President's Message from Ricardo Pimentel

2008 Acceptance Speech

Good Evening, Tonight I feel as if a great honor has been bestowed on me. But I also feel the weight of responsibility. I welcome the weight.

As I’ve walked around the conference these last days, I’ve heard much in the gloom and doom department. This is understandable. I’m guessing that virtually no one in this room has been untouched by the retrenchment occurring in the industry. We’ve lost jobs, know someone who has or know someone who is feeling like they have a bull’s-eye on their back.

But it is at times like these that organizations like NAHJ are most important. It is at times like these that someone or some group is necessary to remind folks that values cannot be discarded as easily as some are discarding the people who have embodied those values; practiced them, in fact.

I want to assure you that as president, I will work with the NAHJ board to make the organization relevant in these difficult and changing times.

We will continue to advocate for those values our members represent. Most importantly, for that value that says that journalists who are most knowledgeable about the fastest growing segment of our population will be those best able to produce meaningful news about them that is authoritative, fair and accurate.

We will continue to argue that news organizations are richer and most effective when Latinos are part of the fabric of experiences that these organizations can draw on.

Our industry has for the last 10 to 20 years been horribly shortsighted, a shortsightedness that has resulted in many of the stresses we are experiencing today, individually and as an organization; a shortsightedness borne of focusing on easy money and on the dictates of Wall Street analysts, who were, in turn, focusing on whether this quarter’s performance would better last quarter’s or some other past financial snapshot. They did this without proper regard for quarters many years in the future, without due regard for the industry’s longevity.

This is where we find ourselves today. Our jobs in jeopardy; our industry under threat. And our very necessary organization under assault. The imperatives we will operate under during my presidency will be that the jobs we do are too important to disappear; that the industry we work in is too vital to a democratic society to vanish; and that NAHJ is too necessary, especially now, to have its work and its voice be muted by the forces assaulting the economy.

I am not telling you that NAHJ can or should do anything to halt the technological evolution we are experiencing. This evolution is inevitable. I am telling you that NAHJ will do its best to ensure that the values that have held us in such good stead as a nation and an industry are preserved, as we evolve. That, going forward, we realize that the contributions of Latino journalists will be as valuable tomorrow as they always have been.

We will make clear to the titans of the news industry that whatever platform for reporting the news that emerges from this evolution that Latinos must necessarily be part and parcel. Our skills can be matched with anyone’s and our cultural literacy makes us linchpins in any future that journalism faces.

A people who have in their collective experience demonstrated adaptation, perseverance and flexibility while caught up in such historical currents as Manifest Destiny, immersion, colonization, immigration, demonization of immigrants and constant pressure to assimilate, can weather something as relatively trivial as secular change in the news industry.

And that’s the other message I want to leave with you tonight. That would be hope. That we should have faith in our own ingenuity and inventiveness.

A colleague I ran into the other night told me that he was hoping to leave this conference refreshed and energized. After we compared notes on buyouts and layoffs in our respective shops, he observed that I wasn’t helping much.

OK, this is for you, Joe.

There will come a point when the news industry stabilizes – when the bloodletting is replaced with new growth.

Joe, there will always be a market and a need for critical analysis, deep reporting and watchdog journalism. This need will exist whatever platform the news is reported from. We will have to reinvent how we report these stories, but I am quite certain that the need will not go away. It will become more of a conversation than a lecture, and we will have to change our view of ourselves as less gatekeepers and more conversation starters or facilitators. But we will be the people bringing fact, truth and reason to this conversation. We will be the ones making sure it is a conversation rather than a shouting match.

Many of our newsrooms are well on this path, though I would argue belatedly. Our colleagues on the business side have been trying to figure out the right business model, recognizing, belatedly, that even as reading habits have changed, so have purchasing habits.

But I am confident that they will figure it out. And that it will be soon.

It will be soon because it will have to be. And this hemorrhaging of talent will cease because, at some point, our bosses will recognize that credible content has been the best thing going for us and will continue to be.

They will, at some point, realize that much as a transit system can’t cut routes and raise fares and then wonder why ridership has gone down, a news industry can’t diminish its content in whatever platform and credibly wonder where the readers, viewers, and audience have gone.

And in the interim, NAHJ will be there.

As I said, I feel the weight of this responsibility. That’s not just because these are difficult, transitional times, but because I believe that the best leadership is servant leadership.

I know that being a servant leader is the hardest kind of leadership one can undertake.

I promise you I will always remember that this is the kind of leadership our members want. I will do my best to provide it.

Thank you.

Ricardo Pimentel
President
NAHJ