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More Work to be Done, Says AAJA

Local broadcast journalist Wendy Tokuda and John Yang, Washington-based news correspondent for ABC News. Photo By Sam Chu Lin

By Neela Banerjee and Sam Chu Lin

The climb to the top of any profession is difficult. But for a career in journalism, the road can be particularly grueling. Take, for example, Peter Bhatia, executive editor of The Oregonian and next in line to head the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He recalled the day his wife went into labor — when half the world away, the Marcos regime in the Philippines was collapsing. At the time, Bhatia was an editor at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. At the hospital, he left his wife’s side to take a phone call from the reporter (current Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein). He went into the office that same night to finish the story.

“Looking back on it, I’m embarrassed,” Bhatia said. “As newspaper editors and managers, we need to make our newsrooms balanced places, especially for people with families.”

Bhatia told his story — and offered words of wisdom — to other journalists and students who attended the 14th Annual Asian American Journalists Association Convention in San Francisco.

Convention co-chairs Matt Dunn and Lisa Chung and AAJA President Victor Panichkul discuss conference highlights.

In total, over 1,000 people gathered at this year’s event, which marked AAJA’s 20-year anniversary. The nationwide professional association was founded in 1981 in Los Angeles by a small but prominent group of journalists, including Tritia Toyota and Bill Sing.

“The mission that they set for the organization 20 years ago is just as vital now as it was when it was first conceived,” AAJA president Victor Panichkul said. Along with providing a means for association and professional development for Asian Pacific Islander journalists, one of AAJA’s main goals is to advocate for fair and accurate coverage for the APIA community.

Convention co-chairs — freelance journalist Matt Dunn and San Jose Mercury News columnist Lisa Chung — wanted to showcase the diversity and ingenuity of the Bay Area. “I think it was really important to have the convention in the Bay Area because of the increasing diversity of the community that you can really see here,” Chung said. “I also think it is very important to highlight the Asian American contribution to the area of technology.”

Networking And Workshops

Thursday and Friday’s plenary session focused on high-tech in the newsroom and Asian American entrepreneurs. Included in these discussions, as well as a running theme through the rest of the conference, was the way the dot-com bust and subsequent economic downturn is affecting the newspaper industry. Newspapers and corporations from the New York Times to Knight-Ridder have been laying off people, and hiring is at the low end of the cycle.

AAJA’s annual job fair still had recruiters from 95 news organizations and schools, down from 120 at last year’s convention.

“We were expecting the job fair to be even more exciting this year because of the recent lay-offs,” AAJA executive director Rene Astudillo said. “There are a lot of Asian American journalists looking for jobs.”

According to the AAJA office, over 400 people attended the job fair this year, dropping off resumes and networking.

“I had expected more people to be here,” Mei-Ling Hopgood of the Cox Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau said. Due to the market downturn, she surmised, most newspapers have much less money in their budgets for training programs and conventions like this one.

Executive Editor of InStyle Magazine Jeannie Park and Peter Bhatia, executive editor of The Oregonian, speak out about work-life balance

Along with the networking, awards luncheons and large-scale plenary sessions, the main draw of the convention was the numerous workshops on subjects ranging from journalistic ethics to newspaper design to climbing the management ladder.

On a Thursday panel focusing on achieving work-life balance, high-ranking Asian American editors, Jeannie Park of In-Style Magazine and Bhatia of The Oregonian, joined forces with Dave Murphy of the San Francisco Chronicle’s At Work section, and Odette Pollar, a syndicated columnist and workplace consultant.

After having children, Park now works part-time in the office but maintains her position as executive editor.

“We all know that these are not the kind of jobs you can leave at the office at the end of the day,” Park said. “You can always do more research, develop more ideas, fix that headline. But at some point, you need to decide what is most important.”

Also on Thursday, a nationally televised panel examined national security and the case of Wen Ho Lee. Coordinated by award-winning journalist Helen Zia, this panel brought together people on all sides on the incident, such as New York Times reporter James Sterngold, and Brian Sun, Wen Ho Lee’s attorney.

With racial profiling in the national laboratories, the recent spy-plane incident in China, and a report issued by the Committee of 100 showing significant distrust of Asian Americans, attendees discussed media’s portrayal of Asians and APIAs with experts and colleagues.

Zia was asked numerous times by reporters about her new book on Wen Ho Lee, My Country Versus Me: The First Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy.

“It answers all of the questions,” she said. “But we don’t know when it’ll be published now that it’s in the hands of the government censors.”

Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, who also served on the panel, noted he is also writing a book about the former Los Alamos scientist, but he gave no prediction as to when it would be released.

Dan Stober, a San Jose Mercury News reporter, who has just finished co-authoring yet another book on Lee with Ian Hoffman of the Albuquerque JournalÅ

“When I looked around the courtroom in Albuquerque,” he wrote, “the mainstream news media were pretty much all white.”

He continued on: “The only way to guarantee balanced coverage of a case like Lee’s is to be the reporter or editor covering the story. Second best is to be in the newsroom and make a lot of noise if you think coverage is not good. But it’s still second best.”

Kudos

Friday night’s scholarship banquet, attended by 1,000 people, showed off the best of what AAJA had to offer with presentations by student broadcasters, awards and a moving speech by novelist/journalist Chitra Divakaruni.

AAJA presented their special recognition award posthumously to Walt and Millie Woodward of the Bainbridge Review. Walt Woodward was one of the few journalists to speak out against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and ran a regular column in the Review written by correspondents from the internment camps.

One-time Manzanar correspondent to the Bainbridge Review, Paul Otaki, accepted the award for the Woodwards.

Yen Do, original publisher of the Nguoi Viet Daily, received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Do began publishing the Nguoi Viet out of his garage in Orange County in 1978. Award presenters said that Do “inked each accent mark by hand and delivered all 2,000 copies himself.” The Nguoi Viet was the first Vietnamese language newspaper in the United States and now has a staff of 70 and a circulation of 18,000.

Television Producer Frank Abe of Seattle received an AAJA award for his documentary Conscious and the Constitution, the story about the Japanese American Heart Mountain resistors who refused to be drafted while their families were incarcerated in the camp.

“It was in 1989, AAJA inspired me to start this documentary,” he recounted. “We have a responsibility as journalists to tell authentic stories about the Asian American experience, and if we didn’t do it, who will?”

The convention ended on Saturday with a nationally televised town hall meeting dealing with the increasing diversity of the Asian Pacific Islander American community and their representation in the media. Panelists and audience members spoke out against both the model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes that mainstream media constantly use to characterize the community. A heated discussion during the open forum led AsianWeek columnist Emil Guillermo to declare that Asian American publications have done a much better job at portraying the Asian American community.

“The true voice of Asian Americans is in the ethnic press,” he said.

Said Bill Sing, one of AAJA’s original six co-founders and business editor for the Los Angeles Times: “We’ve come a long way, but there are still a lot of challenges facing us as journalists as Asian Americans and journalists of color. The young people, who are entering now, need to understand that they can’t just only care about themselves. They have to care about other journalists of color. They have to think about their communities.”