Culture

Writers Link Circumstances to Conditions on South Side The sad story of Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West Little League team, stripped of its hard-fought 2014 U.S. championship title, is starting to depart from the pat story line of hard-working young black teammates punished for the deeds of the rule-breaking adults in charge of them. The team gave up…

N.Y. Times Columnist Boosted Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb David Carr, the New York Times media critic who died suddenly Thursday at 58, was also a nurturer of young black journalists, some of whom were quick to pay tribute to him. Carr spoke of his commitment in a 2008 article in the Times advocating for paid…

Some Say Time Is Right for NBC News Workhorse Lester Holt, who is sitting in the anchor chair of “NBC Nightly News” for the next six months after the suspension of anchor and managing editor Brian Williams, will initially be working seven days a week, an NBC official told Journal-isms on Wednesday. Holt, the all-purpose substitute…

Black History Month a Good Time to Illuminate the Present “Along Main Street in a small South Carolina city, there is a war memorial honoring fallen World War I and II soldiers, dividing them into two categories: ‘white’ and ‘colored,’ ” Jeffrey Collins wrote last week from Greenwood, S.C., for the Associated Press. “Welborn Adams, Greenwood’s…

Some Wonder Whether Double Standard Is at Work The fallout over Brian Williams’ retraction of his years-old story that he was on a helicopter shot down by enemy fire in Iraq might be primarily about credibility and trust, but it is also about celebrity, ratings and, some say, race. “You know…Patricia Smith, Jayson Blair &…

U.S. Nonwhites Opposed Publishing Muhammad Cartoons A month after the attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a three-day jihadist assault that, in all, left 17 people dead, a racial split has emerged over whether the magazine should have published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, according to the Pew Research…

Fox News Pundit Links Al Jazeera Reporters, Terrorism Two veteran journalists have come to the defense of Randall Pinkston, another longtime black journalist, after Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly called out Pinkston, Soledad O’Brien, Joie Chen and John Seigenthaler as workers for Al Jazeera, which O’Reilly called a “propaganda outfit” that supports terrorism. (video) Les…

Pop Culture Still an Attraction for Black Web Visitors BET.com, MadameNoire.com and TheRoot.com were big winners among African American-oriented websites in 2014, according to figures for unique visitors provided to Journal-isms by the comScore, Inc. research company. For the first time, the figures include both desktop and mobile data. Previous figures measured desktop use only.…

News Outlets Split on Best Ways to Cover the Topic With the New York Times moving Tanzina Vega, the paper’s sole reporter on a national race and ethnicity beat, to cover the Bronx courthouse, a larger question is at play, Chris Ip wrote Wednesday for Columbia Journalism Review. “What happens to her national race and…