When the latest unemployment numbers came out, they sounded like a relative win for the U.S. economy. Given February’s battering storms, which closed businesses and roads for days at at a time, the unemployment rate was expected to go up. Instead, some people expressed relief that it stayed steady at 9.7 percent. But before we get too excited about essentially breaking even, we should check ourselves…or check our numbers. What we generally call the “unemployment rate” excludes many unemployed Americans, notably “discouraged workers” who have given up looking. Read More »
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Be the Media You Want to See
Monday, February 1st, 2010
In about half an hour at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center I’m giving a speech called Be the Media You Want to See: How Social Mediaand Citizen Journalism Are Changing the World.” (Per my usual procrastinatory superpowers, I got my powerpoint done about half an hour before I had to hop on the train to New Haven.)
Earlier today I spoke on WNPR (Connecticut) about how digital technology is transforming journalism, as well as issues of race and diversity in journalism. (My interview begins at 00:23:23; the first half of the show is about the new PBS documentary Digital Nation which premieres tomorrow night.) Read More »
Reax to Tavis publishing R. Kelly Memoir
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Reaction is running hot to Tavis Smiley gearing up to publish R. Kelly’s memoirs.
From the SmileyBooks press release
“I’m writing this book as Robert, not R. Kelly,” the singer says. “I’m tired of being misunderstood. I will show you the tears, fears, and sweat. I will open my heart and reveal the good in my life as well as all the drama. I want to tell it like it is.”
There is no direct mention of the sexual assault allegations that resulted in an acquittal.
From Gina MacCauley’s What About Our Daughters:
I had hoped this was a hoax, but apparently Tavis Smiley, who is accused of gathering large numbers of Black folks together so that they could get pitched predatory Wells Fargo loans (disproportionately affecting Black women) is joining forces with another accused predator, R. Kelly. Its amazing that the primary unifying force in the Black community is EXPLOITATION of women and girls. If you go to TavisTalks.com you will see front and center and item announcing that R. Kelly has joined Smiley Books. When is that State of the Black Union and how do we get a permit to protest it? I’m serious.
The comments are no less critical.
And from Danielle Belton’s The Black Snob:
And this book will be just another in a long line of signifiers to perverts that you can do pretty much anything to a woman, girl, child, whatever, and someone will love your trifling ass anyway because it’s our fault for having vaginas. But for Tavis, and others who claim to be holding the entire race to a higher standard, this is further proof that you never meant to hold anything to any standards ever. That “cash rules everything around you, dollah, dollah bill, ya’ll” and you could seriously give two craps about the implication of being the speakerbox to a known predator. After all, freedom of speech, ya’ll! And SOMEONE was going to publish his book so why not Mr. Accountability? Pardon me while I go regurgitate something.
(Belton’s blog also has a link to a guest post about Smiley and Wells Fargo.)
It provoked a conversation on Twitter where several of us talked about who gets the mic when it comes to representing blackness in media. The short answer, in my mind, is that the people who are the best at getting the mic are people who help build the platform: people like Tavis who are business-builders as well as media-makers. So all critiques have to be funneled through the lens of economics: if you don’t like what one mediamaker does, do you have an alternative brand or model?
What do you think?
Is “saving journalism” enough?
Friday, October 16th, 2009
I’ve been a journalist for 20 years– through full-time jobs at Newsweek, MTV, CNN, ABC, Oxygen, and NPR; part-time ones at One Economy, KALW, and WNYC; PopandPolitics.com; and three non-fiction books on race, politics, and media. I’ve rolled with the punches and thrown a few. But now more than ever, the business that I entered at the age of sixteen, with my first national publication, is, well, in a hell of hurt.
Many of my highly skilled friends who report, edit, or run newsrooms are unemployed, underemployed, or just plain scared. Lots of people are worried about the fate of reporting and media in America. Organizations are going bankrupt or out of business, including scores of America’s daily newspapers. Tens of thousands of journalists are being given their walking papers and finding they cannot re-enter the industry. We have created ways that entirely new forms of media can upend “old media,” but that digital victory is without a clear profit model. Read More »
