UNITY Conference: Journalists of color are going primetime

As members of the Asian American Journalists Association, Erin and I will be attending the quadrennial UNITY conference in Chicago in July. I attended the last UNITY conference, which was held in 2004, and it was inspirational. It’s a combined convention of four national organizations that represent journalists of color: AAJA, the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.

Because it’s held every four years, and it happens to be an election year, UNITY attendees will be treated to a forum with Barack Obama and John McCain. It’s a powerful, electrifying sight: The candidates for the most powerful position on Earth coming to speak to a roomful of 10,000+ journalists who look like me, as well as other minorities — who are definitely the majority during UNITY.

The conference planners just announced that the Presidential Forum will be held during primetime and broadcast live on CNN. Continue reading

A tribute to a pioneer

Bill Hosokawa in 2005, sitting next to a caricature at the Denver Press Club

Bill Hosokawa died of natural causes at age 92 in Sequim, Washington, where he lived with his daughter. He was a pioneering Japanese American journalist, author and diplomat who lived in Denver for 60 years.

Those are the facts of Bill’s life and death. But there’s lots more to Bill than just the facts.

I wrote an obituary for Bill that will run in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, the APA civil rights organization. Bill was a leader within the JACL, and a columnist for the PC for decades. I’m the editorial board chair for the newspaper, and a national board member of JACL, and I knew Bill because we’d run into each other at many events in Denver. So it made sense for me to write the obit for the PC.

But I also owed it to Bill to write about him because he was a role model for me as a writer — we both wrote columns for Denver’s Japanese community newspaper (he kept his up long after I ran out of juice and got too busy). I wrote about Bill’s influence on my career years ago, in one of my columns. Continue reading

The future of journalism

The future of journalism, of course, is in the hands of the young journalists and journalism students who are about to enter the profession.

That’s why I’m happy (and honored) to be volunteering as one of the professional mentors working with a group of students on AAJALink, the student-run Web site covering the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association.

The confab is in Minneapolis, a city I’ve never traveled to. So far, I haven’t seen much of it except what I’m sure must be the world’s largest Target (a two-story department store a block away from the retailer’s corporate offices, which is also on the downtown Minneapolis Nicollette Mall). Continue reading