“Did ESPN just get ‘mediajacked’?” Brian Steinberg asked Wednesday on AdAge.com. “Normally, an event as important and interesting as basketball wunderkind LeBron James announcing what team he has chosen to play for would be a national, even global, event — with coverage supplied by hundreds of different media outlets. “Come Thursday, in prime time no…

End of Strained Relationship Means “Sky’s the Limit” Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who finally returned to the Philadelphia Inquirer in February after a two-year feud with his employer of 15 years, left the paper by mutual agreement on Tuesday. “I’m as happy as I’ve been for a long time,” Smith told Journal-isms on Wednesday.…

Two days after CNN hired disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer to co-host a new prime-time program, the National Association of Black Journalists Friday blasted the cable news networks for their failure to place African American hosts in such prime-time slots. “The company missed another opportunity to place a person of color in prime…

It was near the end of the “Blogging While Brown” conference on Saturday when a woman in the Air Force stepped to the microphone to tell the group that she blogged about natural hair and that there were “so many restrictions” on it in the military. If you have “relaxed” hair, she said, a new rule…

“Consumer magazine publishers have desperately been trying to scratch a profit from any amount of advertising dollars they can get their hands on, especially since the economic recession last year. “One group that was hit particularly hard in the marketing pullback was African-American magazines,” Jason Fell wrote Thursday for Folio. According to the Publishers Information…

A handful of Malcolm X scholars say the 45-year-old mystery of who really pulled the trigger and killed the iconic black leader has been solved, and are wondering why the news media aren’t giving it more attention. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a historian who writes for the Woodson Review and other publications of the respected Association for…

Rand Paul Cancels Out on “Meet the Press” Rand Paul, engulfed in controversy over his views on the 1964 Civil Rights Act 24 hours after he won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, has canceled his scheduled appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” His campaign spokesman “said he was exhausted and…

Richard Prince’s Book Notes™: Compelling Nonfiction After 44 years behind bars, the nation’s most famous prison journalist tells his story. A black journalist reaches the highest reaches of the New York Times newsroom, only to topple in a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions. Women examine their multifaceted status in 21st century journalism. Now it can be…

After two years in the top editorial job at the nation’s largest English-language magazine targeting Hispanics, Mimi Valdés is out in a shakeup at Latina. The former editor of Vibe magazine “had tried to take the Hispanic-aimed magazine more upscale, featuring more fashion, beauty and luxury products in the pages,” Lucia Moses wrote in Mediaweek.…

NBC and ABC demonstrated this week that newsmagazines have not lost their ability to be provocative — or offensive, depending on your point of view. Detroit leaders, accompanied by Vickie Thomas, president of the Detroit Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, and Bankole Thompson, senior editor of the Michigan Chronicle, a black weekly,…