Unity meaning professional#

I don’t know that anyone from that organization has ever asked to come to the Unity party, but I missed white journalists in D.C. There’s room enough for the predominantly white SPJ, too. There’s room enough for that diverse crowd. I’d hope that the leadership at Unity can see now that the time has never been more right to stand up for people - many of them members of the Unity organizations - still fighting against the kinds of workplace and journalistic ignorance and bigotry that brought the likes of NABJ into existence nearly 30 years ago. Someone said it wasn’t “the right time” for that.

The answers for the former were, from where I sat, feeble: It would dilute the diversity effort to step outside of race/ethnicity and into sexual orientation. An even bigger question was why NLGJA couldn’t be part of Unity. On the table was the suggestion that ASNE include white women, gays, and lesbians in its annual diversity census. There were board members from ASNE, top officers of NLGJA and JAWS, and diversity leaders from across the country. In the room were presidents from NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, and NAJA. There are less valid ones, though.Ī year before Unity 1999, as the American Society of Newspaper Editors was coming to grips with the fact that it would fall well short of its 20-year-old goal of racial and ethnic parity by the new millennium, the Unity core gathered with editors for a meeting in San Francisco. Put logistics aside, and there’s hardly a valid argument against this. The District’s convention center comfortably absorbed the crowd of more than 8,000, but with predictions that the 2008 convention figures to top 10,000, Unity might not be able to grow much bigger. Given the impressive turnout of black, Asian, Latino, and Native American journalists in the nation’s capitol, I’m not even sure this is practical.

Unity meaning professional#

And while you’re at it, pull the Society for Professional Journalists in as well. Open the doors and let gays and lesbians in. The next step is to become truly inclusive.

The third time was truly charming, and it hardly seems the right time to mess with that. John Kerry made back-to-back appearances before the group, it was clear that Unity had arrived at a new day. It was also, by any measure, the largest convention of American journalists ever, a fact largely lost on those who feel compelled to force the word “minority” into that sentence. mega-convention was a wonderful event, heavy on heft and relevance and all the hugs and handshakes that give the annual journalists of color gatherings the quality of a family reunion. Here in the afterglow of Unity 2004, I’m giving some thought to that word, unity.