AAJA, the Asian American Journalists Association has figured out the best way to get back at me after all my years of being a bickering member.
It’s honoring me.
On Wed., Aug. 4, I’m being honored among 150 others as an Asian American pioneer in U.S. journalism. (Yes, Tritia Toyota and Connie Chung are on the list too. But so ae lots of others who were founders and original members of AAJA).
How’d that happen?
It’s just a citation for being old and one of the first Asian Americans to consider journalism instead of medicine, the law, restaurant ownership, or investment banking for a career.
At this point in time, I’d have to say, choosing journalism may not have been the best choice.
But it was my choice. And I’m gratified that someone noticed that I was the first Asian American male and first Filipino American to host a national news program when I was senior host of “All Things Considered” in 1989.
I hope that doesn’t become the headline in my obituary someday. It’s not over yet. (I can’t even withdraw from my IRA without a 10 percent penalty).
I’m still a pioneer who hasn’t quite reached the promised land.
I was a consistent listener to All Things Considered when I was driving my car with buttons for KCRW and KPCC. Congrats on the honor. Your voice is needed now more than ever among the cacophony of commercials, silly noises passing for music, and hate provocateurs.
Congratulations for being old and honored. This sentence says a lot: “…choosing journalism may not have been the best choice.”
AAJA does not have a future if the organization stays with old ideas and old concepts about journalism. Well-connected local community-based independent journalism online and on-demand is the current way to get news, not from a few pyramid sources such as when AAJA first developed.
Unfortunately, AAJA has not stayed with the times and only considers corporate media as journalism, skipping all the other newsmakers, such as independent internet news sites, blogs, documentary filmmakers, etc.
SF Gate, for example, has cut staff so much that it has become an aggregate site, and probably retain readers because of its nasty comments section, which is considered one of the most belligerent on the internet, possibly stirred by SF Gate (aka SF Hate) moles to incite debate and hatred. This is corporate media at its worst and on its deathbed. This is not the future of journalism, and this is not where funders will invest.
Old journalists should probably fly the coop, if they haven’t already gotten canned, and let new or old new journalists take the helm with new media. Perhaps toil through sweat labor now, but it’s possible that later the funds will come in. At least there’s hope with new media, but there is little hope in corporate media.
Well, I tend to agree with you. Corporate media is lost without a business plan as it foolishly tries to replicate the past by turning the web into a digital newspaper.
And AAJA, and other minority journalism organizations merely follow because their funding comes primarily from the corporate media, making the J organizations raison d’etre to be primarily a supplier of people to the corporate media.
Only now are some groups realizing they’ve got to retrain the troops. More sessions were devoted to new media, and not just to old tech news ideas like “computer-assisted reporting.”
(That’s opposed to typewriter assisted reporting?)
So the door wasn’t totally closed to the
“community media,” the bloggers, the indy news sites, the ethnic press, at this week’s AAJA convention.
In fact, Yahoo and Google seemed more prominent as sponsors at this event, more so than the TV networks, at least one of which did not even bother to show up.
Why should it? It had just laid off hundreds of workers.
AAJA took a wrong turn when Doris Truong was elected president of the board. Given that students and so-called non-journalists* cannot vote for leadership, it is easy to see how this happened. The old guard voting for the old guard.
* Students, indies, bloggers and documentary filmmakers cannot vote. Only those in full-time corporate media may vote.
In regards to SF Gate being so desperate to attract readership through its horrendous comments section, here is a story that fortifies my assessment, just so you and your faithful readers don’t think I’m full of guano. http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8395
An interesting quote from that article: “… anyone familiar with news comments sections is accustomed to reading racist attacks on a wide spectrum of groups, but particularly Latinos and undocumented immigrants.”
In regards to my synopsis that community journalism is the new way to get news, this event, The Evolving Landscape of Local Journalism (http://bit.ly/9aug10talk), acknowledges new media sidestepping corporate media. An interesting quote from the blurb: “As the San Francisco Chronicle continues to struggle and cuts reporting budgets, these new players are increasingly our source for original local news reporting.” Local news and ‘bloggers’ consistently scoop corporate media.
Getting back to AAJA, one of its objectives is to achieve parity in corporate media. When the organization developed, this was a priority to assure accurate representation and portrayal. What was unexpected is that in the internet age, corporate media is dying, so why would AAJA want parity with something that’s dead?
Hence, the just-elected AAJA leadership and the old skool mentality of the Association’s voting membership is not forward-thinking, and will likely continue to lag behind media trends. Asian Americans need to monitor the new crop of media, to assure that race sensitivity is intact, and that the AA community is efficiently and accurately covered.