KCABJ Academy Advances

Members voted at the May 1 meeting to extend the deadline for the KCABJ Urban Student Journalism Academy at Penn Valley Community College. The extension is to give people who heard KCABJ member Glenn E. Rice promoting the academy in late April on KPRS-FM time to submit their applications and essays. The new deadline is May 19. KCABJ members voted to accept seven Kansas City area high school and college students for the academy. Each will be notified with a letter. KCABJ members will meet next at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 22 at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, 3700 Blue Parkway, to determine whether the new applicants should be admitted into the academy. All of the names of the 2004 class will be published in the June edition of the KCABJ Newsletter.

The program will take place June 21 through July 2 at Penn Valley Community College. It had been at Rockhurst University since 1992, but Rockhurst ended its collaboration with KCABJ this year. For more information or to get an application for the workshop click here.

Members with ideas on newsmakers who can speak to the students at mock press conferences during the academy are encouraged to contact program coordinators Tanyanika Samuels and April Jackson. The coordinators also are seeking story ideas for the students to pursue for the KCABJ Journal, a newspaper that the class will produce during the academy. The students will be in room 209 in the Humanities Building at Penn Valley Community College. The academy committee will meet at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 15 at KSHB-TV.

KCABJ President Tracy Allen said The Call of Kansas City would pick up the cost of providing at least two meals for the students during the academy. She said other sponsors are encouraged to contact her. Former President Anita K. Parran also volunteered to sponsor a meal.

Tracy said at the May 1 meeting that KCABJ had been invited to participate in a Hip-Hop Summit on Aug. 29. Russell Simmons and the Rev. Ben Chavis will be among the big names appearing at the national event in Kansas City. The location will be announced soon.

Members learned at the meeting that the candidates for governor of Missouri have accepted invitations to participate in a candidate forum, which will be after the August primary. KCABJ will be among the sponsors with the Black Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City.

Tracy said the Omaha chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists wants to hold a joint get-together for its members and KCABJ's. The details are being worked out.

Applications for the 13th Annual KCABJ Media Awards will be mailed in June. The ceremony will be on Nov. 13 at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center.

Tracy reminded KCABJ members about registering for the UNITY convention in August in Washington, D.C. The registration cost rises substantially after the June deadline. Check out www.unity.org or www.nabj.org for more details.

Poor Showing in Newsroom Diversity

The American Society of Newspaper Editors in April released is annual national report on newsroom diversity, and the numbers didn't look particularly good.

However, ASNE Web site praised the advance: ``Newsrooms at U.S. daily newspapers collectively improved their diversity by nearly a half of one percentage point in 2003, but the growth to 12.94 percent laggd behind the 31.7 percent minorities in the U.S. population.'' ASNE goes on to say the number of working journalists declined by 500, leaving the current newsroom census at 54,200.

However, ASNE said all minority groups increased in numbers. The gain in diversity was the third successive rise of nearly a half a percentage point. ``But the total percentage is still short of the growth rate needed to achieve ASNE's goal of parity of newsrooms with their communities by 2025.

Other facts from the 27th annual newsroom census: Journalists of color account for 10.5 percent of all supervisors in newsrooms. Nearly two-thirds of all minority journalists work at papers with circulations of more than 100,000. The percentage of women in daily newsrooms rose to 37.23 percent following a two-year decline. Women journalists of color make up 16.27 percent of women in newsroom jobs, up from 15.8 percent last year. The number of white women declined by 72. Daily news staffs are still mostly male. Men now total 34,017, a drop of 533. Minority men in newsrooms number 3,733, up from 3,652 last year. ASNE reported that 927 of the 1,417 daily newspapers responded to the survey, representing 65.42 percent of all U.S. dailies.

The first ASNE census in 1978 found that journalists of color held only 3.95 percent of all newsroom jobs. The percentage was 11.85 in 2000, 12.07 in 2002, 12.53 in 2003 and 12.95 in 2004. ASNE in 1978 set a goal to have the percentage of newsroom jobs equal the percentage of minorities in the population by the year 2000. But back then the minority percentage was under 25 percent of the total U.S. population. It has increased to more than 30 percent today. ASNE in the late 1990s pushed the population parity goal to 2025. The effort is in conjunction with the Kerner Commission report after the riots in the 1960s partly blaming the news media for the civil unrest because they failed to report on the problems in the nation's minority communities. The report said the press needed more journalists of color to more accurately recognize the news and report it in a fair, accurate and balanced way.

ASNE's Web page offered a positive view of the newsroom census. NABJ viewed the census report differently. NABJ's Web page said: ``The National Association of Black Journalists is alarmed that fewer black journalists are working as supervisors in America's daily newspapers and called on top editors to take advantage of NABJ's growing census of members ready for key decision-making positions.''

NABJ further reports that the number of black journalists increased slightly: 19 more black journalists are working in newsrooms nationwide now, up .09 percent. That was up from a year ago when the increase was 40 black journalists, or .04 percent. But those African-Americans are in newspapers of more than 100,000 in circulation.

NABJ President Herbert Lowe offered this insight: ``It's pitiful that we continue to measure progress - or actually the lack of progress - in terms of plus .04 percent or .09 percent a year when what we really need to see are spikes of 3 percent to 4 percent. The industry says all the right things, but every year we find that we're no better off than the year before. This is far too important for baby steps.''

NABJ said the report showed that one out of five black journalists were supervisors, 572 out of 2,938. ``That's a decrease of 15 black supervisors from the year before, and means they represent only .04 percent of all newspaper supervisors,'' NABJ reported. Reporters still represented 53 percent of black journalists even though reporters overall only account for 45.8 percent of the total workforce.

The UNITY Web site also was critical of the newspaper industry's slow hiring and promotion practices for journalists of color, saying it again shows ``a continued pattern of minimal progress in diversifying the news media workforce.'' Ernest R. Sotomayer, president of UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. said, ``While we welcome even a slight increase in representation by people of color in newsrooms at a time that overall employment fell in the industry, the progress remains too slow in the face of much greater diversity in our population.''

The Asian American Journalists Association called on newspapers to place more Asian American journalists in supervisory and management positions.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists Web page said the organization was ``troubled by the lack of net growth in the number of Latino journalists.'' Hispanic journalists increased from 2,212 in 2002 to 2,258 in 2003.

In the region that includes Missouri and Kansas, minority journalists hold 298 of the 3,805 journalism jobs or just 7.82 percent of the total, according to the ASNE census. It was the lowest of the nine regions. The New England states were second lowest. The west south central region, which includes Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas was the highest with 17.77 percent of the newsroom jobs held by minority journalists. In the Kansas City area, The Kansas City Star reported that 17.9 percent of its newsroom jobs were held by minority journalists. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that journalists of color represented only 14.8 percent of its newsroom employees. The St. Joseph News-Press reported 4.5 percent. Those papers in the Kansas City area reporting that they had no journalists of color included the Independence and Blue Springs Examiner, The Leavenworth Times and the Ottawa Herald. The Lawrence Journal-World minority newsroom census was 2.6 percent, and the Topeka Capital Journal reported 1.9 percent. The Wichita Eagle put its number at 16 percent.

NABJ News

The NABJ Web site reports that Denver Post Editor Greg Moore said at a NABJ regional conference that black journalists must fight for positions and promotions in mainstream newsrooms to enrich those newspapers and broadcast outlets.

``We are at a crossroads, while the industry has a huge amount of responsibility for addressing this, so do we,'' Moore said at the Region IV Conference at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. ``The struggle is not over. We have work to do. We must rediscover our purpose.''

He said journalism associations such as NABJ should offer more professional development opportunities at national conventions, and better newsroom diversity monitoring efforts are needed.

NABJ Executive Board and the Council of Presidents are trying to set up a ``Chapter Day'' on Wednesday, Aug. 4 at the UNITY convention. It will serve as an opportunity for people to share ideas and to take lessons home to improve NABJ member chapters.

NABJ and the National Urban League have forged a partnership to create training and scholarship programs aimed at helping to encourage more black students to seek careers in journalism. NABJ President Herbert Lowe and Urban League President Marc H. Morial announced the partnership in March. To learn more go to www.nabj.org/urbanleague.html.

NABJ has received a challenge grant from the Ford Foundation and James L. Knight Foundation, which pushes the organization to raise money for its operation and programs from nontraditional funding, particularly from individual NABJ members, friends, supporters, community members and family-owed businesses.

Working Hard for the Money

The Inland Press Association in Des Plaines, Ill, reports that entry level and experienced reporters saw about a 7 percent increase in total direct pay from 2002 to 2003. The demand for quality journalists amid a shrinking supply has caused the salary creep.

Scholarships and More