Media

New York Police Outreach Becomes PR Disaster “An exercise in social media outreach turned #epicfail Tuesday when users flooded the Twittersphere with some of the NYPD’s most infamous moments of brutality, the Daily News in New York reported. “The NYPD, through its Twitter page, innocuously asked people on to post pictures of themselves interacting with New…

Slate Raises Hackles Speculating on Hispanics, Whiteness When George Zimmerman was tried last year in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, descriptions of Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” rankled some whites as well as a number of Hispanics. “Whites think the media were intent on telling a tragic tale in terms of a white villain and a black…

Unhappy Mass. Governor Defends “Important Voice” Federal agents shut down an unlicensed radio station in Boston Thursday, sending “shockwaves through Boston’s African-American community, where the station filled a vacuum on the airwaves after the station WILD-AM was sold,” Meghan E. Irons reported Friday for the Boston Globe. Gov. Deval Patrick sharply criticized federal agents for the…

NYPD Disbands Muslim-Tracking Unit Exposed by AP “A special New York Police Department unit that sparked controversy by tracking the daily lives of Muslims in an effort to detect terror threats has been disbanded, police officials said Tuesday,” Jake Pearson and Tom Hayes reported for the Associated Press. “NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis confirmed that detectives assigned to the unit had been…

Free Press Columnist Wrote Passionately About Fiscal Crisis Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary Monday “for his columns on the financial crisis facing his hometown, written with passion and a stirring sense of place, sparing no one in their critique.” Henderson appeared to be the…

In Newsrooms, “Still a Small Tilt in Merit Pay to Men” The pay disparity between men and women that grabbed the attention of the White House and Capitol Hill this week has nearly vanished from newspaper newsrooms, Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America, told Journal-isms on Friday. “Likely still a…

Activist Says, “I Wasn’t With the Rats — I’m a Cat” “Some of today’s New York newspaper front pages were pretty remarkable,” Josmar Trujillo wrote Wednesday for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. “Both the New York Post (4/9/14) and the Daily News (4/9/14) sensationalized, for the second day in a row, revelations that Al Sharpton…

Inattention Worsening Humanitarian Crises, Officials Say In 1985, there was Live Aid, a live concert with a global audience of 1.9 billion across 150 nations, organized by the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof to benefit Ethiopian famine relief. Millions of dollars was raised. A decade earlier, as a former Beatle, George Harrison gathered musician friends for…

“A Firebrand With Unassailable Journalistic Credentials” Charles Sumner (Chuck) Stone, newspaper editor, professor, columnist, former Tuskegee Airman and founding president of the National Association of Black Journalists — a legend to many — died Sunday at 89, according to news reports. “Stone died in his sleep early this morning at an assisted-living home in Farmington,…

People of Color Were Subjects, Creators of Excellence From the ABC drama “Scandal” to miniseries on the histories of Latinos and of African Americans to close-up looks at urban high schools and NPR’s “The Race Project,” the George Foster Peabody Awards announced Wednesday were enriched by the lives and work of people of color. “The…