The Attorney General invited AAJA to an off-the-record policy meeting.  The meeting is one of a series of meetings with media and other organizations that the Attorney General is conducting as part of the policy review directed by the President.

While AAJA welcomed the invitation to meet with the U.S. Department of Justice on media policy, AAJA will not be attending the meeting.

We advocate for fair and accurate media coverage on behalf of our 1,700 members. An off-the-record conversation would not allow us to inform our full membership about the meeting.

Transparency is key to building trust between the news industry, our government and the public. Should there be a future on-the-record meeting, AAJA would gladly join the conversation to help shape media policy in a way that best serves the public and diversity in news media.

Paul Cheung
President
Asian American Journalists Association

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

AAJA is proud to announce the following individuals who will be attending a special combination of the ELP Introductory Session and the National Convention in August 2013 in New York:

Learn more about the Executive Leadership Program.

See the announcement of the 2013 ELP Class.

Members

We learned last night that Tom Arviso Jr. has resigned as UNITY president due to personal reasons. We want to thank Tom for his service. The four alliance presidents are engaged with acting president Doris Truong on UNITY’s next steps. The leaders of AAJA, NAHJ, NAJA and NLGJA are committed to UNITY’s mission and are hopeful in finding a resolution that will ensure its success.

Sincerely,
Paul Cheung, AAJA President
Hugo Balta, NAHJ President
Rhonda LeValdo-Gayton, NAJA President
Jen Christensen, NLGJA President

Spencer Hsu (AAJA-Washington, D.C.) was named a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, he explored flawed forensic evidence in a series of criminal cases prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department. Hsu’s watchdog journalism caused a review of more than 20,000 cases. Hsu has also covered homeland security, Washington, D.C.-area members of the U.S. Congress and Virginia politics for the Post. His previous recognitions include the 2012 Scripps Howard Foundation Ursula and Gilbert Farfel Prize  and The Innocence Network Journalism Award.

Doris Truong (AAJA-Washington, D.C.) has received the eighth Robinson Prize from the American Copy Editors Society. The award recognizes “substantial contributions to the craft of copy editing and excellence in overall copy-editing skills” and includes a $3,000 prize. Truong is a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post. She is immediate past president of AAJA and is currently vice president of UNITY: Journalists for Diversity. She is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and the 2003 AAJA Executive Leadership Program.

Tomoko A. Hosaka (AAJA-San Francisco Bay Area) is Chief Operating Officer at Plympton, a digital publishing startup. The company, founded by journalist and author Jennifer 8. Lee, aims to revive serialized fiction for the digital age. Hosaka was previously News & Politics Manager at Ustream and a Tokyo-based reporter for The Associated Press. She serves on AAJA’s Governing Board and is a graduate of the 2012 Executive Leadership Program.

Sital S. Patel (AAJA-New York) is a reporter at MarketWatch, covering Wall Street and financial services, based in New York.  Prior to joining MarketWatch, Sital worked as a producer, reporter, researcher for Fox Business Network where she has covered a broad range of financial stories including different aspects of Wall Street, earnings, the stock market and politics. Patel was a past New York Chapter President, a 2009 graduate of the Executive Leadership Program and currently serves as an AAJA National Advisory Board Representative for the chapter.

Jessica Chen (AAJA-New York) has joined the News 12 team as a freelance reporter in the New York metro area. Prior to becoming part of News 12 team, she was a reporter at KRNV in Reno, NV, and worked in Taiwan at Next TV Broadcasting Limited. Chen is a graduate of University of California, San Diego and enjoys reporting human interest stories.

Corky Lee (AAJA-New York) and his work is being featured in a photography exhibition at Stony Brook University titled “Asian Roots/American Soil.”  He is a freelance journalist, who for 41 years years has used his camera to ensure that the faces of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and their experiences are included in American history. By documenting the civil rights struggle, he has retold these stories through a special lens.

Photo Credit: Jason Jem

To submit your own Member News, send a 30- to 40-word write-up (subject to editing) with a biography and a photo to AAJA Professional Programs Coordinator Marcia Santillan at marcias@aaja.org.

See what our Members accomplished in 2012

See what our Members accomplished in January 2013

See what our Members accomplished in February 2013

See what our Members accomplished in March 2013

AAJA extends its condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of NLGJA President Michael Triplett.

Triplett, 48, died Thursday, after a battle with cancer, according to the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

An assistant managing editor at Bloomberg BNA in Washington, D.C., Triplett’s wide-ranging career included being an adjunct professor of law at his alma mater American University Washington College of Law.

Triplett was elected president of NLGJA in August. NLGJA noted his many contributions to the organization. He served at the chapter and national levels, along with on the board of Unity Journalists for Diversity.

AAJA especially appreciates Sen. Inouye’s support of the Honolulu Advertiser’s 600 employees and 150,000 daily readers in April 2010, when he wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking for a thorough review of the newspaper’s impending sale, in the interest of “preserving the diversity of voices in the media and protecting jobs.”

• Statement from the senator’s office
• Statement from the White House
• Obituary from the Honolulu Star Advertiser: A war hero to a U.S. senator

AAJA Media Contact: Executive Director Kathy Chow

E-mail: kathyc@aaja.org
Telephone: 415-346-2051 | Fax: 415-346-6343
Mailing address: 5 Third St., Suite 1108, San Francisco, Calif. 94103

The Asian American Journalists Association is a nonprofit professional and educational organization with more than 1,700 members across the United States and in Asia. Founded in 1981, AAJA has been at the forefront of change in the journalism industry. AAJA’s mission is to encourage Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) to enter the ranks of journalism, to work for fair and accurate coverage of AAPIs, and to increase the number of AAPI journalists and news managers in the industry. AAJA is an alliance partner in UNITY Journalists, along with the Native American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. For more information about AAJA, visit www.aaja.org.

The alliance association of AAJA, NAHJ, NAJA and NLGJA sought input from members on their preferred name for the partner organization.

A ballot was sent to all AAJA members, and here are the results:

• 70.7 percent (217 votes) — UNITY: Journalists for Diversity
• 18.9 percent (58 votes) — UNITY: Journalists of Color & Diversity
• 10.4 percent (32 votes) — UNITY: Journalists of Color

The UNITY board — whose AAJA representatives are Sharon Chan, Janet Cho, George Kiriyama and Doris Truong — will have a final vote on the alliance association name Friday.

Dorothy Ing Russell in 2010

AAJA is saddened by the news of the death of Dorothy Ing Russell, as reported by Richard Prince in Journal-isms.

Russell died Friday, Oct. 19, in a Maryland hospice after a short illness.

Many in AAJA admired Russell for her work as an international correspondent and more than two decades at The Washington Post, working as a desk editor on some of the biggest stories of the time, and how she gave so much of herself to AAJA. Her courageous voice in a 1990 Post opinion piece noted the far-reaching implications of the racism and sexism spewed by Jimmy Breslin.

AAJA honored Russell’s many accomplishments and contributions with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.

She was noted for her rise from a 1951 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, to acting Indonesia bureau chief for United Press International in 1956, to becoming only the second woman stringer for The New York Times at the time. She was a reporter for the American Weekly in London, a writer and editor for The Japan Times, Asahi Evening News and Stars and Stripes in Tokyo and as a writer-researcher for World magazine in New York City.

With her hire in 1968 at The Washington Post, she became its first Asian American editor and writer and its second woman editor in the city room. While on the national copy desk, she edited stories on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and the riots in Washington, D.C. In the early 1970s, she was the only woman editor on the Post’s Metro copy desk and helped edit the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Watergate break-in and cover-up written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Russell leaves a lasting legacy with AAJA.

She established the AAJA Mary Moy Quan Ing Memorial Scholarship in honor of her mother, which has provided tens of thousands of dollars in financial assistance to college students through the years.

She cofounded AAJA-Washington, D.C., and had served as the chapter’s treasurer.

She was recognized as an AAJA Pioneer in 2010 during the association’s national convention in Los Angeles, front and center in a photograph of those honored for making a mark on U.S. journalism and the organization.

Her passing will be marked with a private gathering.

AAJA extends its condolences to her family and friends.

Evelyn Hsu, past AAJA-Washington, D.C. president, remembers one night when Russell stayed for hours with other volunteers as they faced down piles and piles of scholarship material until every envelope was hand stuffed and ready for mailing.

“She volunteered for countless AAJA activities over the years,” said Hsu, senior director of programs and operations for The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a past AAJA national president. “She was so generous and dedicated to AAJA. We all looked up to her because she was a pioneer. We looked to her for advice. You wanted to hear what she had to say.”

Eva Lee Ngai, AAJA-Washington, D.C. president in 1989, knew Russell as a role model professionally and personally, and as a friend. Ngai describes Russell as kind, gracious, a lover of skiing and culture who was a docent at one of the two Asian art museums – the Freer Gallery of Art – of the Smithsonian Institution. “She seemed ageless,” Ngai said. “Dorothy Russell touched my heart for 26 years and I am a better person for it.”

Under the guidance of the project’s Co-Directors   Emilia Askari and Joe Grimm and Unis Middle School Seventh Grade Social Studies Teacher April Kincaid, the students are immersed in journalism writing, photography, video and audio projects.  Learning is enhanced by professional journalists who volunteer by speaking about their experiences reporting in places such as the Middle East or assisting the students’ in developing their new journalism skills.

Using their newfound skills, the Dearborn students vividly describe their experiences and explore their opinions on issues from identity and discrimination to bullying and sports, giving visitors to The Living Textbook a window into how they see the world.

The Living Textbook ELP Demonstration Project is made possible through the generosity of the Ford Foundation.

Questions?  Contact Marcia Santillan at marcias@aaja.org or 415-346-2051, ext. 107.

About The Living Textbook’s Co-Directors

Emilia Askari is a journalist with a master’s degree from the University of Michigan School of Information and the mother of two children. Askari has about 20 years experience as a reporter, previously working for newspapers such as the Detroit Free Press and the Miami Herald.  Over the course of her career she’s received more than 20 prizes and fellowships, most recently in 2010 from the Radio and Television Digital News Association.  She has been a member of AAJA since 1999 and has previously served as the Michigan Chapter’s Treasurer.

Joe Grimm is a visiting editor-in-residence at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism.  He previously worked at the Detroit Free Press for 25 years and was its newsroom recruiter from 1990 until 2008.  In 1993 he established the annual “Spirit of Diversity” job fair in Detroit and in 1997 launched the JobsPage, a journalism careers site.  Grimm also created “100 Questions and Answers About Arab Americans” in 2000. He posted it Sept. 12, 2001.  He is the author of the widely read column “Ask the Recruiter” for the Poynter Institute.  He has been a member of AAJA since 1990 and helped create its Michigan Chapter.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Aug. 7, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) elected Paul Cheung as its 2013-14 National President, announced Friday at its annual Gala Awards Banquet, during the UNITY Journalists convention in Las Vegas.

On Jan. 1, Cheung, global interactive editor at the Associated Press in New York, will begin his two-year term as AAJA National President.

“I want to thank our members for seeing the possibilities of what we can do together for our future in journalism,” Cheung said. “I am profoundly grateful for the chance to serve AAJA as president.”

Cheung won with 273 votes. Janet H. Cho, a business reporter for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, received 111 votes. A total of 388 votes were cast, out of the more than 1,000 ballots from voting-eligible AAJA members.

“Congratulations to Paul and thank you to all the AAJA members who took the time to listen to our platforms and cast their ballots,” said Cho, a former AAJA Vice President for Print. “I enjoyed meeting so many of you at UNITY12, and look forward to continuing to represent you on the UNITY Journalists board.”

Cheung previously worked at the Miami Herald as its deputy multimedia presentation editor, and before that, he was a senior graphics editor at the Wall Street Journal.

His service to AAJA includes volunteering as a Governing Board member and being co-director of the OurChinatown hyperlocal news site, which was part of AAJA’s Executive Leadership Program Media Demonstration Project. Cheung has also been a trainer for AAJA’s multicultural JCamp for high school students. He has overseen programming for several AAJA national conventions and was co-chair of programming for UNITY12, which drew together AAJA, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association from Aug. 1 to 4 in Las Vegas.

Elected in uncontested races were Niala K. Boodhoo, a business reporter at Chicago Public Media, as AAJA Vice President for Broadcast and Gautham V. Nagesh, editor of the Technology Executive Briefing at CQ Roll Call Group, as AAJA Treasurer.

Rounding out Cheung’s executive team are AAJA Vice President for Print Thomas Lee, a business reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and AAJA Secretary Theodore Kim, a mobile editor at The Washington Post.

Outgoing officers are AAJA President Doris Truong, a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post; Vice President for Broadcast George Kiriyama, a news reporter for NBC Bay Area; and Treasurer Rene Astudillo, executive director of the Lupus Foundation of Northern California. Their terms end Dec. 31.

Cheung, Boodhoo and Nagesh will take office Jan. 1.

Media Contact: AAJA Executive Director Kathy Chow

E-mail: kathyc@aaja.org
Telephone: 415-346-2051 | Fax: 415-346-6343
Mailing address: 5 Third St., Suite 1108, San Francisco, Calif. 94103

The Asian American Journalists Association is a nonprofit educational and professional organization with more than 1,675 members across the United States and Asia. Founded in 1981, AAJA has been at the forefront of change in the journalism industry and furthering diversity in news media. AAJA’s mission is to provide a means of association and support among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) journalists and to advance AAPI journalists as news managers and media executives; provide encouragement, information advice and assistance to AAPI students who aspire to professional journalism careers; provide the AAPI community with an awareness of news media and an understanding of how to gain fair access; and to research and point out when news media organizations stray from accuracy and fairness in the coverage of AAPIs and AAPI issues. AAJA is an alliance partner in UNITY Journalists, along with the Native American Journalists Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. AAJA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, federal tax information number 95-3755203. For more information, visit www.aaja.org.