It Ain't Just NPR News & Notes: Black Newspaper Journalists Are Getting Kicked To The Curb Too!

With major media outlets laying off reporters and editors at alarming rates, black journalists have been hit particularly hard as The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, National Public Radio, BET and NBC News are among the companies to drastically reduce newsroom staff in an effort to stay afloat financially.

In 2008, an estimated 15,000 people have lost their jobs at newspapers, according to the tracking Web site Papercuts. And by 2010, media experts say, several cities may be without a daily newspaper. Almost every black journalist who is working knows a black journalist who isn't.

Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and vice president for UNITY Journalists of Color, said black journalists – and journalists of color – offer readers and viewers a valuable perspective on news.

"When diversity dies in our nation’s newsrooms through layoffs and buyouts, it has a direct impact on the consumer of color,” Ciara told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “People in charge of content who have different experiences and backgrounds produce a more well-balanced product."

The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, will cut its newsroom staff about 40 percent by year’s end, one of the largest reductions in a single move by a major American newspaper.

Associated Press, the clearinghouse of U.S. journalism, is firing 10 percent of its staff, or about 400 people. Gannett Co. Inc, with interests in newspapers and broadcast stations, recently eliminated about 2,000 jobs in its latest round of cuts, while NBC News plans to reduce some of its 1,200 employees.

Earlier this year, The Washington Post asked a number of seasoned black journalists to consider taking buyouts – which many did – and other black journalists were forced to leave publications like The Dallas Morning News and The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Black journalists also are concerned about "News & Notes" – the provocative news program geared toward African-American listeners on National Public Radio – that has been canceled after a three-year run. NPR last week cited declining revenue for the cancellation, adding that the network planned to eliminate about seven percent of its workforce.

“Undoubtedly, historically-black radio has been the heartbeat of the black community, from the advent of talk radio through the Sunday morning gospel shows,” Keith Murphy, host of The Urban Journal on XM Radio, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “We, as a people, go to our local and national talk formatted shows in questionable times because of the trust and bonds that are developed.”

Richard Prince, who writes "Journal-Isms," a diversity column for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, was among the first to report developments concerning “News & Notes” before the official announcement concerning the program’s demise.

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Folks Who Get It: Regal, Arrogant, Demanding News Anchor Dennis Richmond Prepares To Sign Off On KTVU

He addresses the camera with his body at a precise quarter-turn, the arrangement of his shoulders carefully calibrated.

These are the massive shoulders that Dennis Richmond seemed to carry the weight of the world upon for more than three decades. But now, after a 40-year career at Channel 2 - 32 years as the anchorman for KTVU's "10 O'Clock News," - Richmond will lay down the world's burdens on Wednesday night and sign off for the final time.

The Bay Area's style is devoutly old school - straight, clean, and no-nonsense. He turns 65 next week, but Richmond still lifts weights to maintain the symmetry of those sculpted shoulders. Along with his buttery baritone and bedroom eyes, they're what give Richmond's delivery of the news a three-dimensional quality.

After a three year stint in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, Richmond tried college for a couple of years, then drove to California with $400 in his pocket and no idea what to do with his life. Growing up outside of Toledo, Ohio, he had been addicted to the only local channel's 15-minute nightly newscast. So he applied for a job at KTVU. The struggling station's news division then consisted of about 25 people - it's five times that now - and the nation and the world were about to explode around them.

Later, of course, he would colorize the news himself, becoming only the third black face on local news - the others were Belva Davis and Ben Williams of CBS affiliate KPIX - in 1969. Richmond's doggedness quickly made his star ascendant, and the '60s made his look transplendent. "I was reporting with a big Afro, a beard and the little sunglasses," he says. This contributed to his popularity, both on-camera and off.

So good looking, when he walked in a room you could hear women gasp, Richmond certainly enjoyed the attention. Never seen with an unattractive woman, Richmond finally married at age 51, and became a grandfather last year when his daughter Amber - from a previous relationship - had a child.

Whatever his effect on female viewers, Richmond did not cast the same spell on many of the people he covered. He was Channel 2's main man on many of the biggest stories of the 1970s - the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Zebra Murders, the double-killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

But when he and his cameraman showed up at crime scenes, the cops often assumed they were perpetrators, not newsmen. When he and Moore arrived at San Quentin to cover a breaking story in their marked news van, armed only with press credentials, the prison guards ordered the pair to produce further identification - while pointing loaded rifles at them.

Dave Clark, Heir Apparent To The Richmond Legacy

On another occasion, they were dispatched to the Oakland airport to cover the arrival of president Richard Nixon. "They had had bused in all these pretty looking white people to make Oakland look as lily white as they could," Moore says. "So there weren't any minority people there at all except Dennis and me. They sent us over our own black Secret Service agent.

"They threw all that racism at us, made us show our credentials four or five times, backed us into corners, but we felt we always came back with a story as good as anybody else's."

Still a run-and-gun street reporter by the mid-'70s, Richmond took stock of his future and decided it was behind a desk. "One day I looked in the mirror and said, 'If I'm going to go anywhere, I need to make a change,"' he recalls. He cut his Afro, trimmed his beard down to what became his trademark mustache, and began wearing three-piece suits on the air.

When one of KTVU's anchors got caught passing off as a bulletin a story that was actually several hours old, he was fired. Richmond got his chance as a fill in in 1976 for several months and seized it. When the arrangement was made permanent, no one realized at the time just how permanent. And apparently little thought was given to the fact that Richmond was about to become local television's first black anchorman.

Through the years of Richmond's reign at KTVU, a good deal of mystery has surrounded the comings and sometimes abrupt goings of his white, female co-anchors. One actually quit in the middle of a newscast.

"I demand a lot of other people," Richmond says. "If I see mistakes that are clearly made because of carelessness, it really angers me. It damages the broadcast and damages me. If I have to edit someone on the air, I'm going to come looking for that person and try to convince them not to make that mistake anymore. And I might not be the nicest person in the world the way I do it."

"A lot of people who have worked with Dennis think him abrasive, and kind of hard to work with," says John Fowler, a reporter at KTVU for 31 years. "He's not,if you do it right."

Richmond's long anticipated retirement appears to have once again emboldened the competition. Dana King has recently begun calling Frank Somerville, Richmond's designated heir at KNTV, to warn him pro-wrestler style, "You're going down!" And KPIX has launched a 30-minute news show of its own at 10 o'clock on its cable station (Ch. 44).

"When a longtime anchor leaves, it often means that viewers will shop around a little bit," says Channel 5 news director Dan Rosenheim. But at the midpoint of the current sweeps period, Richmond's newscast was holding steady in the lead of the ratings race, with a nightly average of 102,000 viewers, compared to KPIX's 6,000.

"Your job is to sit there and tell the viewer the news stories of the day," Richmond says. "You can have a personality, but that's who you are. And that's who I was. Who I've been for 40 years."

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