The tragic killing of two Virginia television reporters Monday prompted commentaries reaffirming the need for gun control, bemoaning the frightening “dark side” of social media and noting the vulnerability of television news crews. But it was attention to the mental health of black journalists that prompted Jeffrey Ballou, a news editor at Al Jazeera English,…

New Yorker Magazine Is Latest to Explore Ties “Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right — Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists — have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him,” Evan Osnos wrote for the Aug. 31 issue of the New Yorker.…

More Newsroom Diversity Would Ease the Burden “As calls for newsroom diversity get louder and louder — and rightly so — we might do well to consider what it means that there’s an emerging, highly valued professional class of black reporters at boldface publications reporting on the shortchanging of black life in this country,” Gene…

Civil Rights Icon, 75, Gravitated Toward Media Julian Bond is rightfully being mourned as an iconic civil rights leader, but he also gravitated toward the media. Judging from comments since his death on Saturday from vascular disease at age 75, media members likewise took to him. “He was typically wise, never boring, always eloquent,” Kevin…

Atlantic Writer Has Defended Term, but Not Used Like That “On July 31, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a review of several books on race and racism in the United States,” Karen Attiah reported Thursday for the Washington Post. “The series, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent Guus Valk, leads with a review of…

In ’65 Watts Coverage, Race Complexities Eluded L.A. Times “Almost all of them are dead now,” the Los Angeles Times’ Doug Smith began his story Wednesday evaluating his paper’s coverage of the Watts uprising of 1965. “When I joined The Times in 1970, they were the giants of the newsroom, still sharing the glow of…

NABJ, Unity Join Media Outlets in Expressing Outrage “Reporters from The Huffington Post and Washington Post have been charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer’s performance, a chilling setback for press freedom coming nearly a year after their arrests in Ferguson, Missouri,” Michael Calderone reported Monday for the Huffington Post. “The Huffington Post’s Ryan J.…

Busloads Travel to Paisley Park Studio Complex At least 650 members of the National Association of Black Journalists accepted an invitation from Prince to pay $20 apiece to visit the Paisley Park studio complex used by the entertainer outside Minneapolis Saturday night in hopes of seeing the star himself. But the NABJ members — and…

A Gallup poll released Tuesday shows that Americans’ satisfaction with how blacks are treated in the U.S. has dropped to an all-time low,” Scott Sutton reported Tuesday for the Chicago Sun-Times. The next day, Jesse J. Holland reported for the Associated Press that “A majority of blacks in the United States — more than 3…

Media Begin Commemorations of Portentous Shooting As the news media began to commemorate the first anniversary of the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., that reverberated around the nation, St. Louis County police “agreed as part of two federal court settlements not to seek charges against a pair of journalists who were arrested for allegedly…