Tag Archives: media

UNITY Conference: Journalists of color are going primetime

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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

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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 passing of pop references

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One of my ongoing passions is pondering the passing of pop culture references. Baby boomers have lived through decades of new hip phrases — for instance, the hip word for “good” has evolved every few years, from “cool” to “groovy” to “far out” (thanks to John Denver for killing that one off by using it too much) to “excellent” to “bad” to “tight” to other words and phrases.Young people are constantly introducing new words and bringing new meanings to old words. That’s a part of the evolution of culture and language. Continue reading →

The changing of the media guard

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Oswald being shot, photo by Bob JacksonI’m watching “JFK: Breaking the News,” a documentary on WNET, one of the New York area’s PBS stations, about the media coverage of the November, 1963 assassination of president John F. Kennedy. It’s fascinating because in analyzing the way both print and broadcast journalists scrambled in Dallas after the shooting, the program shows how it was a bellwether event in the history of media. It marked the passing of the “breaking news” mantle from newspapers to television. Continue reading →

It wasn’t so long ago…

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CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.

Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over 70 percent of the (legal) digital music market. Meanwhile, CD sales have been dropping steadily. The era of the compact disc is over, it seems. Continue reading →