created within the past several years, can suffer the same staffing problems as older, legacy publications. In Hawai‘i, there are particular features of culture to consider. “As I look out at the newsroom, I see white people,” Chad Blair, the politics and opinion editor, says. “I have become the institutional memory as a local, even though I’m not from here.” Blair, who is white, has lived in Hawai‘i for 30 years. But he doesn’t know ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, or Hawaiian, a language that comes from oral tradition and is still commonly spoken throughout the state, especially in the names of people and places. Blair knows enough to know—as anyone who has spent extended time in Hawai‘i would—about the language’s two diacritical marks: the ‘okina (“a glottal stop, similar to the sound between the syllables of ‘ohoh,’” per the University of Hawai‘i) and the kahako (“a macron, which lengthens and adds stress to the marked vowel”). The state of Hawai‘i strongly encourages the use of diacritical markings in writing, and they can be rendered fairly easily. An ‘okina is made with a single open quotation mark; the kahako is a straight-line accent that can be added on any computer’s keyboard settings. The marks dictate pronunciation: Hawai‘i has an okina between the last two letters and Waikīkī, a beach area popular with tourists, has kahakos over the last two vowels.

JOURNALISM’S BAD REFLECTION

ABRAHAM WILLIAMS

LOST OPPORTUNITY Former Hawai‘i Governor John D. Waihe‘e III says that Civil Beat is missing out by not having a more diverse staff.

But news outlets handle usage differently. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, for instance, doesn’t use marks for common words—like Hawai‘i—but it does sometimes for others, including names, and plans to expand usage are being considered. Hawaii Business magazine started using marks last year; the Associated Press doesn’t except on rare occasions, in a proper names. A reporter seeking guidance on Google Maps would come up against confusion, since there’s inconsistency to be found there: Mānoa Valley District Park appears with a kahako; Mānoa Elementary School does not. In 2010, the editors of Civil Beat decided not to use diacritical marks at all, except occasionally, in the spelling of someone’s name. Debates over proper language use have come up in quotes and copy, Blair says, but Civil Beat has never had a Hawaiian language expert on staff, and there have been mistakes. In some cases, readers aware of the

newsroom’s whiteness have bristled at the appearance of certain words—instead of appreciating the effort, they see appropriation. In July, for instance, the editorial board published a piece, “Get Off Your Damn Okole And Vote”—deploying a substitute for “ass” that’s typically acceptable to say in the presence of children. Soon after, Blair fielded calls from two readers—one Native Hawaiian and the other white—complaining about its inclusion in a headline. They felt it was too crass. The staff has also discussed how to handle quotes in Hawaiian pidgin, a language that developed as Native Hawaiians communicated with immigrant groups. Pidgin words and phrases are commonly inflected in everyday conversation—it fills speech more or less densely in different parts of the state. Yet not all readers understand the meaning of pidgin words—particularly people outside Hawai‘i—and no Civil Beat reporters are fluent. Depending on the situation, editors have paraphrased quotes or translated them into standard English. Questions of language arise in newsrooms all over Hawai‘i. Across town, at the Star-Advertiser, where 40 percent of the staffers are white and 60 percent represent minority groups—predominantly Asian, but also Native Hawaiian, black, Pacific Islander, Indonesian, and Latinx—there is a weekly column in Hawaiian that has run for

more than 10 years. The paper prints a short synopsis of the piece in English at the top, rather than attempt a direct translation, since Hawaiian words can be interpreted in various ways. This is possible, in part, because about half of the full-time staff is from Hawai‘i and more than a quarter has spent decades on the islands. “We’re fortunate we have good local candidates that can represent different minorities,” Frank Bridgewater, the editor, who is white, tells CJR. “We’re lucky—they just walk in the door.” So why, then, wouldn’t Civil Beat hire people fluent in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i or pidgin, instead of giving up entirely? (To say nothing of availing editors of a few keyboard shortcuts.) “You don’t need a Native Hawaiian to write about Native Hawaiian issues,” Jim Simon, the managing editor of Civil Beat, tells CJR. He concedes, however, “It is important to have someone at the table, if you can, to talk about those issues from a very different perspective.”

ivil Beat has had a tough time integrating into its community. Its early days were challenging—a tight budget and no guarantee that the site would survive made it difficult to support a team, John Temple, the founding editor, recalls. Some staffers left months into the job and, in one case, before the site launched. And the door kept swinging: in 2012, Temple packed up to join The Washington Post. Epler, Civil Beat’s deputy editor, took the reins; she had worked in Hawai‘i once before—in the early 1980s, for Honolulu magazine—and had moved through websites and newspapers in Arizona, Washington, and Alaska, where she was part of the reporting team at an Anchorage paper that in 1989 won a Pulitzer Prize. But many of Civil Beat’s journalists from Hawai‘i—often those representing minority groups—continued to cycle out. Despite the initial turnover, Civil Beat managed to make a splash by filing Freedom of Information Act requests for the salaries of government employees. In a special report that revealed data about 8,500 workers for the city and county of Honolulu, Civil Beat pursued a degree of transparency and accountability that the community wasn’t quite used to. It was so unusual, in fact, that other news outlets reported on readers’ concerns over publishing the information. (“It shouldn’t even be posted up there,” Rita Narvaez, a resident of Honolulu, told Hawaii News Now.) Civil Beat relished its role as agitator and advertised with a tagline: “Smart. Disruptive. Never Sorry.” It was a welcome, sharp voice at a time when the local media was suffering. Over the past decade, Hawai‘i’s two largest daily newspapers have merged—Star-Advertiser is the result; three onceindependent television stations now operate under a single brand, Hawaii News Now; Honolulu Weekly, an alternative paper, has folded; and Mana, a glossy magazine covering Native Hawaiian subjects, has stopped printing. During the same period, Civil Beat shifted its business model, from that of a paid subscription site to a nonprofit receiving substantial support from an Omidyar-backed fund. A director of philanthropy was hired, and the newsroom began accepting donations, which it now receives from individuals and organizations, including

CJR

Why wouldn’t Civil Beat hire people fluent in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i or pidgin, instead of giving up entirely?

the Knight Foundation and the Facebook Journalism Project. (Knight is also a funder of CJR. The Democracy Fund, which is part of the Omidyar network, has helped fund CJR in the past, but has no current involvement.) Civil Beat has more than doubled in staff—there are now 19 journalists in the newsroom. But filling their ranks has often involved hiring people from outside Hawai‘i, and the newsroom is now largely malihini haole (white newcomers from the mainland). This has meant that, even as Civil Beat has received its share of journalism prizes and its reporting has ushered in legislative changes, the approach it’s taken has sometimes rubbed sources and readers the wrong way. Contributors, too. Civil Beat has “always been hiring from outside of here, and that’s the one flaw,” Denby Fawcett, a longtime journalist from Hawai‘i and contributor to Civil Beat, tells CJR. Being primarily white and nonlocal is “probably a fair criticism of Civil Beat,” Epler says. “We just can’t find people here locally— Civil Beat does a specific kind of journalism— we do a harder edge, an aggressive thing that people aren’t used to here.”

ately, Civil Beat has been working to address its gaps in representation. In 2016, Civil Beat started a fellowship program to train early-career reporters in the site’s self-professed brand of investigative journalism. Those recruits have been more diverse than the general pool of hires;

“Effectively, there are two newsrooms at The Seattle Times.”

Seattle, Washington

“

eattle thinks of itself as a ‘woke’ city,” Tyrone Beason, a journalist for The Seattle Times who has written extensively on race, says. People of color make up around 35 percent of the population; politicians campaign on inclusivity. “So you have to deal not with reticence of the hostile kind, but reticence of the righteous kind. People feel as if they have internalized all of the good lessons that our society has to teach, and it’s hard to get people to think that they have something else to learn.” This can be a challenge for the newsroom of the Times, too. Among 194 employees, 75 percent are white; only 15 people on staff are Asian, and 9 are black. In addressing diversity, there tends to be a gap between older and younger employees. “Effectively, there are two newsrooms at The Seattle Times,” an internal survey found this summer. Long-time staffers are “much more likely to be satisfied and to feel valued by senior leaders that they’ve worked with for years,” whereas “young employees are much more urgently worried about pay and family care, do not feel valued by the newsroom, and have deep concerns about its future.” The Times has rolled out several initiatives to increase the hiring and retention of people of color. Don Shelton, the executive editor, says that the paper has “become much more intentional and systemic about recruiting for diversity, making sure that we post positions externally on most or all of the national diversity websites.” In February, the newsroom hosted a diversity workshop; the paper also formalized a “Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.” On the newsroom’s Slack account, the task force created a channel, called #sensitive-news-help, to offer support in covering topics related to race and ethnicity, Frank Mina, the assistant managing editor, says. Yet several former Times staffers tell CJR that the old ways of the newsroom stifle efforts toward diversity. Thomas Wilburn, who left the Times in July, says that he was frustrated with how the “sensitive” Slack channel was used—in practice, staffers rarely posted about work in progress, and colleagues were told that, if they had concerns about published pieces, they should approach editors directly. “Having conversations in private eliminates the ability to learn from observing others,” he says. “There’s no way to form a collective idea of what our values are.” Current staffers tell CJR that, when they have brought editors feedback, superiors

of The Seattle Times staff is Asian

of the city’s residents are Asian

have called them “uncooperative” and “argumentative”; one reporter was told to smile more. “There was a question of how much you can bring your personal views or experiences to inform your work as a journalist before you’re no longer being objective,” Audrey Carlsen, who left the paper in 2017, says. “I may think of myself as a journalist, but the world thinks of me as a black dude, whether I like it or not,” Beason says. “You can’t make that disappear, but how do you make it more apparent, but in a constructive way?” —Jane C. Hu

CJR

Staffing problems are happening in a state where whites have never been the majority, as opposed to other places, where the demographic changes are more recent.

“We need to expand the audience to look more like the country that we serve.”

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles County is 50% Latinx, but public radio station KPCC’s audience is only 18% Latinx

18%

50%

two—Dugdale and a white reporter originally from Hawai‘i—have recently been hired full-time. This year, at the urging of staffers, Epler allowed a committee to convene and examine how to improve its staffing and spread the word about openings to a wider pool of applicants. The committee is made up of four people of color on staff: Dugdale; Mariko Chang, the donor membership and events manager; and Anita Hofschneider and Suevon Lee, both reporters. Hofschneider, who grew up in Saipan and is Chamorro, leads the group and is working to formally incorporate diversity considerations into the hiring process. As part of that effort, she has joined Civil Beat’s hiring committee, led by Epler, to review and vet candidates. Since January, the diversity committee has compiled a running list of potential candidates with Hawai‘i ties who are working elsewhere. Job postings now include the following language: “Civil Beat strongly values a diverse workforce and encourages people from minority communities to apply. A familiarity with Hawai‘i and its unique local culture strongly preferred.” In addition, the newsroom has been making efforts to connect with Hawai‘i residents, hiring weekly contributors who live on different islands and, on occasion, publishing reader submissions. To build relationships with readers in Honolulu, Civil Beat has begun sponsoring trivia nights, coffees for donors, and a speaker series. In a way, Civil Beat’s struggle to strike a balance between locals

n 2012, when George Louis Martinez— who goes by A Martinez—started at KPCC, the flagship station of Southern California Public Radio, he wasn’t sure what he was getting into. Martinez, the Americanborn son of Ecuadorian parents, was raised in Koreatown and didn’t learn English until first grade; in college, he’d played baseball, and eventually forged a career in sports journalism. “I never knew what public radio was,” he recalls. “I’d heard of NPR, but never listened to KPCC.” Public radio means taxpayer-supported nonprofit networks, but it’s also a class signal, a marker of respectability, and, often, an indicator of type: three-quarters of National Public Radio’s editorial employees are white; Latinxs are among the least represented ethnic groups, comprising just 6.1% of the newsroom. At KPCC, Martinez is the only Latinx host and the rest of the staff is

JOURNALISM’S BAD REFLECTION

and outsiders is a common one in community journalism—it can be a matter of familiarity versus critical distance. “It can be hard to report bluntly if you went to the same private schools as people going back to the age of six years old,” Eric Pape, a former Civil Beat editor, points out. Access is important, but so is an unfiltered perspective. “The balance is crucial—the mix is very helpful and healthy.” “The balance is toward fresh eyes,” Gene Park, a former Civil Beat social media editor, adds. To him, that isn’t a downside, but an asset. “That’s why I found Civil Beat so attractive—they’re taking a fresh approach.” Hiring locally is “not the biggest concern,” Epler says. She would tap more local talent if she found the right candidates; she poached one reporter from the Star-Advertiser. But her primary aim is finding the best journalists who will cover Hawai‘i with unrepentant curiosity. “You can kind of drop in and figure it out,” she continues. “That’s what you’re paid to do, right?” That explanation doesn’t satisfy everyone. John D. Waihe‘e III, a former Hawai‘i governor who was the first American of Native Hawaiian descent to be elected to any US office, believes that Civil Beat is selling itself short. “The richness of the news, of the content itself I think is enhanced by the diversity of the reporters,” Waihe‘e says. “You’re much more capable of, first of all, recognizing where news may exist, and secondly, by understanding it from a different point of view.” —Sophia Yan

majority-white (36 of 86 are people of color, including 7 of 16 managers); Los Angeles County, in contrast, is nearly 50 percent Latinx. The station’s management “seemed very eager to hire me,” Martinez recalls. That’s possibly because, he suggests, he provided “that window or doorway to a guy who’s Latino and maybe knows me from sports.” He was a smart choice—early evidence suggested that his show, “Take Two,” a local news magazine program, was bringing new listeners in. But the number of Latinxs in the station’s audience has peaked at 18 percent, or about 137,000 among the station’s weekly cumulative listeners. Bill Davis, the chief executive of Southern California Public Radio, says he is painfully aware that “public broadcasting audiences have tended to be whiter, better educated, and more affluent.” In 2005, he recalls, KPCC conducted research finding that second and third generation Latinxs, who speak mostly English, are the least well served media consumers in Los Angeles. “We need to expand the audience to look more like the country that we serve,” he says. But people like Ray Ramirez, the owner of Ray’s BBQ, in Huntington Park, California, don’t see much awareness of stations like KPCC among his customers. “There’s no outreach, no marketing,” Ramirez tells CJR. “I don’t think many folks know where to find it.”

Recruiting more talent has been a challenge. “Public radio might be afraid of turning over every rock,” Martinez says. “If you only look for public radio hosts at public radio places, you’re typically going to find the same person. If you really want to do something different, go somewhere different.” KPCC struggles to hire people of color and keep them moving up the ranks. For a long time, Priska Neely, an education reporter, was the only black reporter at the station, a position that came to feel like a burden. African Americans make up 9 percent of Los Angeles County but only 4 percent of KPCC’s audience. “I don’t want to be the one,” she says. “I see a lot people come in without training, feeling isolated at work, and they leave. I have also felt those things. But for the same reasons, I want to stay.” —Gautham Nagesh

100

CJR

“I’m just like damn, this is a newsroom full of so many white people in this majority black city.”

Baltimore, Maryland

20 L

awrence Brown, an associate professor at Morgan State University, in Baltimore, Maryland, writes and teaches about the many ways the city has historically failed its black residents. Through his research on The Baltimore Sun, uncovering articles dating as far back as 1913, he’s tracked how journalists there have bucked impartiality, often agitating the city’s white population against integration. “The Baltimore Sun would be printing these really outrageous articles referring to ‘the Negro invasion’ and, basically, black home buyers attempting to move onto white blocks,” he says. For his close reading of today’s Sun, Brown has attracted a large following on Twitter—including many members of Baltimore’s leftist community—for whom he dissects reporting to reveal bias against black people. In some cases, that bias comes from what is left unwritten. In April 2015, Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man, was arrested in West Baltimore for carrying a knife; by the time he arrived at the police station, he was unable to breathe or talk, and he died of a spinal injury while still in custody. The Sun covered Gray’s death. But later, Gray was found

of Baltimore’s residents identify as black or African-American

of Sun journalists are people of color

to have elevated levels of lead in his blood—a public health crisis that had received relatively little attention. “What’s often missing,” Brown says, “is connecting the violent crime we see in our city to the fact that we have so many youth and young adults that have been previously lead poisoned.” The same problem afflicted Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old woman. She made news not for the toxic paint found in old homes throughout her neighborhood, but for her murder; in 2016, she was shot by Baltimore County police. In its coverage, the Sun described the incident as a standoff. “Totally framing it as though she was initiating the contact,” Brown recalls. In reality, he says, “The officer came into her house and shot her, shot her son, Kodi. This was totally aggressive.” The coverage should have focused on police errors, he adds. “That sort of framing inflicts trauma in and of itself because it misidentifies the problem.” According to the US Census Bureau, Baltimore has a population of 611,000. More than half of the city’s residents—63 percent— identify as black or African-American. About 30 percent identify as white. In the Sun newsroom, however, only 20 percent of journalists are minorities, according to Renee Mutchnik, the Sun’s director of marketing. “Diversity and inclusion are strategic priorities at The Baltimore Sun,” she tells CJR, adding that four of the eight most recent hires were people of color. When CJR approached six current and former Sun employees to comment, they all declined. Patrice Hutton, who runs Writers in Baltimore Schools, a nonprofit literacy program, has received glowing write-ups in the Sun. But as a reader, she always has an eye on diversity. “I’m just like damn, this is a newsroom full of so many white people in this majority-black city,” she says. Sometimes, she looks up Sun reporters on Twitter. “I’ll click on their profile and I’ll be, like, ‘What, another white journalist? There are so many of you.’” —Lisa Snowden-McCray

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“It seems condescending.”

Queens, New York

SHAMINDER DULAI

ueens, New York, is one of the most diverse places in the country, where more than 160 languages are spoken and 47.5 percent of the residents are foreign-born. So why did it take The Queens Tribune, the local paper, nearly a half-century to finally come up with a plan to cover the richness of that diversity? The story of the Queens Tribune’s effort to write about its community as it exists today has as much to do with focus and editorial leadership as the diversity of the staff. The Queens Tribune’s masthead, like those of many other local newspapers around the country, is tiny: two editors and one writer to fill a 20-plus-page broadsheet covering a borough of 2.4 million people. The two editors are white; the writer, Ariel Hernandez, is Latina. For years, the Queens Tribune presented a picture of the borough that was largely white and focused on coverage of school board hearings, zoning disputes, and local politics. Reporting on the Jamaican immigrant community, which is sizable, was relegated to an offshoot called

PAPER CHASE Jasmin Freeman recently relaunched The Press of Southeast Queens to better serve people of color.

102

The Press of Southeast Queens. Among former staffers and many residents of the area, The Press of Southeast Queens was seen as a smaller and less-healthy afterthought to the main news outlet; it didn’t help that the demographics of Southeast Queens were predominantly black, Jamaican, West Indian, and Latinx, whereas other neighborhoods were populated mostly by people of European descent. Recently, however, the Queens Tribune got new leadership, and with it, a new idea. In April, the paper was bought out by Ocean Gold Media, a newly formed company getting into the publishing-events-creative agency game. Jasmin Freeman, who had been an executive at a media group called City & State, which covers New York politics and policy, was hired onto the management team, and became a publisher and majority owner of The Press of Southeast Queens. “I was a little uncomfortable about that when I first started,” Freeman, who is black, says. The reputation, she knew, “makes it seem condescending in a way: ‘Here’s 16 pages for you, this is all you get, you don’t need to be informed about the rest of Queens.’” So she decided to relaunch it, as a magazine geared toward people of color. Called simply The Press, the new project was envisioned as a minority-led, minority-staffed, minority-focused New York City–wide publication. Freeman’s first issue of the magazine, which came out in September, was on the theme “Black Beauty” and was timed to coincide with New York Fashion Week. For the second issue, which came out in mid-October, she took on race and sports. Freeman, who grew up in the upscale suburbs of Long Island (east of Queens), recalls feeling insecure as the only black girl in a predominantly white neighborhood. Now she has a son, who is a toddler, and she finds that portraying strength in identity is top of mind. “I never want my kid to have that insecurity of what he looks like,” she says. In her new job that means, in part, offering a counterbalance to the main Queens Tribune newspaper. “It’s important to have a publication that normalizes us,” she says.

or now, Ocean Gold is treating the Queens Tribune and The Press as two distinct brands. Hernandez contributes to the magazine, but most of its pages are filled by a team of freelancers, the majority of them people of color. Hernandez, for one, is optimistic that The Press is poised to consistently cover race, class, and culture in a way that the Queens Tribune has not. “The magazine is going to be what The Press of Southeast Queens was supposed to be,” she says. “It’s going to give a lot of people closure. Minorities are undercovered—it’s like they don’t exist.” Brian Rafferty, who was editor of the Queens Tribune from 2004 to 2011, says he’s hopeful that the new venture will succeed. During his tenure, he attempted to start up a Queens-wide edition to cover the entire community, but that project never materialized. (He wasn’t helped by the fact that, during his time, the paper had no one assigned to cover Latinx communities who could speak Spanish, even though a quarter of Queens residents are Spanish speakers.) Some staffers describe a newsroom at the Queens Tribune that typifies a local outlet short on resources, with reporters churning out stories based on press releases, tips from politicians, and comments from the few community leaders organized enough to reach

CJR

editors of The Queens Tribune newspaper who are people of color

47.5

people in Queens who are foreign-born

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103

“We kind of looked around and said, ‘Well, yeah, this is definitely not as diverse as we need to be.’”

Denver, Colorado

n 2007, Randall Smith, an investor in New York who specializes in distressed debt, founded a hedge fund called Alden Global Capital. Alden Global, which set its sights on media properties, earned a reputation as a vulture; Margaret Sullivan, of The Washington Post, called it “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.” In 2010, Alden Global acquired a newspaper empire, now known as Digital First Media, which oversees 97 papers. One of them was The Denver Post. In the five years since Digital First Media took over, the Post staff has been cut in half; this year, dozens more people were laid off. The bloodbath unleashed a rebellion. Post journalists protested in editorials, pickets, and a string of high-profile resignations. In June, eight Post staffers who had left voluntarily gathered for a news conference in the shadow of their old building to announce that they were launching a digital news startup called the Colorado Sun. Backed with seed money from Civil, a cryptocurrency and blockchain technology platform that’s funding a network of local news startups nationwide, the Sun would be readersupported and ad-free. The ex-Post staffers behind this new publication, one of its founders told a reporter, would be the “A-Team of A-Teams.” Not long after the announcement, during a panel at the Denver Press Club featuring Sun journalists, an audience

Of the eight founders of the Colorado Sun, a news startup that launched in June

member asked about the lack of diversity on its staff: seven of the founders were white and five were male. “It wasn’t until the team kind of came together and solidified that we kind of looked around and said, ‘Well, yeah, this is definitely not as diverse as we need to be,’” Eric Lubbers, the chief technology officer at the Sun, tells CJR. Denver’s population is 30 percent Hispanic or Latinx, according to the latest census, and nearly 10 percent black or African-American. Four years ago, the National Association of Black Journalists sent an open letter to news media startups about a “parade of recent hires” that did not seem to indicate “a commitment to ensuring that these new newsrooms reflect all the communities they will cover.” Recently, when the Sun hired two more white male staffers, people on social media renewed that plea for racial parity. “Every staff needs more than one person of color and not just to meet a quota and not just to say that we look diverse,” Gabrielle Bryant, the president of the Colorado Association of Black Journalists, says. Larry Ryckman, the Sun’s editor, says that he hopes to add diversity to the site through freelance arrangements and, in the future, if the staff is able to grow, strategic hiring. Yet Summer Fields, a consultant at Hearken who helps news organizations engage with readers, doesn’t believe that freelance contracts are the answer to newsroom inclusion. Local news sites, she finds, “pick people that they can tokenize and point to that they do not retain—that they don’t offer a job.” —Corey Hutchins

is not white.

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Some staffers describe a newsroom at the Queens Tribune that typifies a local outlet short on resources, with reporters churning out stories based on press releases, tips from politicians, and comments from the few community leaders organized enough to reach out to them.

CJR

out to them. The economics of a community weekly bring a constant demand of deadlines and a limit to how many resources can be devoted to a single story. “It’s not an excuse, but they can’t do everything that they need to do,” Azi Paybarah, who worked for the Queens Tribune from 2003 to 2005, before joining the New York Observer and, most recently, The New York Times, says. “(We were) trying, but it’s a challenge.” Occasionally, someone on the staff—or a politician who feels that her constituents are being undercovered—voices concerns that the coverage seems homogeneous. “When you look at the paper, you can see it—they are missing some neighborhoods completely and write about others regularly,” Robert Holden, a City Council member whose district is in Queens, tells CJR. “They tend to report on the same things, like community board meetings and politics, and don’t talk to other people in the community or visit other neighborhoods.” The Asian populations of Woodside rarely have a voice in the paper; Columbians from Astoria are all but absent; after the publication of an annual story on India’s independence day, Andrew Holt, the chief executive of Ocean Gold Media, realized that the paper had historically ignored the Pakistani community, who also celebrate independence from colonial rule. Hernandez understands the concerns. Because she speaks Spanish, it often falls on her to reach out and encourage more people to share their stories with the paper. There are other groups, however—like the Chinese in Flushing—who are still locked away behind a language barrier.

olt, previously the publisher of City & State magazine, tells CJR that he’s aware of the imbalance critique.“There’s a lot of work to be done,” he says. “It’s a process.” Yet he points to signs of improvement. The company has, he claims, increased the diversity of its contributor pool—which now includes Gerson Borrero, the former editor of El Diario, the largest Spanishlanguage daily in New York City—and he promoted Hernandez to feature reporter. He moved the newsroom from a northeast transit desert of Queens to a more central location, in Long Island City, in the hope that staff will become more ingrained in the community. “The separate publication wasn’t doing the community a service, years of cuts hurt them, and it became pointless,” Holt says. The introduction of The Press, he explains, is meant to restore trust. “It’s all part of the plan to up the quality, produce more investigative work that is exclusive to The Press,” he continues. “I think it’s a matter of, if you present things in a quality way, people will want to read you and seek that out.” —Shaminder Dulai

JOURNALISM’S BAD REFLECTION

“It’s mostly white images I see.”

South Bend, Indiana

Spanishspeaking reporters at ABC 57

40 people in ABC 57’s newsroom

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he newsrooms of South Bend, Indiana, just over the Michigan border, cull stories across two states, reporting from the towns, industrial hubs, and college campuses in a region known as Michiana. It’s a conservative and mostly white corner of the country, but African-Americans represent a large share of the population in many cities, including Benton Harbor, Michigan; Michigan City, Indiana; and South Bend. Rural communities are full of Latinx migrant workers and their families. It’s a rich territory for journalism. But you might not know that from the newscasts. Michael Puente, a WBEZ journalist in Northwest Indiana, says that on South Bend’s TV news, “it’s mostly white images I see.” One local station is ABC 57, which has a majority-white newsroom of about 40 people. When it covers black communities, stories come as a numbing parade of school fights, dead bodies, arrests, bizarre assaults, and lots of shootings. Positive coverage often centers on do-gooderism, like volunteering in a homeless shelter. While there is ambitious reporting about, for example, South Bend’s eviction rates, there is altogether little context about the problems that accompany structural racism. South Bend, Puente says, is a case study in how “it’s not just big metropolitan areas that need diversity” in media. ABC 57 is on par with nationwide averages for television newsrooms in terms of how many people of color it employs as journalists. Station managers declined to provide demographic data, except to say that there are two Spanish-speaking reporters on staff. Bias in coverage persists. According to Danielle Kilgo, an assistant professor of journalism at Indiana University, ABC 57’s coverage is “rife with trigger words.” On a recent broadcast, white anchors introduced a story by describing “brawls” and “chaos” that “plague the city,” she says, before “passing the buck to black reporters who report in black communities about issues that are framed as black problems.” Kilgo continues, “The routine segregation of the news broadcast reinforces existing ideas that certain issues are only relevant to particular races.” When it comes to race, there are also troubling omissions. In September, for instance, an in-depth report on maternal death rates did not mention the fact that African American women are at significantly greater risk. A website search for “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and “migrant” show occasional stories on events, like a Latinx networking night, but not in-depth reporting. Puente sees more opportunities. How is the Latinx community affected by the rising trade war? With Indiana in an opioid crisis, are treatment centers reaching people of color, including Spanishspeakers? The tense political climate may be driving Michiana’s Latinx residents into the shadows. Diverse newsrooms can better draw those stories out, Puente continues, with reporters “who can more comfortably get into these communities.” That means station managers need to be more thoughtful in recruiting. “Having a diverse newsroom is a choice,” he adds. “Any station in a very white area can have a very diverse workforce. It just needs to work harder to achieve it. —Anna Clark

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“We are just failing at our job.”

Houston, Texas

ix years ago, researchers in Houston studied its demographic changes over the past 20 years and determined that worldwide migration had made it the most diverse major city in America, edging out New York. “No city has been changed as rapidly, fundamentally, and irrevocably as Houston,” Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University, says. “This is where the American future is going to be worked out.” The Houston Chronicle, housed inside a four-story building southwest of downtown, is the city’s only major daily and tasked with covering the increasingly diverse region, of 7 million people. It isn’t an easy job for a paper that is predominantly white. Threefourths of Houston's population is composed of people of color, yet, according to the American Society of News Editors, last year, the staff of the Chronicle was more than 77 percent white. “We are just failing at our job at being a paper in the most diverse city in the country,” one staffer, who only agreed to talk about the problem anonymously, says. Journalists of color working in the Chronicle newsroom have a variety of concerns: they say that not all jobs are posted publicly; that editors often hire through their own networks; and that the positions that are advertised are not shared with professional organizations of minority journalists, which could help attract more diverse candidates. Once people of color are in the door, inclusion and retention pose serious challenges. The highest-ranking editors, all of whom are white, exert great influence, since they determine hiring and coverage priorities and drive the paper’s overall vision. Last year, when the paper saw an exodus of minority reporters for other jobs, their colleagues circulated a petition to management asking three things: to discuss whether the Chronicle conducted job searches in a manner that reached people of color; to disclose pay ranges across ethnic groups; and to send employees to minority professional conferences. But the effort lost momentum when

Hurricane Harvey hit the city. Suddenly, the newsroom had to focus on mobilizing to cover a disaster.

he petition largely fell by the wayside, but the lack of diversity remained. One gap that stands out is the hiring and promotion of Latinx people, who account for 44 percent of Houston’s population, far more than any other ethnic group. (Whites follow, with 25 percent.) On the metro desk, the Chronicle has only one Latina reporter and one Latina assistant editor. There are Latinx journalists on the business desk and on the state, national, and features desks, but daily coverage of Latinx stories beyond immigration is sporadic at best. Two years ago, the sports desk lost a bilingual MexicanAmerican columnist who covered the Astros and, soon after, the paper ended up in a much-publicized controversy when the reporter who took over quoted Carlos Gómez, a Dominican outfielder, in a way that Gómez found offensive. Most striking, however, is the fact that Latinxs are wholly absent from management and from any editorial positions where they can inform the paper’s published views. Today, there are no Latinxs among the eleven columnists spread out across various desks, and no Latinxs on the eight-member editorial board. In short, the region’s largest ethnic

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group is not represented in any position of power. Anna Nuñez is a faithful Chronicle subscriber who says that she started reading the paper as a child, while her mother, a Mexican immigrant, was out cleaning other people’s homes. Nuñez tells CJR that the absence of a Latinx columnist or editorial board member “speaks volumes about the lack of respect or consideration for the Latino community.” “This is Texas,” she says. “We’ve got the border crisis, we have so much going on. And now, more than ever, it’s important that we have reporters who know our community way beyond the language. You’ve got to know the nuances. You’ve got to know the culture.” For years, she has tried to engage the Chronicle. She has visited with editors at their offices, and in June, when the Trump administration’s family separation story broke, she wrote an opinion piece that the paper asked for but never ran. (Evan Mintz, the deputy opinion editor, says that he held it so it could run in a prominent position, but the facts on the ground kept changing; he calls the whole thing “an unfortunate problem of timing.”) Nuñez is frustrated that efforts to engage the Chronicle on the subject of race seem to go nowhere. “I don’t know what else to do,” she says. “How do you make them move the needle?” Macario Ramírez, a Mexican-American activist who runs a folk art gallery in the Heights neighborhood, near downtown, says that he, too, has campaigned for better coverage from the Chronicle. “We have picketed them more than five, six times, just because of their lack of responsiveness to the community and our needs,” he says. When the city named a street for Cesar Chavez, Ramirez sent press releases but couldn’t get the Chronicle to write about it. Latinxs, he adds, “have been underreported. They should be aware that there’s a huge community in Houston that needs their attention.” At least one Latina leader gives the Chronicle more credit. Dr. Laura Murillo, the president and CEO of the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says that the paper regularly seeks her input. “I also think it’s incumbent upon our community to make sure we are out there involved and engaged in issues impact the city,” she says. “We have to be inclusive, and not just for others to be inclusive of us.”

n the fourth floor of the Chronicle building, in the center of the newsroom, is the office of Nancy Barnes, the paper’s outgoing executive editor. Barnes, a Virginia native and 36-year news veteran, started at the Chronicle five years ago, becoming the first woman to lead it. When she arrived in Houston, she recalls, “I walked into the paper and was really surprised” by the lack of diversity. Though Barnes, who was recently tapped to become the next executive editor of National Public Radio, has been successful in posting high rates of minority hires—over the past four years, 31 to 38 percent of new staffers have been nonwhite—she has struggled to keep

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of Chronicle staff is white

of Houston’s residents are white

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them. This year, the paper lost two reporters of color to The Washington Post and The New York Times. Talented minority journalists are highly sought after in an industry where all publications are looking to diversify, she says, and that constant turnover explains some of the gaps on her staff at any given time. For instance, the paper had a Latina on the editorialboard, but she left last year. Barnes says that she tries to keep all journalists, not just minorities, by counter-offering “a lot.” When it comes to hiring, Barnes acknowledges that job openings are posted for public view “usually,” but “not always.” Sometimes there’s a reason to keep a role unadvertised: a position needs to be filled immediately, or there’s a budget freeze looming, so editors move quickly, to avoid losing the hire. With some beats, like energy reporting, “it’s especially hard to get some of the demographics you’re looking for.” The paper does not have a full-time recruiter, so department

heads handle their own searches. Barnes says that she asks them to post each job in several places, always including at least one that will draw diverse candidates. “But I have to constantly be pushing,” she says; otherwise, editors fall back into old practices. Some desks end up doing better than others. The features desk has 15 writers and editors, seven of whom are black, Latinx, Asian, or Native American. Asked if she’d consider disclosing salary ranges by ethnicity, Barnes says that’s up to the human resources and legal departments. Maria Carrillo, who was the highestranking Latinx editor in the Chronicle newsroom until last year, when the Tampa Bay Times hired her away, says that editors of color are best able to deliver minority hires and improve retention. Minority editors, she says, can connect with applicants of color during job interviews; value their full potential in light of their background; and, once they’re

“It’s not for me.”

Orlando, Florida

of Orlando’s population is composed of racial minorities

Yet far less than

of reporters at the Orlando Sentinel identify as people of color

week after she left Orlando, Florida, for a fresh start in Miami, Charlotte “ChaCha” Davis, an LGBTQ activist, was called back. On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed and 53 were wounded in a shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub. “When I say African Americans died at Pulse that night and even more were injured, people are like, ‘It was black people there?’” Davis says. “Looking at the news and looking at the media and all the things you saw surrounding around Pulse, the stories and everything else, you would have never thought that black people attended that club.” It was Latin night when the shooting took place. Initial reports included interviews with leaders from minority communities, but in the week following the breaking news coverage, mention of people of color by the Orlando Sentinel was scarce. Reporters, it seems, had few contacts to work with; the

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hired, embrace and coach their story ideas with nuance. People of color can easily feel invisible in a newsroom, she says, and when someone at a senior level “values you, values your ethnicity, your culture—boy, that’s just really empowering. I know I’ve felt that way in my career whenever someone took an interest in me and paid attention to me.” But “having to be the diversity police is hard for all of us,” she says. At the Chronicle, Carrillo organized an informal support group for minority staffers and did most of the mentoring for journalists of color who arrived and found themselves floating. “I became a very popular go-to person,” she says. “But in fairness to Houston, that’s not been any different than anywhere I’ve been, to some degree or other. It’s just that Houston is tougher in many ways because the community is so diverse, and so in the newsroom, it feels so very pronounced.” Can the Chronicle staff ever fully reflect

Sentinel’s archives show that, before tragedy struck, hardly any stories had taken a close look at the city’s LGBTQ population. Aside from a piece on an anti-discrimination bill voted down by the Florida legislature and coverage of Disney Gay Days, reports on queer people can’t be found in an archive search. “We have been and are always studious about the significant ethnic, age, social, political, and economic diversity of our audience and market and go to great pains to be mindful of it when making decisions of all kinds,” Avido Khahaifa, the editor of the Sentinel tells CJR. He declined to provide details about the makeup of the staff. The Sentinel did not report its newsroom demographics to the American Society of News Editors for its annual diversity survey; a CJR review of the staff list, which includes 87 journalists, indicates that far less than half of reporters are people of color. (Racial

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According to Maria Carrillo, minority editors are better able to connect with applicants of color during job interviews, value their full potential in light of their background, and, once they're hired, embrace and coach their story ideas with nuance.

minorities make up 60 percent of Orlando’s population.) When pressed, Khahaifa replied, “My reticence with regard to your project is a direct result of my experience with similar efforts, the results of which only made our task more difficult as discrete points and observations were highlighted in isolation, creating a skewed picture of just how complex our challenge is and how we approach addressing it.” When CJR reached out to people of color working at the Sentinel and around Central Florida for their thoughts on newsroom diversity, many declined to comment; one reporter said that she couldn’t risk her job to talk about the lack of advocacy for racial and ethnic minorities in journalism. Christopher Cuevas, the executive director of QLatinx, an LGBTQ collective that formed in the wake of the Pulse attack to support Latinx survivors, says that the Sentinel, along with other news organizations, fixated more on the shooter than the victims. “We didn’t feel that enough attention had been given to the grassroots efforts led locally by communities of color that worked, often underresourced, to build a culture of resilience for the most impacted and historically marginalized,” he says. Do members of those communities read the Sentinel now? Anthony Bertram, who used to party at Pulse, doesn’t bother. “It’s not for me,” he says. —Lyneisha Watson

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Houston—a growing, diversifying city? Is that even realistic? “In a place like Houston, it feels like a huge mountain to climb to get to a place where the numbers are reflective of the community,” Carrillo says. In the industry as a whole, “Do I think we can do better? I do. Do I think we can get there? I don’t know,” she continues. “I guess for me, it comes down to, can we afford not to try to do this? I think we’re going to be doomed, because our old readers are not going to be with us.” Barnes says it’s a process. “Ideally we would mirror our community. I think it’s going to be a long time before we reflect the complexity of the diversity in Houston in particular.” But, she adds, “Could we get to

forty percent (ethnic diversity) in five years? Could we get to fifty percent in ten years? I think that’s a reasonable goal.” She emphasizes, however, that newsrooms need to adopt a broad concept of diversity that considers other aspects of a journalist’s identity, such as class, geography, and worldview. “All of this is really important to have a newsroom that fully reflects the many communities it covers and sees stories through a wide variety of lenses,” she says. “Diversity of thought and diversity of background is also something we have to work on, because if we don’t get people from all walks of life to trust us, as journalists, we’re going to lose.” —Cecilia Balli

M I C H A E L STA RG H I L L

MISSING PIECES Macario Ramírez, seen here in his folk art gallery, has long protested the lack of Latinx coverage in the Houston Chronicle.

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“It’s not enough when you’re the paper of record in Mississippi.”

Jackson, Mississippi

of Jackson’s population is black

of the Clarion Ledger staff identifies as people of color

uring the fifties and sixties, the Clarion Ledger, the biggest newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, had an explicitly anti-black agenda. In covering school integration, for instance, the paper published stories intended to damage the reputation of the black community. In the years since, much has changed: the paper sold to Gannett, merged with a competitor, and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on education reform. From 2002 to 2011, Ronnie Agnew served as executive editor, the first (and only) AfricanAmerican to hold that position. But in Jackson, where the population is 81 percent black, the Clarion Ledger still has a long way to go to reflect the city as it is. Jackson is 17 percent white; the same percentage represents how many people of color work at the Clarion Ledger. That amounts to six people, five of them black and one Asian. Jackson is the capital of Mississippi; the Clarion Ledger is the state’s largest daily newspaper, with a circulation of 57,700. Readership has fallen over the past 20 years as the recession, combined with losses in advertising revenue as companies go digital, has whittled away the paper’s size. Ten years ago, the newsroom held around 50 staffers; today, only 32 editors and reporters are left to report on the community. In January 2018, the Clarion Ledger’s publisher departed and was not replaced. Gannett now manages recruitment for its 109 local newsrooms at the corporate level and diversity falls under the purview of Mizell Stewart, the senior director of talent, partnerships, and news strategy. The Clarion Ledger’s executive editor, Sam Hall, who is white, tells CJR, “a smaller market makes it challenging to obtain high-skilled employees of color.” The Clarion Ledger has had some luck bringing in cub reporters through the sports section. But not everyone sticks around. “Retention is always a priority and you want to do everything

you can to retain your best talent,” Hall says. “They will eventually want a shot at a bigger market and you can’t hold them back.” Does the lack of diversity diminish the value of coverage? “The commitment is to do good quality journalism,” Jimmie Gates, a city and legislative reporter, says. Gates, who is black, has been at the Clarion Ledger for more than 30 years. “We always get criticism no matter what we do,” he says. “We have many positive stories about the African-American community that people haven’t read. The good thing is, we have young reporters and veteran reporters that have a lot of ties to the Jackson community.” Still, there is room for competitors in Jackson, including The Jackson Advocate, Mississippi’s oldest African-American newspaper, and the Jackson Free Press, an alternative weekly. “The Clarion Ledger has done admirable work on Klan cold cases,” Donna Ladd, the editor of the Free Press, says. “But it’s not enough when you’re the paper of record in Mississippi, a state with a history of racial oppression.” “The secret to success in bridging the gap in covering the community is diversity,” Colendula Green, a longtime Jackson resident who reads the Ledger, says. “The Community section, for example, needs to show more.” —Terricha Phillips

Charlottesville One Year Later A violent white supremacist rally reshaped a cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s idea of itself. Has the local press changed? AUTHOR

Brendan Fitzgerald PHOTOGRAPHER

Jason Lappa

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n August 2017, Jason Kessler, a selfproclaimed “pro-white activist,” prepared to host what would become a massive, fatal white supremacist rally. Kessler, who described opponents of fascism as “the anti-white KKK,” lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where city council members had recently voted to remove two monuments raised during the era of Jim Crow. His event, Unite the Right, would be based at one of those monuments—a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general. On the eve of Kessler’s event, a torch-lit procession of hundreds of white men stormed the grounds of the University of Virginia. They chanted anti-Semitic slurs and attacked counterprotesters, ultimately sending one, Tyler Magill, to the hospital. The next morning, clergy gathered near the Lee statue, offering hymns and prayers for peace. But there would be none: in the streets nearby, white supremacists attacked residents and activists who opposed them. DeAndre Harris, a young black man, was surrounded and beaten; a man drove his car into the anti-Nazi crowd, injuring more than a dozen people and killing Heather Heyer, a local activist. Throughout the weekend, journalists functioned as emergency responders in a roving crisis, providing updates that helped residents counter the violence. Alexis Gravely, the associate news editor of The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Virginia, tracked white supremacists who marched through campus. Near midnight on Friday, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked on Twitter about the experiences of students of color there. Gravely, one of the few black

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journalists on the scene, replied, “Reporting on it. Following the marchers to show the world what I’m seeing at my school.” On Saturday, participants in the rally tossed bottles and urine-filled balloons at reporters; some activists and journalists struggled to breathe as pepper spray from demonstrators and law enforcement filled the air. Ézé Amos, a Nigerian-born freelance photographer whose photos vivified a detailed 10-page timeline in C-VILLE, Charlottesville’s alt-weekly, was assaulted by a man wearing a Hitler shirt. Charlottesville has a long history of white supremacy as well as opposition to it. Still, for many people in the city, the events of the weekend catalyzed a newfound commitment to racial justice. Residents began to fill auditoriums to hear activists speak. City council and school board meetings transformed. Talk of resistance started to feel promising. For the local press, however, the rally and its aftermath have not led to a reckoning. There are virtually no black reporters from the area working in Charlottesville’s newsrooms, which, like those in much of the rest of the country, are staffed largely by white people. At times, Charlottesville’s news outlets have provided platforms for white supremacist messages, knowing full well what harm they have wrought. Journalists describe their work as reactive—few express a keen motivation to tell stories of systemic racism. One editor told me, “We just cover the local news.” August 12, 2017—a vivid display of racist terror—could have been a turning point for how well Charlottesville media might be expected to confront racism endemic to the community. But since then, lapses in coverage have revealed how much work needs to

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M AT T E I C H

LOCAL GUIDE Jalane Schmidt gives tours of Charlottesville’s history to journalists from around the world.

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be done in order for local newsrooms to serve their audiences with care and with credibility.

n an image from August 12, a Charlottesville protester hurls a blue metal box through the air. The box holds copies of C-VILLE, where I worked for years as a reporter and editor. That week’s feature, “Voices of Hate,” included short profiles of Unite the Right attendees that were oddly light in tone. In the protest image, the cover— a large photo of Kessler—has been flipped so it cannot be seen. “A lot of people had turned the covers over,” Samantha Baars, a C-VILLE reporter, says. “I assume people didn’t want to see Jason’s face.” The paper’s profiles—of Kessler, Richard Spencer, and others involved in Unite the Right—were intended, staff members recall, to inform residents who might demonstrate against white supremacists during their rally. “I don’t think any of us thought the feature was scary,” Baars says. Yet the coverage offended many readers. In October 2017, Spencer returned to Charlottesville. NBC29, the local TV affiliate, referred to Spencer and his torch-wielding mob on Twitter as “white activists.” The station would later correct itself, in a subsequent tweet, by using the term “white nationalists.” NBC29 then aired what it touted as a “rare interview” with Spencer, even though he had been far from press-shy. Spencer used the segment to portray himself as a victim, and to describe the torches, props in his theater of racial terror, as “beautiful, magical, and mystical.”

PIONEERS

Elias Boudinot Elias Boudinot, whose given name was Galagina Oowatie, was the founding editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper. Born in the Cherokee Nation, on lands that would become part of the state of Georgia, Boudinot was formally educated at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. When he returned home, in 1826, he encountered mounting pressure for Indian removal, as Georgia state officials fought with tribes over territory. In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president and immediately made Indian relocation a national priority. Boudinot founded the Phoenix that year. Boudinot believed that the power of the authentic Native voice, through journalism and in the printed media, held the potential to persuade readers beyond the borders of the Cherokee Nation and could perhaps stop the clamoring for Cherokee removal. As he said in a speech to non-indigenous people ahead of the Phoenix’s launch, “There must exist a vehicle of Indian intelligence, altogether different from those which have heretofore been employed.” This vehicle, he added, “may exhibit specimens of their intellectual efforts, of their eloquence, of their moral, civil and physical advancement.” Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, paving the way for the Trail of Tears. Although Boudinot’s efforts were too late to stop government officials from forcibly removing the Cherokee from their lands, his vision for the power of the authentic Indian voice endured, and can be found today in the printed and digital word of the Cherokee Phoenix. Bryan Pollard is the president of the Native American Journalists Association.

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David Foky, NBC29’s news director, tells CJR that the station “intentionally cut out the hateful and racist comments he made during that interview,” which, he says, would have given Spencer an even greater platform. Nevertheless, viewers on Facebook called the segment “disgusting” and urged advertisers to stop doing business with NBC29. “We have not interviewed Spencer since,” Foky adds, “and have no plans to do so in the future.” Charlottesville residents refer to NBC29’s interview with Spencer as a low point in post Unite the Right coverage. Other examples of questionable reporting have come most often from The Daily Progress, the city’s newspaper of record since the late 19th century. Problematic coverage of race in the Progress has a long history. In 1921, the paper reported on the launch of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter in triumphant terms. Weeks before Unite the Right, the Progress re-published excerpts from that story, which refers to a membership that included “hundreds of Charlottesville’s leading business and professional men.” The Progress “has responsibility for creating the conditions that we live in,” John Edwin Mason, a UVA professor of African history and the former vice-chair of Charlottesville’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, says. “It was an enthusiastic supporter of segregation,” he adds. “It was an enthusiastic propagator of white supremacist ideas about the natural inferiority of African Americans. That showed up in their pages well into the period after World War II.” In conversations with Charlottesville residents, two particularly egregious items published by the Progress in the past year come up time and again. The first is an unsigned editorial that appeared two days before the Unite the Right rally. In it, the paper blames Dr. Wes Bellamy, then the lone black member of the Charlottesville City Council, for stoking racial unrest, claiming that Bellamy “attracted the attention of a now-dedicated foe”—Kessler. At the time, the Progress editorial board included Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Douglas calls her tenure on the editorial board “interesting,” “very difficult,” and work she “had to

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NBC29, the local TV station, advertised a “rare interview” with Richard Spencer, who used the segment to portray himself as a victim.

stop doing.” Her term lasted six months, then she was done. Of the editorial, Douglas says, “If it wasn’t calculated, then it surely showed a lack of sensitivity to where you were in the moment, and surely showed a lack of understanding of the power of your press in that moment.” The second item concerns Nikuyah Walker, who grew up in Charlottesville and in January became the city’s first black woman to be named mayor. Days before she entered office, an anonymous City Hall source encouraged the Progress to scrutinize emails that Walker had sent to city officials. The messages, the paper found, touched on Walker’s “concerns about policy decisions, councilors’ comments and issues related to racial inequality and wealth disparity in the community”—all matters that a local politician would be expected to discuss. But the story, which includes a photograph of Walker, characterizes her emails as “incendiary,” “highly critical,” and “often confrontational.” In its headline, the Progress—which did not analyze the tone of emails from other councilors or candidates— describes her as “unabashedly aggressive.” Perceptive readers could not help but see a racist slant to the article. Since then, Walker, who often communicates with constituents via social media, has given hardly any extended interviews to the local press. An exception, and the most revealing coverage of her to date, appeared in January in Vinegar Hill Magazine—a mostly digital publication with a quarterly print run of roughly 3,000 copies, a fraction of what

the Progress prints. “I know what it is like to be black in America, I have seen what it is like,” Walker told Vinegar Hill. “It cannot be ignored. I did not create it, and until people stop perpetuating it, I will focus on it, proudly.” Named for a black community in Charlottesville that was razed in the name of urban renewal, Vinegar Hill is run by a 62-year-old named Eddie Harris. Harris has little to say about other media—“That’s their lane,” he tells me. But when I speak to another local journalist about Walker and mention that I haven’t seen an interview with her comparable to the one in Vinegar Hill, he replies, “Yeah, and you’re not going to.”

he breakdown in trust between readers and the local press may come from what Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor of English at UVA and an organizer with Black Lives Matter, calls “an assumption of whiteness.” In July, nearly 100 Charlottesville residents took part in a six-day civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, where they delivered soil from the lynching site of John Henry James to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum. The event received coverage from most media outlets in Charlottesville; both C-VILLE and the Progress ran several photos of residents as part of their online coverage. In print, however, each paper ran only photos of white men. Woolfork shared an image of the Progress’s front-page story on social media. “Why this photo?” she wrote. “People of color were

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“I don’t think there’s any way to extricate yourself from history,” Ryan Kelly, a photographer, says. “Ignoring it and burying your head in the sand isn’t going to do anybody any good.”

quoted in the article, so why this photo?” The framing revealed a bias that surfaces in Charlottesville journalism. “It doesn’t matter what the story is about,” Woolfork tells CJR. “If it’s something of note or of record or of value, and it’s perceived in a positive way, a white person has to be recognized or acknowledged for it. It just doesn’t make sense to me. You have two black woman organizers to honor a lynched black man, and the two photos you choose are of two white men.” Attempts to speak with current and former Progress journalists and publishers for this story were largely rebuffed. Rob Jiranek, who served as publisher of the Progress for two years and left the paper in May, told CJR that he had “zero interest” in speaking. Reached by phone, Peter Yates, the current publisher, also declined. “If the newspaper is institutionally capable, I would love to see The Daily Progress look at itself,” Mason, who worked with National Geographic on its assessment of its own racist history (published as a special issue, in April), says. “I understand how understaffed the Progress is. I know some of the reporters and I wouldn’t want to put this burden on them, because they’re already working 30-hour days.” But reflection, he explains, “is a very useful role journalism could play.” Charlottesville’s legacy newsrooms aren’t entirely blind to racial inequity in their city. When the Ku Klux Klan rallied there a month before Unite the Right, Val Thompson, the news director of CBS19, led newscasts with a message explaining to viewers why the station would not air interviews with Klan members. In December, C-VILLE published a detailed history of gentrification and displacement in the city’s 10th and Page neighborhood. Recently, when I checked in with local journalists, they told me about their ongoing commitment to covering law enforcement’s unfair treatment of minorities, income inequality, and a longstanding affordable housing shortage. One described her efforts to center black voices in stories; another said that lately she’d been aiming to correct a tendency to most often interview white women. The Cavalier Daily conducts an annual survey of staff to assess how well it represents the UVA student body. This year, editors found that the newsroom “could use considerable improvements.”

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Among Progress contributors, however, the only person willing to speak with CJR was Ryan Kelly, whose picture of the car attack on protesters during Unite the Right received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography—an honor that the Progress notes on its front page. “Race is a defining factor for the city of Charlottesville as it is in tons of cities across the country,” Kelly, who was a staff photographer until 2017, says. “I don’t think there’s any way to extricate yourself from that history. And ignoring it and burying your head in the sand isn’t going to do anybody any good.”

istory is unevenly layered at Court Square Park—selectively recorded and only partly excavated. The park, beside a county court building frequented by Thomas Jefferson, had once been McKee Row, a black community whose residents were uprooted in 1914 to make way for an allwhite school. When plans for the school fell through, a wealthy white stockbroker bought the land and, in 1919, gave it to the city on the condition that it become a permanent home for a monument to Stonewall Jackson. A small marker, set into the sidewalk near the court building, reads, in part: “On this site slaves were bought and sold.” This is where Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at UVA and community organizer, begins her local history tour, which she’s led for journalists from Deutsche Welle, The Guardian, and

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HuffPost, among other outlets. For reporters covering Charlottesville, Schmidt’s tour feels like required reading in a new course. “I don’t know if I’m revising history so much as revealing it,” she told Hawes Spencer, a longtime local reporter, for his book Summer of Hate: Charlottesville USA. On the day I take Schmidt’s tour, it’s August 6, less than a week before the first anniversary of Unite the Right. We’re joined by Mimi Arbeit—a former community organizer with Charlottesville’s Showing Up for Racial Justice chapter and an assistant professor of psychology at Suffolk University. As we make our way from the Jackson statue to Lee, Schmidt explains that Arbeit founded Charlottesville Anti-Racist Media Liaisons (CARML), a group that facilitates conversation between local activists and the press. CARML, Arbeit says, is “an important part of activist infrastructure in Charlottesville,” where a barrier to effective coverage “is the fact that white journalists are steeped in white supremacist culture and journalists may not seek out people directly negatively impacted by white supremacy.” Activists like those with CARML serve as a counterpoint to the city’s legacy press. Another group, Solidarity Cville, which launched in early 2017, has published a timeline of events linked to the Unite the Right rally, news roundups and analysis of local and national coverage, and frequent Twitter updates. Solidarity, which operates as an anonymous collective, also produced a short documentary.

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“White supremacy still lives here,” the film concludes. “What will you do to dismantle it over the next six months and beyond?” Molly, a Charlottesville resident, covers city government meetings via her Twitter handle, @socialistdogmom, which has about 13,000 followers, including at least a dozen local journalists. For her work, Molly nets $1,400 in monthly donations—a sum that approaches the salary of some reporters. “I think that the time for both sides has passed,” she says. “This isn’t a time to stand in the middle and hear both sides, because one of those sides is murderous Nazis.” Molly, who asked that CJR not identify her beyond the information available on Twitter, lacks institutional safeguards that some newsrooms use to protect their staff, and the risks she takes are clear: in July, Christopher Cantwell—a white supremacist whose violent threats were featured in Vice’s Charlottesville documentary— published a blog post in which he referred to her with an anti-semitic slur and pleaded that someone “dox” her. On the tour, we make our way toward the Lee statue, which had been shrouded from the days after Unite the Right until late February. As we approach it, Schmidt points out a sticker bearing the insignias of white nationalist groups and the words “evil has many faces.” Then she gestures toward a building across the park, donated by the same man who gave Charlottesville its Lee statue. It’s the local historical society, she says. Ahead of Unite the Right, Schmidt had sought access to the society’s collection of Ku Klux Klan robes for research on the Klan’s local presence, but had been rebuffed. She sent emails to reporters, encouraging them to make the same request, and took Lisa Provence, C-VILLE’s news

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editor, with her to the society building to make the ask in person. “It wasn’t until I got journalists involved that I broke the dam,” Schmidt recalls. The historical society ultimately coordinated a closed viewing of two robes for Schmidt and for a number of reporters. As we wrap up, the temperature rises to nearly 90 degrees. Schmidt and Arbeit decide to get water. Before we leave, Schmidt directs our attention to a telephone pole that overlooks the park and the Lee statue. She points out a new camera, installed ahead of the Unite the Right anniversary. It’s a symbol of continuing distrust in the community—this time, between residents and the police. “That wasn’t there a few days ago,” she says.

he Charlottesville City Council’s final meeting before the first Unite the Right anniversary lasts nearly seven hours. Throughout, there is little agreement between the city government and residents about what the risks are, or how to prepare. The gallery is packed. Most of the crowd sits quietly through the Pledge of Allegiance. Someone near the council dais holds a sign: “Punish Nazis, not residents.” One resident has brought three copies of White Fragility, a book out this year by Robin DiAngelo, for the city’s three white council members. Ahead of the meeting, the city shared plans that it had deemed “essential for the safety of persons and property” during the anniversary weekend. Officials were making arrangements to close city streets, alter public transportation routes, and reduce access to park facilities. They would also restrict parking around Friendship Court—a subsidized housing development mostly populated by black people—and amass more than 1,000

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law enforcement officials in the city. Residents, having reviewed the plans, are unhappy. They want to know whether the city has received any credible threats for which these plans are preparing; officials won’t say. Moreover, people are concerned about a surge in police who, a year ago, showed little willingness to help them. And so, for hours, residents approach the dais. They give their names and, in many cases, their addresses—a point of order that, after a terrorist attack, doubles as a feat of bravery. They decry the city’s plans. A few criticize the local press—for the Richard Spencer interview, for the Progress’s “hit job” on Walker. At one point, Walker discusses her use of social media to directly address constituents—recently, she’s been criticized for that by the Progress. “How information is conveyed to the community is important for me,” she says. “Not everybody comes into these rooms.” The meeting feels charged with the same energy that powered Charlottesville’s opposition to white supremacy a year earlier. The next day, however, coverage of the meeting feels restrained. A debate over the hiring of an interim city manager, a crucial component of city preparations for the weekend, is framed mostly as a debate between councilors, rather than an existential matter for residents. Local TV stations describe the meeting as “heated,” as does the Progress in its front-page headline. There’s considerably less attention paid to the specific concerns of residents who, for hours, voiced their anger and fear and grief. It’s as though the same event that transformed civic engagement in Charlottesville skipped over some of the city’s reporters—as though, still, daily opposition to white supremacy defies journalistic language. cjr

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Connie Chung As the quiet youngest daughter of parents who immigrated from China to Washington, DC, Connie Chung may have shocked her family by jumping into the still-nascent industry of television journalism. Chung told them that she wanted to be the next Walter Cronkite, and she had a good reason: nobody else in television looked like her. Chung’s male colleagues seemed hellbent on reminding her of that fact, as she worked her way up from being a copy girl at a local station to being Washington correspondent at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. She didn’t exactly ignore the racist slights—she “slanted” the news, people would say, or she was producing “yellow journalism”—but she put up with them; she laughed or made the jokes before others could, brushing off racism and sexism at networks that she would later recall were sometimes run by “cavemen.” Her star rose, at CBS and NBC, by landing major stories, such as Magic Johnson’s first interview after revealing that he was HIV positive. Her trailblazing moment came in 1993, with her return to the CBS Evening News—there, she became the first Asian to coanchor a major network’s national weeknight newscast, alongside Dan Rather. “Crazy as it is, I ended up sitting in half of Walter Cronkite’s chair,” she once recalled. “It was really my pinnacle goal.” By that time, many journalists were clamoring not to be the next Walter Cronkite, but the next Connie Chung—especially Asian Americans who had never known a journalism career was possible until seeing her on air. Nicole Dungca is a reporter on the projects and investigations team of The Boston Globe and on the board of directors of the Asian American Journalists Association.

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When “minority affairs” becomes the center of coverage

ILLUSTRATOR

Vidhya Nagarajan

n 2015, my husband and I settled in Philadelphia. His work brought us there; I’d spent the previous two years as a freelance journalist and welcomed the move. Philadelphia, America’s fifth-largest city, has a large black population with a rich history: During slavery, it was a crucial stop on the Underground Railroad and home to the largest and wealthiest free black population in the country. During the Great Migration, Philadelphia was among the most popular destinations for black people fleeing the oppression of sharecropping. Today it has the unfortunate distinction of being the poorest big city in America; in addition to having a sizeable representation of the educated black middle class, there are also large numbers of people of color in deep poverty. Looking around, I grew curious; when I saw that the Associated Press was hiring an urban affairs reporter, I applied. I had been covering stories in that realm for years, at one point at the AP; I got the job. I knew that the title was shorthand for coverage of minority communities, and Philadelphia proved to be a ripe setting. The city had overcrowded prisons; I reported on a push for bail reform. When Bill Cosby, a native son, became the subject of sexual assault allegations, I chronicled the local response. As the country wrestled with what to do about racist symbols in public places, I tracked the fight in my backyard, at Princeton University, where students sought to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public policy. On a daily basis, I followed urban violence; in Philadelphia, the equivalent of a mass shooting happens every month. A year into my job, I was invited to join a team at the AP focused on

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experiences of people of color across the country. My territory grew. I covered national bright spots—the #blackgirlmagic dominating the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the opening of the capital’s first museum dedicated to black history and culture—and ongoing tensions— between the black community and police and, at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the future of the black electorate. Around this time, Donald Trump was on the campaign trail asking black Americans, “What the hell do you have to lose?” The “race beat”—known variously as “urban affairs,” “minority affairs,” or sometimes without a title—emerged during the tumultuous days of American segregation. The role’s importance in national culture, and in newsrooms, has waxed and waned over generations. But as race is an omnipresent force in American life, race coverage, which requires the same sort of expertise as business or education journalism, is essential to reporting on who we are as a society. In November 2017, I was named AP’s national writer for race and ethnicity. The job represented the highest calling for me as a black journalist, which I unapologetically consider myself to be. The appointment also cemented my sense that, throughout my career, long before my role as a race reporter was made official, it has been crucial for me to seek out stories that help bear witness to and for my community—and then, in the newsroom, push past the comfort of some white gatekeepers. So much of journalism is about the choices we make about who will be seen and heard; the race beat is recognition of the fact that images and voices have seldom told the stories of my community. I have aimed to change that.

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he United States has always grappled with conflicts related to race. For some two centuries, there have been black people writing their stories: Ida B. Wells, Simeon Booker, Thomas Morris Chester. The experiences of these and other reporters have been foundational to my career, as their fortitude and clear-eyed approach to exposing racism—often in the face of danger—have steeled me when the weight of the job can feel heavy. They wouldn’t necessarily have considered themselves to have been on the “race beat,” but in many cases they knew that they were what used to be known as Race Men and Women. Sympathetic white journalists joined them, from Ralph McGill, of The Atlanta Constitution, to Gene Roberts, who covered the civil rights movement as a correspondent at The New York Times before becoming editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. “In the fifties, virtually every newsroom in America was white,” Roberts recalls. Many of the first black journalists whose job it was to focus on the black community got their start in mainstream media covering the unrest of the 1960s. Most white reporters attempting to cover urban America were met with skepticism by its residents, who typically encountered journalists only in times of crisis—as they were coming to cover crime or riots. Mainstream newsrooms rarely sought to depict the fullness of black life, only the tragedies. Race beat reporters were borne not out of a respect for diversity, but out of necessity. In the late sixties, the treatment of black communities by major news outlets became a focus of the Kerner Commission. Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, had been tapped by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the underlying causes of racial tension in the United States, and to recommend solutions. With a team of 11, Kerner identified more than 150 riots and other incidents of unrest in the first 9 months of 1967 that resulted from white racism. “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget,” the Kerner report stated, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The race beat was explicitly identified as a means to understanding and preventing violence brought on by racial conflict. Among the commission’s recommendations to the media was expanding coverage of black communities by establishing a “permanent assignment of reporters familiar with racial and urban and racial affairs.” The commission also urged newsrooms to “publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of

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Negroes as a group within the community and as a part of the larger community” and, to accomplish this, “recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and promote those who are qualified to positions of significant responsibility.” The message resonated. “Most newsrooms in the seventies had a visible black reporter presence,” Roberts says. “It might not have been enough, but compared to the fifties, it was significant.” Black reporters were not necessarily put on the race beat, however. Many of his hires at the Inquirer started off working in largely white suburban neighborhoods; like other African Americans of the era, many were trying to stave off the stigma of affirmative action by proving that they could cover anything. The Kerner Commission, which focused on black-white relations, did not account for other marginalized groups. Around the same time, the rise of the Chicano movement, also known as the Mexican American civil rights movement, elevated the national consciousness of Latinx identity. A Chicano press emerged and, in the late sixties and early seventies, dozens of newspapers across the country formed to cover that fight for equality; some Latinx journalists came to be hired to work in mainstream newsrooms where protests took place, including Los Angeles and Houston. In 1984, the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for “Latinos,” a 27-part series that allowed millions of readers to see themselves with dignity for the first time in the pages of one of the country’s most influential newspapers. Russell Contreras, my colleague at the AP who writes about race with a focus on Latinxs and African Americans, says that Latinx reporters have yet to catch up to their African-American counterparts; there are several black columnists at major newspapers, for instance, but scarcely any Latinxs. A degree in Latin American studies or a semester abroad in Mexico can be enough for white reporters who speak Spanish to get jobs covering his Latinx communities. “Even though black history has been marginalized, it’s much more integrated than the other groups,” Contreras says. “When you talk about race, you start with the black experience, because that’s unfinished business.

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Alice Dunnigan Born in rural Kentucky, Alice Dunnigan, the daughter of a sharecropper, fought for access to the halls of power that had been long denied to black people. In 1947, she became the first black woman to get press credentials to cover Congress, and in 1948, she broke the same barrier in the White House. Having spent her early career as a teacher, at 36, facing limited opportunities and a husband who did not support her aspirations, she moved to Washington, DC, on her own. She put in a few years of government work and freelancing until she was hired as the Washington bureau chief of the Associated Negro Press. Her boss told her to focus on getting news from service workers, but Dunnigan was determined to report on officials enacting policies that affected the black community. First she had to fight for accreditation to the Capitol. When she asked Claude Barnett, ANP’s director, for a letter of recommendation, he replied: “For years we have been trying to get a man accredited to the Capitol Galleries and have not succeeded. What makes you think that you—a woman—can accomplish this feat?” She did. Leveraging her Capitol access to get a White House pass, she attended press conferences with Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, questioning them about civil rights. In her 1974 autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience— From Schoolhouse to White House, Dunnigan explained the importance of her presence in those corridors: “Without black writers, the world would perhaps never have known of the chicanery, shenanigans, and buffoonery employed by those in high places to keep the black man in his (proverbial) place.” Ayesha Rascoe is a White House reporter for National Public Radio.

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“So many folks treat race as an oddity or quirk to be analyzed or studied or learned about in an almost cynical way. We’re not an odd spectacle.”

From my perspective, I get it, but that does exclude the rest of us. The discussion about race—especially in journalism—is complex. And we don’t want complex. We want black and white, literally.” Frank Shyong, who covers Asian-American communities for the Los Angeles Times, says that much of who gets covered, and how, comes down to a numbers game. “There is a hierarchy to the newsworthiness of communities based on what’s going on right now,” he explains. “An increased awareness of police shootings or what Trump says about immigration—those types of justifications rarely come around for the Asian community. People can look at the audience and make the calculation.” That approach is shortsighted, he adds. “It’s a little depressing to see that the things that have been written about are still being written about now. I wonder what we’ve been able to teach people about these communities. Journalism should attack areas of misunderstanding, of controversy, and see if reporting and storytelling can change things.”

am a daughter of Atlanta, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., and of a black mother who survived segregation, finished college, and provided a fragile middle

class life for her children. It wasn’t long after I knew that I wanted to be a journalist that I knew what kind of journalist I would be. On some level, however, I thought that the work of the race beat would be in covering a trajectory of progress and in chronicling the last vestiges of systemic inequality and hate. In 2000, in Phoenix, I attended a convention the National Association of Black Journalists for the first time. I was 22, working at the Daily World. “A lot of us feel terrible that you are covering the same things we covered,” Paul Delaney, who helped start NABJ, told me. It was apparent that my preconceptions about advancement toward racial equality were mistaken. Later, when I landed in the AP’s Atlanta bureau—as an intern, then for my first tour as an urban affairs reporter—I met Sonya Ross, also an Atlanta native, who grew up near where my grandparents lived. She sat in the same chair to which I was assigned, before moving on and up to Washington, DC, where she distinguished herself as a White House reporter. She was known for her coverage of civil rights, black politics, and the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. She was one of five reporters allowed aboard Air Force One after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I

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quickly drafted Ross as a mentor; her wisdom and guidance have served me well in my career. Recently, I asked Ross about my role at the AP. “I always viewed it as an area of coverage,” she says. But never a “beat” per se, nor an anthropological experiment. “So many folks treat race as an oddity or quirk to be analyzed or studied or learned about, in an almost cynical way,” she adds. “We’re not an odd spectacle that you must know about.” To cover race, in her view, is to account for realities of the American experience. “Race coverage was everywhere, and they were good stories,” she says. “Race followed me to the White House and to global affairs.” Yet half a century after the Kerner Commission advised newsrooms to cover black communities with attention and care, the report’s prescriptions have not been satisfactorily implemented. Ross and I, who have mostly white colleagues, have seen pushback against coverage that doesn’t align with mainstream beliefs about black people; at the same time, we have had to navigate distrusting black communities suspicious of our employer—and by extension, us. “We’re not doing a very good job of giving our historians enough to know about the demographic challenges happening right now,” Ross says. At a moment when “America has leadership that is quite antipathetic toward race, antagonistic even,” she adds, she wonders whether “this industry is going to accept that this country’s racial permutations are here to stay and are worthy of covering.” Still, Ross believes that the level at which race is covered today, albeit imperfectly, represents a dramatic improvement from what existed at the start of her career. Whether or not this progress will hold, and be built upon, is something my peers and I wonder about often—just as we wondered, at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, what of his legacy would endure. We knew better than to believe that we live in a “post-racial” society, and we feared that the backlash against such an idea would get worse. At the NABJ convention this summer, in Detroit, I discussed these questions with

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Akilah Johnson, one of my oldest and dearest colleagues. Johnson, who covers immigration for The Boston Globe, was about to fly to Stanford University, where she had been awarded a John S. Knight journalism fellowship. Johnson had gotten her start in 2001 as an editorial assistant at the Sun-Sentinel, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which had a race and demographics team that she thought she might join. When, several years later, Tribune, her employer’s parent company, slashed jobs to cut costs, diversity was a casualty. The team vanished, and with it, Johnson’s dream. “That used to influence so much of all of my work,” she recalls. Johnson and I had met as cub reporting fellows with Tribune’s minority editorial training program. She couldn’t have appreciated then exactly how fleeting that support would be. “I didn’t realize social justice was the lens I was looking at my work through at the time,” she says. Yet time and again, terms like cultural appropriation and white privilege get written off as identity politics by those who would rather not continue thinking about race. “Now those words, in some circles, have become pejorative to think about,” she says. After more than a decade, we reunited, in 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, dodging tear gas canisters to document the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. As race reporters, we always feel a tremendous responsibility— mingled with a sense of guilt—to get our stories right; the scene in Ferguson was illuminated with urgency. “I feel like every story is a matter of life and death, and I am not being hyperbolic,” Johnson says. There, like journalists of color so often do, she reckoned with her position in relation to the story. When we spoke at the convention in Detroit, we reflected on how, as black reporters, being on the race beat means shouldering entire communities. In many ways, it can feel like we’re writing for our lives, and to protect our family and friends. “We’re conditioned to say, ‘This isn’t about me’—but this was about us,” Johnson says. “You carry that with you in every story you write, whether you are fully conscious of it or acknowledge it, or not.” cjr

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End note

L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E SS

In 1900, after emancipation and before the civil rights movement would defeat Jim Crow, Atlanta University tallied the number of black-ownedand-operated newspapers in the United States. The researchers found 153 publications and represented them in color-coded categories. Many of the papers enjoyed immense influence, particularly the Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier, as the Great Migration brought black people north and west. Over time, the papers numbered in the thousands. In black people’s ongoing struggle for equal rights, these publications served to challenge the segregated institution of journalism. The fight for black liberation continues today. But as newspapers of all kinds have met with a decline in readership, the fate of those by and for the black community has been particularly grim. The National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group, now lists 166 members—not that many more than there were in 1900. Yet to evaluate the strength of the black press on the number of black newspapers would be a mistake. Despite the news industry’s dismal attempt at integration, black journalists, writers, and editors working at every kind of modern media outlet continue to embrace the credo that guided the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827: “To vindicate our brethren, when oppressed, and to lay the case before the publick.” —Alexandria Neason

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