Articles Feature

What Makes a Good Magazine Cover?

What Makes a Good Magazine Cover?
Experts Pick 12 From Year About to End
Post Calls Khashoggi Arrests a Travesty
The Stories Left in Their Notebooks
On ‘Reverse Underground Railroad,’ Black Kids Were Stolen Off the Street
N.Y. Times Rebuts Critics of 1619 Project
$20K Donation for Latino J-Scholarships
Even a Columnist Can’t Do It All

The Story of 2020: Race and Gender

Short Takes

Support Journal-isms

Experts Pick 12 From Year About to End

While 2019 winds down, many of us are reflecting on the year that was,Caysey Welton wrote Thursday for Folio:, which in its print incarnation was known as the magazine about magazines. “We talk about our favorite movies, TV shows, records, etc. But here at Folio:, one of our favorite things to look back at are the year’s best magazine covers.

“As an annual tradition, we reach out to some of the top designers from around the industry to get feedback on their favorite covers. Like every year, the picks show a diversity of timely, relevant topics as well as design aesthetics. . . .” Twelve covers are featured.

Jami Geittmann, senior art director, Taste of Home, wrote, “I’ve picked the February 2019 Parents cover featuring fitness pro Shaun T and his husband, Scott Blokker. By featuring Shaun, his husband and their adorable twins, Silas and Sander, Parents not only normalizes same-sex couples, it reflects America’s diverse culture and the different configurations of families today. . . .”

Andrea Vagas, creative director, PCT and Hemp Grower, wrote, “I think this image of successful hip-hop artist and public provocateur Kanye West donning a ‘Make America Great Again Hat’ is iconic. It’s my favorite because it wasn’t an easy choice and it evokes a strong emotional response — exactly what art is supposed to do. . . .”

Post Calls Khashoggi Arrests a Travesty

Saudi Arabia has delivered a shameful travesty of justice in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the Washington Post, where Khashoggi’s column was based, editorialized Monday.

“Following a closed trial, authorities announced Monday that five people implicated in the Oct. 2, 2018, killing had been sentenced to death, and three more were given prison sentences. None were named. But two men who are known to have directed the operation, former deputy chief of intelligence Ahmed al-Assiri and Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were exonerated. Most likely they were excused at the direction of the crown prince, who, according to the CIA, is the real author of the crime.

“The result is an insult to Khashoggi’s family and to all those, including a bipartisan congressional majority, who have demanded genuine accountability in the case. International acceptance of the result would not only be morally wrong but dangerous, too: It would send the reckless Saudi ruler the message that his murderous adventurism will be tolerated. . . .”

The Stories Left in Their Notebooks

“Amid a crisis in local news, eight journalists who left newsrooms in 2019 reflect on the stories left in their notebooks. Photographers who also lost their jobs captured them on their former beats,” Sarah Mervosh, Amy Harmon and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs wrote Saturday for the New York Times.

Wilborn P. Nobles III (pictured) was one of the eight. “Mr. Nobles is a New Orleans native who worked as an education reporter at The Times-Picayune, which was purchased and absorbed by its competitor, The Advocate, earlier this year. He is now a reporter at The Baltimore Sun,” the authors wrote.

Nobles wrote, “I was covering the Orleans Parish School District. I was responsible for giving residents and the nation an idea about what it was like to participate in one of the largest contemporary school experimentations in the country, which was an all-charter school district. The charter school system in New Orleans wouldn’t be what it is today had it not been for Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures.

“I was 13 when Katrina occurred. My mother stayed, and she drowned in her home. My mom was a substitute teacher. She taught English and language arts. My participation covering that system as an education reporter was informed at a basic level just by the fact that my first teacher was my mom.

“There’s so much that I felt was left undone. I’ve heard a few things both before and after I was laid off about abuse in school. Some involving a school bus driver allegedly harassing a student and that same bus driver being a registered sex offender. After I got laid off, I heard another allegation about a group of students being transferred because the football players had been sexually harassing those students. These are difficult things to prove and find people willing to talk about it, but if there are allegations out there, somebody needs to dig. Every now and then, I still kind of stress myself out thinking about it. . . .”

In August 1825, Cornelius Sinclair’s parents rushed a missing-persons notice into the pages of Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia’s most popular newspaper, within days of their son’s disappearance. (Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)

On ‘Reverse Underground Railroad,’ Black Kids Were Stolen Off the Street

Whether or not they’ve seen the movie “Harriet” about the African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, most Americans have heard about the Underground Railroad. But in a new book bound to prompt one of those “why-didn’t-I-know-about-this?” moments, author Richard Bell describes a “Reverse Underground Railroad” with about the same number of “passengers” — roughly “tens of thousands of each over a 50- or 60-year period.”

Instead of spiriting enslaved black people from the South to the North, however, on the “Reverse Underground Railroad,” free black people in the North were kidnapped or tricked into slavery in the South.

Bell describes this phenomenon in the newly published “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home” (37Ink/Simon and Schuster.)

Moviegoers saw a glimpse of this practice in the Academy Award-winning 2013 film “12 Years a Slave,” based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup. But Bell, a historian who teaches at the University of Maryland in College Park, says that Northup, a middle-class adult when he was tricked and captured by con men, was more of an outlier.

“Most of the kidnappers active on the Reverse Underground Railroad were men, though some were women. Most were white, but a surprising number were black. They rarely approached highly literate, middle-aged men like Northup. They preferred instead to lure away poorly educated children with ruses that could swiftly separate them from their families,” Bell writes.

“Very few of their captives traveled by ship to New Orleans. Instead, kidnappers forced most boys and girls to trek southward on foot in small, specialized overland convoys known as coffles, after the Arabic word for ”caravan.’ Their prisoners rarely ended up in showrooms or on the auction block, and were vastly more likely to be sold off in ones and twos to planters in the Mississippi and Alabama Cotton Belt who could not afford New Orleans prices.”

Bell says he scoured 19th-century newspapers along the East Coast as part of his research, and found evidence of this frightening traffic in the ads placed by distressed parents, such as the one pictured above.  

The historian messaged Journal-isms, “such ads were quite common, I’m afraid, and you could open almost any early 19th century newspaper in a city like Philadelphia and expect to find one.

“Newspapers were thus the organs by which distraught parents announced to the world that their beloved sons and daughters had been abducted and enslaved. They were vehicles for appeals for information, and, separately, for discussion and condemnation of the frequency with which free black children and adults were being trafficked into slavery. As such they are one of the most important sources though which historians can document the existence of what I call the Reverse Underground Railroad.”

Were there many newspapers that were vehicles for condemnation of this “Reverse Underground Railroad”? “Few . . . a few.” Bell replied. “They were the antislavery papers, like The Genius of Universal Emancipation, Freedom’s Journal, the African Observer etc. Many others were wholly indifferent…”

A reader on the site Goodreads commented, “That these five boys made it back. . .well not all did, and that’s part of the sorrow. . .that they made it back was nothing short of miraculous. Not all victories are happy. . . and they did make it back, but carried the memories down through the generations (if there be generations). . . .”

In an appearance at a Baltimore bookstore (video) rebroadcast on C-SPAN Radio over the weekend, Bell made additional parallels with 2019. He compared the conversations that early-19th-century Northern black parents had with their children with those that today’s counterparts have about interacting with police or other strangers. Only in the 19th century, the penalty was slavery.

Bell noted that slavery is not a thing of the past. “Sex slavery, agricultural slavery, domestic slavery. It’s happening in California on the big agribusinesses there that supply of our major supermarkets and restaurants. Sex slavery is happening across these United States. Domestic slavery is happening under the protections of diplomatic immunity all over Washington, D.C., tonight and every night,” he said at the bookstore.

“It’s happening in London, too. This is not just an American problem. It’s happening in all the great global capitals of this world,” Bell continued. “Two organizations that study this phenomenon. One is called Free the Slaves; the other one is called Anti-Slavery International. They estimate that in 2019 there are somewhere between 30 and 40 million people in slavery around the world, and to be clear, that is vastly more than were enslaved when Lincoln became the president in the election of 1860. . . . This is an ongoing struggle to which everyone should be committed. . . .”

N.Y. Times Rebuts Critics of 1619 Project

New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein stood behind the publication’s 1619 Project, rejecting historians’ assertion that the storytelling warrants corrections,” Ja’han Jones reported Monday for HuffPost.

“The project, which chronicles the history of anti-Black policies ― written and unwritten ― in the United States since enslaved Africans were first brought to serve English colonists in 1619, has received both praise and criticism since launching in August.

“Among the critics: five professors from Brown University, Texas State University, Princeton University and City University of New York. In a letter to The New York Times, published in the newspaper on Friday, they outlined their issues with aspects of the project that they argue are inaccurate or unfair. . . .

“They argue the package inaccurately claims colonial independence from Britain was largely motivated by colonists’ interest in maintaining slavery. They also said they believe the project contains some ‘misleading’ material, specifically about former President Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery and Black people generally. . . .

″ ‘During the fact-checking process, our researchers carefully reviewed all the articles in the issue with subject-area experts,’ Silverstein wrote. ‘This is no different from what we do on any article.’

“Silverstein also wrote that the founding documents outlining American democracy have allowed vast racial inequality to continue. . . .”

$20K Donation for Latino J-Scholarships

“Journalist and author Shea Serrano is teaming up with the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists to launch a scholarship for Latinx folks interest in publishing or journalism, Ecleen Luzmila Caraballo reported Thursday for remezcla.com. “Serrano donated $20,000, which will be awarded as $5,000 scholarships over the next four years.

“The writer’s motivation for doing so was birthed from a disappointing, albeit unsurprising, Publishers Weekly report, which showed that in 2018, Hispanics only made up 3% of publishing houses. All in all, the study confirmed that publishing – like newsrooms for US legacy publications and on-air sources – is overwhelmingly white. . . .

” ‘The only two requirements to apply for the scholarships is that the person be Latinx and have a desire to work as a writer in either of the two aforementioned fields. The person’s pedigree, school nor their GPA will be determining factors for the scholarship. ‘I got exactly zero scholarships I applied for,’ he wrote. ‘My life has changed so so so much because of writing.’ . . .”

Even a Columnist Can’t Do It All

At the end of my first year as a columnist for the L.A. Times, I find myself thinking about what I’ve achieved, and what I haven’t,Frank Shyong (pictured) wrote Monday for the Times.

“I began this year with a lofty goal. I wanted to tell the stories of all of the communities and cultures that make up Los Angeles, at least all the ones that get left out. I wanted to articulate a version of the city that had all those voices in it. But I’m just one writer, who can only speak two languages, Mandarin and English, and I didn’t achieve as much as I’d hoped.

“I tried to report stories about swap meets and quinceañeras, but found myself frustrated with my inability to speak Spanish. I tried to pitch stories about black, Jewish and Iranian people, among many others, only to find that I did not know enough about those communities to understand what a good story was.

“And confronting the responsibilities of such a large platform has reordered and changed my priorities. I’ve had to do a lot of learning on the job. I haven’t always been successful, but I hope I’ve at least been interesting.

“Here are a few takeaways I wanted to share:

“Los Angeles is a long battle between fantasy and reality. . . .

“Everything is everywhere. . . .

“There are many mainstreams, not just one. . . .”

The Story of 2020: Race and Gender

For many of my peers in political journalism, the historic election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president was the biggest and most momentous election we had ever covered,” Errin Haines, the Associated Press’ national writer on race and ethnicity, wrote for a Nieman Lab edition on predictions for 2020.

“But the 2020 contest may prove to be the most consequential election of our time. Like 2008, next year’s presidential campaign will center largely around issues of race. Race and gender are the story that will drive the narrative from now until November.

“The upcoming presidential contest follows a decade shaped by protest and progress. National reckonings around sexual violence and systemic inequality have unleashed political activism that has taken several forms, from activism to bids for elected office.

“Women and people of color found their voice, making headlines and making change across our society, from the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter — and perhaps nowhere more prominently or impactfully than in our politics. All have set the stage for a 2020 election in a deeply divided America, with some of the clearest fault lines lying at the intersection of sex and racial identity.

“This reality must also be reflected in our nation’s newsrooms, where two-thirds of political journalists are still white men and women are too often still covered as a special interest “group. In 2020, when this country will mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, it’s worth reimagining the role of women in our democracy and how we as journalists are reporting on how their priorities are translating into political action. . . .”

 

Short Takes

The UCLA students who founded Gidra in 1969 were inspired by other activist movements, particularly the black student movements of the ’60s and the Third World Liberation Front strike that took place at San Francisco State University in 1968.

  • Reporters Without Borders called Dec. 17 “for the immediate release of Reda Elhadi Fheil el Boum (pictured), a well-known Libyan journalist and human rights defender, who has been missing ever since his arrest on arrival at Tripoli airport on a flight from Tunisia on the evening of 15 December. . . .El Boum has been the target of a major smear campaign on social networks for more than three years, ever since he published a report on the human rights situation in Libya for which he received the Media in Cooperation and Transition prize in 2017. . . .”


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