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Founders, Collegians Want NABJ Student Involvement

By Adam Vicks
Black College Wire

Some founders and student members of the National Association of Black Journalists say they want to see increased student involvement, and training in new media, to prepare the next generation of leaders for the nation�s largest black journalism organization.

Students need to take the initiative to become more recognized by the national organization, said Caleb Wilkerson, an associate producer at NFL Films who is student representative on NABJ�s board of directors. Members are in Atlanta to celebrate their 30th anniversary.

�They got to go to conferences, they got to stay informed,� said Wilkerson, who added that students are entitled to voice their opinions to the board of advisers.

Wilkerson, whose two-year term ends this year, has witnessed the student membership increase from 924 to 1,295 over the past two years. He advises students to become more active in their chapters and at the regional level.

Caleb Wilkerson

Sandra C. Dillard, one of NABJ�s founders, agreed that student involvement must continue to be important.

�Well, where are we going to get the next journalists from?� she asked. �Seriously, I think students should definitely be a part of it. Because maybe when they get to be working in their careers, they�re going to reach down and help somebody else.�

Maureen Bunyan, an NABJ founder and veteran Washington television anchor, said, �Institutions are supposed to last after the people who created them have gone. And the only way that the institution can last is if you make sure that you have new blood and that the younger people have opportunities to do the same things that you�ve done and understand the problems and issues that they�re going to face.�

Maureen Bunyan

Shawnee McFarland, a staff member at the convention�s student Web site and a recent Black College Wire summer intern, said that understanding new media is a necessary skill in the society.

�Being younger, there are things that we do that older people might not be as big on, like technology,� McFarland said. She described how, in the age of media convergence, workshops on how to master a Macintosh computer and how to create blogs and Web sites are essential for aspiring journalists. The Dillard University senior said current NABJ workshops are too general for a tech-savvy generation.

Founding member William Dilday reflected on the progress of NABJ and how the issue of diversity has changed at the same time technologies have changed.

�When we first got started, our main thing was to bring black journalists together to be united, and look at the way the media portrayed blacks in their coverage, to try to get blacks more positions of employment in the media and to make sure the black perspective got a better portrayal in the media,� he said.

He added, �I think it has progressed even further than that. I know it's a much stronger organization than when it started because there weren't that many of us.�

National membership has increased from 44 members in 1975 to 3,887 this year. And Dilday wants to see diversity reflected in who covers the news.

�We need to be covering everything,� he said. �We don't just want to cover the black community or the Latino community or the Asian community; we want to cover everything in all the media and we want to be the news directors and editors, and as long as NABJ keeps that push on, along with the other minority organizations, we've got a good chance of accomplishing that.�

Adam Vicks is a senior broadcast journalism major and political science minor at Howard University. Joi Gilliam and Kendrick Marshall contributed to this story.

Posted Aug. 4, 2005