Future Of Minority Workshop In Doubt p. 18

By: Larry Timbs Summer program has for the past seven years supplied a pool of
minority journalists for newsrooms throughout the Southeast sp.

AN INTENSIVE, HIGHLY praised 10-week summer workshop that for the past seven years has supplied a pool of minority journalists for newsrooms throughout the Southeast may soon be history.
Suffering from a lack of permanent funding, the Southeastern Multicultural Newspaper Workshop at the University of South Carolina college of Journalism and Mass Communications may be held this summer for the last time.
"It has been the single most effective source of minority journalists for Knight-Ridder newspapers in the Carolinas, and to lose it would be a trag-edy," said Gil Thelen, executive editor of the State, Columbia, S.C.
Thelen, a driving force to help ensure that the workshop has enough money to operate this summer, noted that a recent count showed at least 15 graduates of the program had worked or were currently working at Knight-Ridder daily newspapers in Columbia, Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Charlotte, N.C.
The three newspapers are among dozens throughout the Southeast and other parts of the country that have hired graduates of the workshop since it was launched in 1987.
After this summer, however, the workshop ? funded its first few years with seed money from foundations ? faces termination. That's because the newspaper foundation seed money has dried up for a project that requires $65,000 to $75,000 each summer to be run with 12 students and a director.
A big chunk of the money needed to keep the workshop afloat this summer is coming from Knight-Ridder and from McClatchy Newspapers, which owns dailies in Rock Hill, S.C., Hilton Head, S.C., and Beaufort, S.C.
Knight-Ridder will contribute about $30,000 to the workshop, according to Thelen. Terry Plumb, editor of Rock Hill Herald, said McClatchy will provide $10,000 for the workshop.
"The future of it is uncertain. After this year, we don't know what will happen," said Ken Campbell, an associate professor in the USC College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Campbell, who came to USC from North Carolina A&T State University, has been director or co-director of the workshop for four years.
Minorities with college degrees or minorities with some college and equivalent life experience who are interested in becoming newspaper journalists learn about reporting, writing and editing at the workshop for 10 hours a day for eight weeks. Workshop participants ? who pay nothing for tuition, housing, food and books ? then undertake a two-week internship, preferably at their hometown newspaper.
The workshop experience, emphasizing hands-on training, has translated into newspaper journalism jobs for a good many of the alumni, helping news executives add diversity to their newsrooms.
Frank Barrows, managing editor of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, notes that more than 40 of the workshop's alumni are working at newspapers such as the St. Petersburg Times, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and at smaller dailies such as the Florence (S.C.) Morning News and Savannah (Ga.) Morning News and Evening Press.
"Most of them would not be in journalism but for the workshop," he said. "Some have become managers. Some are winning prizes."
The idea of the workshop ? to get more minorities into the newspaper business has been embraced by newspaper executives committed to diversity.
The workshop represents an effort to get minorities into a profession which, by the end of 1990, remained predominantly white and male; only about 9% of the 55,700 newspaper journalists in the United States were minorities.
That same year, 51% of the nation's newsrooms had no minorities at all, leaving the industry far short of a goal announced in 1970 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The goal, which ASNE hopes will be achieved by the year 2000, is for the percentage of minorities in the nation's newsrooms to be proportionate to the U.S. minority population of 22 percent.
Nikkole Davis, 22, now an education and health reporter at the six-day-a-week, 10,000-circulation Beaufort (S.C.) Gazette, graduated from the USC workshop in May 1993. A graduate of Winthrop University where she majored in mass communication and history, Davis credits the "very intense" 10 weeks she spent at the USC workshop with giving her solid preparation for her current job.
"It was a wonderful experience. It really gave me the opportunity to see what the life of a reporter is like," she said. "It put me more in a work or job-type atmosphere. I wasn't getting paid but I felt like I was in a job and getting assignments and working on deadline."
Davis, whose focus in her major at Winthrop was broadcasting, found the multicultural newspaper workshop plenty challenging: "It was very rigorous. That's the only way I can describe it. I thought I would pass out the first two weeks."
Workshop days, she recalls, start at 8 am. sharp and end as late as 11 p.m., with participants covering school board, county council and city council meetings. Students attended the meetings, collected information, interviewed key people and wrote their own stories on deadline.
"A lot of times we were given the same sort of topic, but we would go out into the community and come up with our own story," Davis said. "And sometimes we were sent out on a particular street such as Main Street in Columbia and we wrote a story."
She said a wide variety of newspaper editors worked with the workshop participants on a daily basis, making the whole experience seem like a "job-type atmosphere."
"It made it more real because I was going Monday through Friday and I was putting in a full day's work committed to journalism. It just enhanced what I had already learned and let me put my skills to use," Davis said.
Of the 12 people enrolled in Davis' workshop group, 11 were African-Americans and one was a Native American. Davis says everyone in her class who wanted a newspaper job "pretty much got one except for people who didn't want to relocate (from the Southeast)."
She terms it "really unfortunate" that the multicultural newspaper workshop may not be around after this summer to help prepare minorities for journalism jobs.
"It was a good experience and I'm glad they're still going to have it one more summer," she said. "If you didn't have any clips, it helps you get clips, and it lets you network and meet different editors. It just overall gives you the experience of being a reporter without having to learn it on a job."
Joe Shoquist, managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal for 19 years and dean of the University of South Carolina College of Journalism and Mass Communications from 1996-1991, believes if the workshop dies, it will be typical of newspapers' short attention span.
"The newspaper industry got all stirred up 10 or 15 years ago and in all sincerity determined to diversify their newsrooms," he said. "And the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which was really leading the way, set a goal of 20% or 22%, mainly blacks, in American newsrooms to more or less approximate the percentage of blacks in the American population.
"And slow but steady progress was made year after year, until they got up to around 10%. And then they've just gotten stuck there," Shoquist added. "After they got to about 8% or 9%, they really got stuck . . . .
"To me, it's the old story of the newspaper industry being shortsighted, having a short attention span. They drop off important causes if they get hard enough or they don't get results fast enough.
"I think you can just expect that the newspaper industry is not likely to come up with the kind of money that's necessary to maintain this workshop and others like it. The others have already died."
Pat McNeely, associate dean of USC's College of Journalism and Mass Communications and one of the architects of the project, said, "It breaks your heart to think we have this great program and it's going to die.
"When I see the bylines of people [graduating from the workshop] and I go to press association meetings and see them win awards, I'm proud of them . . . . I have a very good feeling."
USC's College of Journalism, while a fervent believer in the positive results coming from the workshop, can't fund the project. McNeely notes that the food and housing costs alone, for each of the workshop participants, are substantial.
"Originally," McNeely said, "the major source of our money came from Gannett. That turned into the Freedom Forum. That was seed money. Now there's no money to help it grow or keep it alive. And that's a great shame because there's been some fine people come out of this program."
McNeely said newspapers have made significant contributions to the workshop, sending editors and others to help with teaching. However, the central threat to the venture's future is lack of money ? something McNeely sees as presenting newspapers with a definite challenge.
?( Timbs is a free-lance writer who teaches journalism at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.) [Caption ID]