UNITY becoming a more powerful alliance and a stronger voice on journalism diversity

Jan. 15, 2004

UNITY President's Message Ernest Sotomayor

The UNITY Board of Directors last January noted that 2003 would present us with many challenges. I didn’t know then how many we’d face.

What I did know, was that we had the will, the ability, and the commitment to meet them, succeed, and begin designing a new agenda for UNITY’s future as we head toward our third and what’s planned to be our biggest and most important convention yet – “UNITY 2004: A Powerful Alliance. A Force for Change.”
 

Planning is well underway, the convention program is taking shape, registration and housing signups are open, the White House and the Democratic National Committee have given early commitments, and early signals are encouraging that our keynote speaker will be United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The best and most important journalism training institutions will be there. UNITY will debate the toughest issues facing journalism, propose solutions, and become agents of change. We’re studying exhaustively, for the first time, the diversity of the national press corps in Washington, D.C., to document with authority how severely it lacks diversity, and then devise solutions to change that and work with companies to ensure follow up.  We’re pushing to get more people of color into the coverage of the national political campaign. We’re taking strong steps in conjunction with dozens of major media companies nationwide to reverse disturbing trends in broadcast hiring.

This will be an event no one in journalism should miss.

My term as UNITY president began January 1, 2003, succeeding Jackie Greene of USA Today, who was the alliance’s first elected president. Jackie steered UNITY through a transition in its governance structure, and set the foundation for the convention next Aug. 4-8 in Washington, D.C.

The biggest challenge that faced UNITY was determining what we are, how the alliance would best serve the members of its partners – that’s now more than 7,000 --  focusing more clearly what our goals are, precise strategies for achieving them, and finding new ways to finance our work, all to advance our abilities to accelerate change in the news media. To that end, we made strides – big strides.

UNITY’s board has determined that in order to best serve the four alliance partner associations and their memberships, UNITY needed to become stronger in its advocacy, at bringing together the individual voices of the associations into one powerful voice on major issues, seizing opportunities to have the coalition tackle the very biggest issues as a coalition rather than each separately as individuals. That is requiring more strategic, proactive and coordinated efforts by UNITY and its four association partners.

And that’s happening already:

n      UNITY joined the public policy debate before the Federal Communication Commission as it prepared to amend the media ownership rules, filing formal comments seeking more public hearings, and we later joined media researchers, legal and consumer authorities and broadcasting regulators in a solution-seeking forum in New York City on the new rules.

n       We joined high-level scholars, media executives and other leading activists in a two-day forum at The Aspen Institute in Maryland in a high-powered session debating the imperative for when organizations like ours, and all journalists, should and can advocate for change in the media.

n      When the 2003 Radio and Television News Directors Association survey showed that for the second year in a row the percentage of people of color in local radio and television broadcasting had dropped, UNITY challenged the industry to hold a first-ever summit of top-level national network and local station executives to not only raise awareness but devise immediate steps to reverse the trend. That took place at the beginning of this year January 9, 2004 in New York City.

n      UNITY has participated in a series of meetings with high-level executives at the United Nations to launch a series of global initiatives to provide association members greater opportunities to be part of the international press corps, to establish reporting internships at the UN, facilitate more travel abroad and assist in arranging contacts with foreign dignitaries and sources.

To help lead the change, we appointed a new executive director: Anna M. Lopez, who as executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists helped take that organization to new heights. We elected new officers: the Asian American Journalists Association’s Esther Wu became vice president and Condace Pressley, at the time president of the National Association of Black Journalists, became treasurer. NAJA’s Robert McDonald served through the fall as the board’s secretary, and has stepped down to attend to his family.

UNITY seeks also to diversify its sources of funding, and that goal is part of a yearlong strategic planning process that we began last summer. This coming spring, our four association boards will meet in a joint session to finalize a strategic plan that will focus our path for the next five years.

 We’ve received a Challenge Fund for Journalism, which calls on us to seek individuals who will support our work, including members of our associations and many others in and out of the industry. You’ll hear more about that, too, in coming months and at UNITY 2004.

The year also brought to a close the five-year Mentoring Program, which helped set dozens of young, eager journalists on their path to become seasoned veterans. With the end of that program, UNITY will shift away from programming, to avoid competing with the associations, which do that very well already.

From here, our goal will be to harness our collective strengths, step up our participation in public policy debates, confront the industry on major issues, organize the highest-level sessions that will produce faster change.

That’s not a small challenge but one that we are prepared for, and one that will require the help of all of you.

On behalf of UNITY, I thank you the support that made for a good year, and we hope to see you in Washington in August.

Ernest R. Sotomayor
President, Board of Directors, and chair, Executive Committee
UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.

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