8
A] lice Bonner, a journalist who has spent 25
years expanding her horizons by covering the
world and helping young journalists find a
place, returned to school last spring to help
expand the horizons of others.
“i’ve always had a sense of duty to try to break
people into the field—especially people like me,”
Bonner said.
Bonner is one of the four inaugural Freedom
Forum Fellows at IINC. This program of the Pointer
Institute for Media Studies allows
professionals to earn an Ph.D. in
journalism in just over two years.
Bonner said she was glad to have
an opportunity to take time off
from her job as director of jour
nalism education at The Freedom
Forum to work with this innova
tive program.
“This was a good opportuni
ty for me," she said. “When The
Freedom Forum launched this
program, it was a chance for me
to be in on the ground floor.”
As a reporter and assistant
city editor for The Washington
Post, Bonner entered the newspa
per industry at a time when
blacks were making great strides
in journalism. She acknowledged
reporters like Bob Maynard for
helping blacks get jobs at main
stream newspapers.
“He was one of the first gen
eration (of blacks reporting for
mainstream newspapers] that lit
erally integrated the papers,” she
said. “1 consider myself to be part
of the second generation of blacks
in the mainstream. We kind of
stepped on the shoulders of those
who came before us.”
Though she received her a
bachelor’s degree from Howard
University in 1971, Bonner said
college classes could not teach her the realities of the
marketplace. A summer program at Columbia University
run by black journalists taught her how to deal write
from an insider’s perspective.
“People from all walks of life who wanted to be
journalists were given 12 weeks of training,” Bonner said.
Becau.se of the help she received from professional
journalists. Bonner said she felt she had an obligation to
assist others. For this reason, Bonner has taught classes at
Howard, The University of Maryland, and directed the
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education during her
career.
“The idea of bringing other people in, teaching
them and helping other people—I didn’t originate that,”
she said. “The first generation of blacks brought me in.”
Bonner said due to integration, advances have been
made in integrating the news industry’, but newspapers
must continue to work adequately reflect the communi
ties they ,ser\’e.
n
k
; Alice
5
■ Bonner:
"Developer of
Journalism
Careers"
By Sharif Durhams
Nkws Editor
“We can help fill the gaps of the American story,”
she said. “We see efforts to bring more diversity to jour
nalism as ‘job action’. The end goal is to cover our com
munities in ways that have never been covered.”
Bonner said she and other journalists have tried to
inform the industry about the lack of attention paid to
the problems of the poor. “If you look at a lot of newspa
pers to this day, there is either a lack of balance or a lack
of representation,” she said.
Part of the problem in covering the disenfranchised
has been a widening of class differences in America,
Bonner said.
“We weren’t that far away from segregation, so we
had [many] black people who knew the black communi
ty,” she said. "It’s an indication of the widening gap
between socioeconomic groups.”
The structure of the newspaper industry and the
mindset of editors also cause problems in covering the
reality of poverty.
“By nature, we cover institutions and there really
aren’t institutions [of poverty] beyond the welfare build
ing,” she said. “Nobody covers poverty on a regular basis.
It’s seen as not worthy of being covered.”
As a part of her contribution, Bonner said she has
tried to instill the need for balanced coverage of the dis
enfranchised into young journalists.
"I don’t know how to teach or to help people with
out building that into how to make up for the communi
ties that are not being covered,” she said.
Bonner said that she tried to find ways to influence
young journalists at the Post, but the opportunities did
not exist there.“They didn’t have and wouldn’t create a
job that would let me create, so I left,” she said.
As a recruiter for Gannett, a media conglomerate
that owns 92 newspapers, Bonner said she had contact
with young journalists, but unlike working for a single
paper, she could not find specific opportunities to show
journalists how to cover the underrepresented. “I had the
job I wanted, but the effect wasn’t the same,” she said.
When she left Gannett and began working for the
Freedom Forum as director of journalism education,
many opportunities to reach students came her way. One
was working with a summer workshop for black high
school journalists that was held at UNC for four years.
“That was one of my happiest challenges at the Freedom
Forum,” Bonner said.
Now, Bonner has to balance time between being a
full time mother of a daughter with a physical disability,
studying for classes and, learning more about economic
justice and covering poverty from professors and profes
sional journalists.
“I m pretty busy,” she said “I’m a full-time mother.
My daughter is 16 and a half, and this is the first time in
her life I haven’t hired help to take care of her. I also
have had a chance to get to know people I’ve only learned
of from a distance.”
Bonner said that while studying at UNC, she hoped
she could work with Journalism Professor Harry Amana
to teach students how to cover poverty. She said she has
already created a “mock-syllabus” for such a course.
“I think if you have the commitment, you can teach
these things, she said. “I’m not going to be what anyone
would call a traditional professor. I see myself as more of
a developer of journalism careers.”