St. Louis CofCC Blog

National Policy Institute:

Editor’s Note: A steady stream of mainstream journalists are moving to, and in some cases moving back to, ethnic media. Despite pay cuts, they have opportunities to fulfill a passion they were unable to in mainstream media, reports NAM contributor Kenneth J. Cooper. Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize winner and freelance journalist based in Boston.

Howard Manly walked away from his op-ed column in the Boston Herald, a tabloid daily, and into the executive editor’s office at the Bay State Banner, a black weekly in the city with less than a quarter of the Herald’s circulation of 230,000.

Evelyn Hernández had worked for Newsday, the Miami Herald and Fort Worth Star Telegram, but decided against returning to a mainstream newspaper after a stint in academia. Instead, she took over as opinion page editor and editorial writer at El Diario/La Prensa, a Spanish-language daily in New York City.

In recent years, a noticeable number of veteran African-American and Latino journalists like Manly and Hernández have made an unusual mid-career transition, leaving behind general-interest media for newspapers, magazines, websites and broadcast outlets oriented to their racial or ethnic groups. Some younger journalists who haven’t gotten much traction at mainstream media are also making the switch.

Journalists say they made the move to fulfill a passion for providing journalism tailored to their minority group, assume supervisory roles that were unavailable to them in mainstream outlets and contribute to strengthening ethnic media that are traditionally short on financial and professional resources.

When did the MSM quit becoming “journalism tailored for” blacks and Hispanics? They have been almost nothing but for all of my conscious lifetime, and much longer before that. They don’t call the major newspaper in Los Angeles the “L.A.tino Times” for nothing.