New America Media's Web Site Features J-School Ethnic Media Projects

The New America Media (NAM) Web site now links to a variety of projects at journalism schools that involve the ethnic media outlets in their regions.

With assistance from NAM (and financial backing from MTF & others), a growing number of J-Schools are exploring, researching and engaging the ethnic media in their own backyards and finding that this work reaps huge dividends in return. It helps the schools attract more diverse students, redefine and energize their role within their own universities and become more relevant in their communities. Schools are:

* Studying this growing sector’s diversity, scope and audience;
* Convening ethnic reporters to provide training in investigative reporting, online story telling and issues such as public health; and
* Creating advisory boards and networks of ethnic journalists to explore commonalities and challenges and to explore partnerships.

See more, plus an interactive map of the projects, at: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_alt_category.html?category_id=535

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Strangers and Bedfellows

Departing from the norm, it looks like a large traditional journalism organization is trying to work WITH citizen journalists.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) is set to launch its Citizen Journalism Academies (CJA). These one-day workshops will train lay people to practice journalism "accurately, ethically and fairly." The goal of the program is to help participants "understand how responsible practices could increase their reach and help them have strong journalistic reputations within their communities and around the world," according to SPJ.

The first workshop will be in Chicago on May 17, where registrants will tackle topics on freedom of information, ethics, media law and reporting. Chi Town Daily News (http://www.chitowndailynews.org/), a nonprofit citizen news site covering Chicago, will assist with the training. Registration is $25. Future workshops are slated for Greensboro, N.C. and Los Angeles.

For more information on the CJAs: http://spj.org/cja.asp

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We May Be Biased, but....

It looks like working on your high school newspaper or yearbook correlates with higher academic achievement and test performance, according to a new study released this week by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Foundation. Student journalists earn higher grade point averages, do better on the ACT and earn higher grades in their first year of college, the study found.

Among the highlights, journalism students:

• Scored at the 64th percentile on their ACT composite (overall) score, compared to the 56th percentile for non-journalism students.
• Earned higher HS GPAs in six academic areas, including English, Math, Science and Art.
• Were far more involved in extracurricular activities and took greater leadership roles in those activities (31.6 percent of journalism students were involved in student government, compared to 17.6 percent of non-journalists).

It wasn't all sunshine for the industry-sponsored study, though. Unsurprisingly, non-student media geeks outperformed their ink-stained peers in 2 of 14 academic areas: ACT Math and ACT science scores.

The study tapped data from 31,175 high school students who took the ACT exams during the past five years. For the executive summary, visit: http://www.naa.org/docs/Foundation/journalism%20matters%20exec%20summary.pdf.

Oh, and we think working on student media is also going to become a lot cooler, thanks to MTV's new reality show, The Paper, that premiered this week. The quasi-reality show follows the staff of a high school newspaper based in Florida. It's sure to be filled with all the backstabbing and intrigue made popular in any of the dozens of reality shows produced on MTV.

Check out the first episode: http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1584809&vid=221964

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Reznet Delivers Powerful Multimedia Piece on Louisiana’s Houma

Kudos to Reznet - an online news source for Native Americans coordinated by the University of Montana - for posting a multimedia feature on the Houma Tribe of Houma, La.

With some 17,000 members living in southeastern Louisiana - nearly 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line - the Houma were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “Katrina, Rita and the Houma” explores how the Houma have struggled – and helped one another – following the aftermath of the hurricane. It goes much further, however, providing captivating photos and a brief history of the people.

The multimedia piece is the product of a new Reznet project in which journalism students – Mary Hudetz, a Crow reporter from the University of Montana, and Martina Rose Lee, a Navajo photojournalist from Arizona State University – are teamed up with veteran professional journalists (Victor Merina, a former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and multimedia journalist Steven Chin) to produce an in-depth story on a complex issue of importance in Indian Country.

To see this fascinating piece go to: http://www.reznetnews.org/article/feature-article/katrina%2C-rita-and-houma%3A-nation-recovery.

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Journalist Ruben Salazar Honored with Postage Stamp

A U.S. postal stamp honoring Latino journalist Ruben Salazar, a Mexican-American news reporter killed by police on August 29, 1970, is to be officially issued on April 22. Salazar, who was born in 1928 and wrote for the L.A. Times and served as news director for KMEX in Los Angeles, was killed during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles, CA. Stamps honoring four other journalists – Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, George Polk and Eric Sevareid are also going to be issued the same day. This is the first stamp honoring a Latino journalist ever issued.

See a commentary piece by Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez that appeared in La Prensa San Diego here: http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=f04bd70dcddc6195f6200680ea8c5109

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No Surprise Here: Fewer Daily Newspaper Journalists

In what's sure to lift everyone's spirits at the American Society of Newspaper Editors' (ASNE) annual conference, the annual newsroom census numbers show the largest decline in the number of daily newspaper journalists in nearly 30 years.

According to the newly released data, the total number of newsroom employees declined 4.4 percent (or 2,400 jobs). Minority journalists continue to see reductions amid all the frenetic cuts, losing 300 jobs in 2007, though the percentage of overall minority journalists increased incrementally from 13.43 to 13.52 percentage of all newsroom employees. This is most likely due to the overall reductions of newspaper workforces (as opposed to being the result of new hires).

Still, newsrooms have a long way to go to represent the potential U.S. readership. ASNE notes that according to the most recent census, "racial and ethnic minorities made up 34 percent of the population in 2006." That gap is likely to continue if newspapers don't diversify as the population does.

ASNE, an MTF grantee, surveyed 924 daily newspapers for the study. For more on the census, visit: http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?ID=6945

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New Writers Program Hitting the Web

Women's eNews is out to find the next generation of writers who can thoughtfully cover issues related to the welfare of women and their families as part of its 39,000+ subscriber independent news service.

The initiative - its New Writers Program - hit the web earlier this week, from an inaugural dispatch from Francesca Levy. The piece, "N.Y. Pioneers Tougher Approach to Batterers," explores newer programs in NY aimed at enforcing the sentences of batterers, rather than focusing on rehabilitation. Levy, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and student at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, explores this issue in a feature-length piece, available here: http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3556

Follow the New Writers' work in the coming months by subscribing to Women's eNews here: http://www.womensenews.org/subscribe.cfm#SignUp.

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Ethnic Media + Free Speech

New America Media hosted an ‘eye opening’ forum on the threats that Ethnic Media reporters and editors sometimes face when their reporting upsets their communities. The forum, “A Challenge for Ethnic Media: When Coverage Provokes Threats from Your Own Community,” gathered journalists, editors and publishers of ethnic media to discuss incidents when they have been boycotted, protested, sued, harassed and physically threatened by members of their own communities who wanted to dictate what the ethnic news media could and couldn’t cover.

A reporter for LA’s Koreatown received a letter assuring him that his fingers would be cut off if his coverage of organized crime in his community continued.

Here is an excerpt from the story NAM posted on its web site:
When AsianWeek was embroiled in a controversy over an article attacking African Americans, the vehement opposition came from members of the Asian-American community, [AsianWeek publisher Ted] Fang noted, not from the black community. Asian Americans claimed the publication as a newspaper that spoke for them and demanded a change in top management to prevent other inflammatory stories from being printed in the future.

This dynamic between ethnic media and their audiences can be beneficial, according to Fang: ethnic media tend to have a strong, loyal following. But it also can be a serious challenge when journalists trying to do their job – telling the good as well as the bad about their own community.

To see the NAM piece, visit http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f68b62db82c0909a0f07e6c12123bea9.

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