Transcripts For CSPAN3 National Press Club Discussion On Cov

Spans q a. Coming up next, a discussion on the la times coverage of the death of rapper Nipsey Hussle. Reporters from the la times joined the National Press Club Journalism institute to talk about efforts to change the negative image of South Central los angeles. The rappers rise to philanthropy, diversity in newsrooms, and writing authentic stories for an underrepresented community. This is about one hour and 10 minutes. Welcome everybody. I like how you instantly got silent. Welcome. On behalf of the National Press Club Journalism institute , i am happy you are joining us on this room and on cspan. I am the executive director of the National Press Club Journalism institute where we are working to close the gap between journalism and civic engagement. This is a really Important Program in service to that mission. I want to tell you a little bit about how it came about. Back in april, ava to burn a was given an honor as part of the Free Expression words. As she accepted her honor she talked about Nipsey Hussle and dedicated it to him. She talked about the la times and their coverage. I want to show you what she said. Tonight i want to dedicate this award to someone who was and is important. Someone who used his arts in dynamic ways. He is a rap artist, and entrepreneurial activist from the part of the country i am from. Very close to compton, where i grew. His name is Nipsey Hussle. He told the truth through his art. The truth of his family, his feelings, his lock, his community. His city, his world, his dreams, his demands, his actions and ideas. His love for his people. His loss echoes throughout the world. His life viewed as the triumph it is and was and will long be. This week i have been motivated and deeply moved by the press coverage of this brother from southcentral los angeles. Specifically, an area in South Central la that we called the 60s. His life has galvanized the press response that has become a real powerful moment for me and so many people who so rarely see that kind of attention given to people like him. The la times, or city newspaper in a front prayed spread with a beautiful headline read a legend in his city. They published attribute article days after his mother written by a black reporter, garrett kennedy. Profiling the totality of nancys talent and attention with great insight and understanding. I gasped when i saw it to layout the words, the way they have honored him on the page. It was another black journalist, Nicole Hannah jones of the New York Times who tweeted that the layout and love shown by the la times was such a profound example for journalists who are of the culture they are writing about as often as possible about with depth of knowledge. The intuitive gravitas is so important. Garrett did nipsey justice salute. That was her tweet. That is really powerful. Soon after that, i was talking to a colleague and friend, joe geisler about our mission. She had also been at the museum that night. I was telling her how Central Trust was in what we were trying to accomplish. She said, find out how the la times did it. So, enter del wilbur who may have invited some of you here tonight. He is a member of the National Press club board of governors. And he connects us to the right people at the la times. They will be eager to tell us how this coverage came about. What led up to this moment and what has followed it. We enlisted amberley adams, who is also a member of the National Press club word of governors and the correspondent. Kimberly will introduce our la times team. Thank you kimberly. Thank you. Hello everybody. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. This is an incredibly important topic. If any of you have a chance after this is done to go back and look at some of the Amazing Stories the la times did, i think that would be of great benefit to you. It is astounding coverage. I will introduce our wonderful panel. First to my left is angel jennings. Angel jennings is a reporter for the metro section of the Los Angeles Times. She covers issues that affect residents in south los angeles. Since joining the times in 2011, angel has written for the business section and covered education. She is a native of washington, dc. And graduated from the university of nebraska. Next to her we have erica smith who is an assistant metro editor for the Los Angeles Times. Hello. She previously worked for the Sacramento Bee where she was an Editorial Board member covering housing, homelessness, and social justice issues. Before that she wrote for the indianapolis star. She is the recipient of sigma delta chai award for column writing and is a graduate of Ohio University and a native of cleveland. Thank you. But that is not all. On the phone we have garrick kennedy. Can we hear your disembodied voice . Hello. Hello. Derek is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times where he has covered music and pop culture since 2009. He is on the front line at award shows and is accessible and profiles hundreds of the music industrys biggest players including mariah carey, drake, carrie underwood, nicki minaj, diana ross, kendrick lamarr, and the weekend. In 2012, kennedy was named the emerging journalist of the year by the National Association of black journalists. In 2014, the advocate featured him in an annual under 40 list. He is also the author of parental discussion and the dawn of gangster rap. Thank you garrett. Many of you already know who Nipsey Hussle was. But, some of you may not have the full picture of the person he was and why his death struck so hard. I think the best way to give you a small snapshot of that is to read some of garricks coverage from the la times. This is a condensed version of one of the pieces that he wrote. Here is the thing to understand about hustle and why his death is exceptionally devastating. Not only to those of us who live and breathe hiphop, but the also reside in his birthplace of south bailey. He was more than a rapper , not that there is anything wrong with just wrapping, because there isnt. Driven by a rapacious desire to reinvest in the street that raised him and rebuild the community. Hustle became an entrepreneur, community organizer, activist, and mentor. And he transformed into a rap star. His death in front of the stripmall he was redeveloping feels particularly cruel. Hustle for never shied away from the legs and stumbles that came with growing up in south la in the 90s. He made music for the street hustlers and those of us struggling to make ends meet. And he became a local hero for using the same fortune he got from wrapping and pouring it into the neighborhood. It is easy to root for the man who sold copies of his mixed tapes out of the parking lot of the strip mall and turned right around and opened a shop in that same mall the second he could afford it. Hustle had big dreams for his hood and it is not just tragic, but unfair that he was cut down in the middle of revitalizing a community that raised him. Those are just some of garricks words about Nipsey Hussle. So, i am going to start with garrick and ask you to tell us a little bit more about who nipsey hustle was to the community. Nipseys importance to the community is something that we are still really fully understanding. Because, there are so many stories that have yet to be told about his influence. But to back up a little bit, he is somebody whos wrap dreams had been in fruition for the last decades. This album he put out called victory lap was nominated for a grammy a couple months before he was killed. That is what put him into the mainstream. But people who were aware and followed him especially knew who he was. He had been putting out mixed tapes for about a decade. One of the things that came out was making the decision to do a limited prepping of his mix. He decided to put a sticker on 100, which seemed steep to a lot of people. But he was saying i know the value of this work, and if you want it you will pay for it. And people did. One of those was jayz who bought 100 copies of it. People started to understand that he was really serious about how we was approaching his rap career from a business perspective. Even though other rappers before him knew how to translate their rap career into a really smart, savvy business plan, he was somebody whos plan was redeveloping the streets where he came from and never left. That is what made him different from everybody else. Angel, can you tell me a little bit about how you ended up on this story and what prepared you to cover the story . Yes. Music is not my terrain. I cover the people. All the problems they face and the problems of south bailey, which include cities of compton and south bailey. People know it as South Central. That is how nipsey described his neighborhood as South Central. I lived in the community and covered it. You can see his influence throughout the streets. He had shirts that were sold out of his store at crenshaw. He took a name of a street that might have had a negative connotation outside of the neighborhood. He took that and harnessed it and restored the pride back into the community. You saw those suits shirts all over. He had a stripmall. I saw his influence and i would drive past his store every day to work. Then, his death happened. I got a call that Something Big happened on the weekend. I was with my family and was told he passed away, can you put in a few calls. That is what i do. I called Law Enforcement offices. I realized this is a story that needs to be told from the ground by the people who cared for him and love him the most. So i got to work the next day. I said let me tell the story about his life and legacy. With my editor, we talked about what he was doing with that stripmall. And this area that is facing tremendous pressure of identification, of housing crisis. He was just trying to reclaim that area and try to do Something Better with it and bring back stores for the community. And keep black people in the neighborhood. Let me tell that story. And i got to work. I will let you get up from there. Can you tell me about the genesis of the coverage . How it came in and how people initially wanted to cover it, and how it changed over time . I have only been there since december. I moved from sacramento. I had gotten into the story because i was the night editor. That was my first editorship. He was literally shot 20 minutes before i got to work. I spent the evening, other than talking to angel bringing in the feeds from everybody. Some of the reporters had been out there talking to people. I monitored social media. One of those things was clear from looking at the data we had and looking at social traffic. It was moving from a crime story to a community story. I can tell you that that night, looking at the data the back story had more traffic between 4 pm and midnight then the entire work i had all day. It was a story we kept updating. That was an early indication of how big of a story this would be. Being new to la, and i dont presume to know everything about it. But, i remember not being able to sleep at night reading garrett column and talking to angel the next day. We usually have our morning metro editor meeting and talk about stories we are going to do and how we will cover it. After talking to angel and reading garrett column and looking at twitter traffic, it was clear it was going to be a community story. We wanted to cover it like a crime story, which normally you would do. We had to do that story, of course. But angel wanted to do a different story. I thought it was a good idea aced on my gut and what i had read. We marched along this path, she and i and she did a great story that ended up doing really well. And we did our crime story. The interesting thing is we have data now to back up our gut feelings about things. We could see in real time at the end of the day how much better her story did, not just locally in la, but nationally and internationally versus the crime story we did. That was a really big clue for us as to how we would continue to cover the story. With garricks input and angels expertise in this area, we were able to do some good coverage. My role is just basically trying to convince everybody else it was a good idea. Go ahead angel. The first story i was writing about the community and revitalizing that stripmall, i thought was going to be a frontpage story. And it wasnt until the next day that it was buried and did not make the front page. That baffled me. It wasnt centerstage. It was about the crime in small letters about him trying to develop the area. Then, another story about him being working in the community. I wanted to tell the community stories. And i couldnt figure out why this wasnt coming out. Nipsey hussle is a link to south la. To the people and the promise and the things that happen in the community. And i wanted to make sure we highlighted that effect. His death was a brazen murder. It was hellacious and people want to know about that, but there is a man and a father here. He was deeply cared about and valued in his community. That is why it was important to get it out. Lets pause and talk about what is overriding all of this. The la times like many newsrooms across the country isnt majority white and doesnt have that many people of color in the newsroom. Can you talk, erica first then garrick about how those conversations started, given that context. And how they changed over time, especially with that data you had. The funny thing about being new to a paper is you dont have a lot of basis for ground rules. People that know me know that is not my strong suit. Generally, what i think i say is not thought about first. We want to be hiring more journalists of color and more people of lgbtq. It is not as easy as it sounds. I know going into this story, the management, a lot of folks have been there for a lot of time. Some were newer editors. The concept of even knowing who Nipsey Hussle was, most of the editors didnt even know who he was. That was the base line. Covering it differently and convincing people that we should do that was difficult. Being a person of color and being younger, i think i can make that argument. The data definitely helps. But it is a culture shift. Again, like a lot of newsrooms, we want to broaden our audience. We want subscribers that are not just the typical upper middleclass, wealthy white subscribers that the la times currently has. La is an extremely diverse city and we need to get more of those people to subscribe. But they are not going to do that unless they feel like what they are reading reflects their community or what they say. Or uses the language they would use and speaks to them that way. I feel like by having diversity in the newsroom, you start to get that a little bit. That is not just diversity in terms of race or ethnicity, but in where people live in the newsroom. One of the big advantages for garrick and angel is that they live in south la. It wasnt just a story about a place and these people. It was literally their neighborhood. I think when you start to have people like that in your newsroom, hopefully with a combination of data people can see in real time that they start to listen and the culture starts to change. At least, i hope thats how it goes. Eric you have been at the la times a little bit longer than erica. Can you tell me how those conversations went for the story and how they have gone in the past . And how you have seen that change, or not . I have been at the paper for 10 years now. I have been the only black reporter for the whole time. I am the only person on the news10. I am one of three black writers and all of the section. I have had to reside in this space, not necessarily because i want to, but because i have to. A lot of my job is explaining these things and why they are important to my job. It is something that early in my career i was resentful of, because i think there were moments where my voice was being suppressed. I felt it was time to go forward other than when they needed me to explain a certain piece of culture. As they hire more people of color, even if they are not always black or always latino, we are still getting more diversity in the newspaper. It has allowed me to take that step back and be a voice now, before i have to be the voice, if that makes sense. When it comes to Something Like nipsey, that can be frank. If i hadnt written that first story, i dont think there would be the interest there was. From a coverage reference, i think somebody had to tell them this was important. I think angel and i had been there the same amount of time. But we still both had to convince editors this was something that matters. We still had to do so much work convincing editors that this was something that matters and is something affecting headlines. Somebody is dead. We know the newsrooms get onto celebrity death. But this is an opportunity to show this was not just a celebrity death. This is something that will hit a little harder. I moved to south la last october. Nipsey was somebody who i spent a lot of time with. I spent a lot of time with them socially. We had dinners together. We shopped together. Just the excitement in the room, that he was finally nominated after all these years. It was also very personal to me. I wasnt really caring about being first, because what mattered to me most was really mattering in all of this. And mattering in the conversation. I wanted to illustrate that it is important. I knew i would have to explain a little bit about rap culture in the piece i was going to rite. And what he meant in the context of what he meant to the city. Because the city this big, a lot of folks will not know who he was. That is the reality of it. Even in his death, a lot of people didnt know. A lot of people got turned on to the things they were learning when they read angels story. They saw what he meant to the community. They all of a sudden heard the