By: E&P Staff The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), its membership down by more than a third as layoffs and the industry recession take their toll, says it's facing a $300,000 budget shortfall.
In a letter to members on the association's Web site, NAHJ President O. Ricardo Pimentel, editorial page editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said the Noche de Triunfos Journalism Awards Gala, held annually in Washington, D.C., has been canceled "to save money and focus on growing our membership."
Pimentel also announced the launch of a fundraising campaign called "Count Me In" that asks each member to raise $200.
NAHJ has broken even since its annual convention earlier this summer in Puerto Rico, which saw dramatically lower attendance than past gatherings.
"But we need to raise $300,000 before December 15, 2009 to continue: giving scholarships to Latino students, training more Latinos in multimedia journalism via regional conferences, bringing the Parity Project's advocacy for fairness in coverage to more cities, and boosting the sheer numbers of Latino journalists with new skills to stay in journalism and collectively have more impact on news media than ever before," Pimentel wrote.
Executive Director Ivan Roman told Richard Prince, who writes the Journal-isms blog on newsroom diversity issues for the Maynard Institute, that canceling the awards banquet was a matter of prioritizing time.
"Do we spend a lot of time in the next few months putting together an event that could raise a more modest amount of money or focus all of our time doing a variety of fundraising that could probably render a better result?" Roman told Prince. "We're betting on the latter."
Donations are being accepted online
here or by mail at NAHJ's national headquarters, 1000 National Press Building, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20045.
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