Why I Skipped the APA Journalists Convention
August 26, 2005
It’s a good thing the Northwest Air mechanics went on strike while the Asian American Journalists Association convention was meeting in Minneapolis, the airline’s hub.
It was the newsiest thing to come out of the convention –– that some of the 1,000 or so conventioneers could be stuck in Minneapolis without a way home.
In general, “stuck” is the operative word for AAJA these days.
I didn’t go to the convention this year. Couldn’t afford to pay all the costs (more than $1,000) on a print journalist’s pay. Not with three kids, a mortgage, and now, unexpectedly, gas.
But I was there in solidarity.
How could I not? I’ve been an Asian American journalist for more than 25 years, once served on the AAJA board and was the Washington, D.C. chapter president.
I’ve fought the diversity battle for representation and coverage of Asian Americans at the local and national level throughout my career in media.
Sometimes I was the only Asian in the newsroom.
AAJA and me? We’re fighting for the same things. Ideally.
But over the years, the fight for inclusion is more difficult when AAJA is now mostly made up of young careerists, not idealists.
The difference in membership is like comparing Martin Luther King to Puff Daddy.
Go to a convention these days and it’s a bevy of beautiful, young television star wannabes.
The really hard-working careerists? They’re competing in the white man’s world on the fast track. Don’t need any affirmative action, thank you.
And they end up with the top jobs.
Until they get stymied. And then they start showing up.
Makes it hard to try to impose a progressive agenda on the rest of the group that has more hairspray than will.
Sometimes you have to get your hair messed up.
By time you are in your 30s, you’ve usually decided a life fighting the glass ceiling is not fun.
If you’re still a journalist in your 40s, then you’ve signed up for life.
For you, the media is like the priesthood.
But you are on a mission.
AAJA’s problem is its uphill fight with membership, along with its uphill fight with a media industry slow to adjust to changing society.
No wonder AAJA conventions start repeating like a broken record.
When I go to them, it’s to trade war stories with the likes of Dith Pran, The New York Times photographer, whose life story was the basis of the book and movie, The Killing Fields.
He survived the Cambodian massacre. War stories about the fight for diversity in journalism must seem quaint to him.
AAJA released a content report of six big newspapers documenting that papers with larger numbers of APA staff members result in more coverage of Asian issues.
It’s like commissioning a study to show that standing in the rain tends to make you all wet.
AAJA’s press release reveals results that aren’t all that great. Of six newspapers from Seattle to Boston, there were just 166 stories, and 71 percent of them were about culture and entertainment.
It’s still Asian American journalists as translators of the APA experience for the mostly white mainstream audience. The survey documents the Asian American experience as novelty.
An ethnic paper like AsianWeek covers 166 stories in no time at all, that’s where you’ll find the real Asian American journalists.
So why does AAJA always seem to give short shrift to those of us who serve the community like it really mattered?
We’re treated like the accented cousins with the funny hair, who sit in the corner at family gatherings.
But the study did seem to want to focus the group on a basic issue: Why do we exist?
There was even discussion on how activist a journalism group should be. As the argument goes, we’re journalists, voyeurs. We like to watch, right? Should we take a stand on any issue at all? We aren’t really activists, are we?
The AAJA website brought up the question on writer Norman Mailer’s ad hominem comments on book reviewer/culture czar Michiko Kakutani, critic from The New York Times.
Mailer is a great writer and stylist, who is not strictly speaking, a journalist. Seems more like a personal squabble.
But on other issues pertaining to journalism, it seems activism is in order.
After all, the group was founded to fight for diversity in newsroom employment and coverage.
It’s a civil rights advocate for change and better opportunities for an underrepresented class in the only profession that is backed by the U.S. Constitution.
So why does AAJA wonder whether its mouth should be open or shut on race issues?
Unfortunately, that would expose that it has no teeth.
No will, no teeth. Worse than no hair spray.
AAJA should be like a buzz saw, a loud and cutting voice, a workhorse and conscience for its members.
Instead, it’s taking the nice docile Asian route. It’s a social club for watchers. Not bad for the time being. I just hope that before another generation passes, AAJA wakes up and discovers its soul.
Reach Emil at emil @amok.com.
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