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Updated: Monday, December 24, 2007
Published: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |
Al Fitzpatrick
1985-1987
Essay by John L. Dotson Jr.
NABJ found a home both literally and figuratively when Al Fitzpatrick took over in 1985. During his term, the organization moved into its first permanent headquarters and hired its first paid executive director.
Though membership in NABJ had grown significantly since its founding in 1975, it had been a back-pocket operation, whose officers ran the organization from their home bases, shifting the association's records around the country as administrations changed.
Fitzpatrick put an end to those vagabond ways. Soon after his election in Baltimore that August, he began raising money to set up a centralized office. He raised $700,000 - including $100,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and $75,000 from the Gannett Foundation - to put NABJ on a business footing.
"Actually, (getting the funding) wasn't as tough as you might think," Fitzpatrick recalled. "The foundations are tighter today with their restrictions about how they distribute their funds. Support for minority organizations was far greater then than it is now."
With funding in hand, Fitzpatrick convinced the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) to make room for NABJ at its Reston, Va., headquarters. That put NABJ in house with two of the most powerful voices in the newspaper industry, ANPA (now the Newspaper Association of America) and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), which also had offices there.
When NABJ's first executive director, Dennis Schatzman, a Pittsburgh public school administrator, left after six months, Fitzpatrick reached out to a friend, Carl Morris, to take over. Morris stayed for three years and helped Fitzpatrick transform NABJ into a highly effective member organization.
As a veteran news executive, "Al had more management experience than most (of NABJ's earlier presidents)," Morris recalled. "He was well known and respected in the industry, which was vital, and he was able to shake the money tree."
Beyond that, said Morris, Fitzpatrick's congenial personality helped to unify the NABJ board.
"He was one heck of a genial guy," Morris said. "He knew how to get along with people and get them to work together. It was marvelous the way he worked with them and got them going in the same direction, with the same purpose."
Fitzpatrick helped to draw greater attention to NABJ within the industry by parlaying his new position as Knight-Ridder's director of minority affairs, to which he had been named in January 1985.
"It was kind of like a marriage in one sense," Fitzpatrick said. "The goals of NABJ and the goals at the job I had at Knight Ridder were identical almost. I was dealing with diversity, the recruitment, hiring and development of minorities at Knight-Ridder. Being president of NABJ put me in position to run into a lot of the top, talented African Americans, which helped me in my job."
NABJ membership grew during Fitzpatrick's administration to 1,000. NABJ scholarships also enhanced, increasing from five for $1,000 each to 10 for $2,500 apiece.
With his two-year NABJ presidency completed, Fitzpatrick wasn't looking for another challenge. But Carl Morris had other ideas.
He was organizing a new group, the National Association of Minority Media Managers (NAMME) and persuaded Fitzpatrick to become its founding chairman in 1991. That organization's goals - developing executive talent and diversifying the management ranks of all media - fit Fitzpatrick's diversity mission. NAMME's membership today is 375, ranging from circulation home delivery managers and city editors to publishers and TV station managers. One of NAMME's key programs is the Albert E. Fitzpatrick Leadership Development Institute, a four-day program designed to expose participants to all aspects of the media business.
Taking charge has been a trait of Fitzpatrick's lengthy career, which dates back to the mid-1950s. He was the seventh of 12 children of an apostolic minister in Elyria, Ohio, a western suburb of Cleveland. Unlike three of his brothers who became ministers, Fitzpatrick, now 71, got the reporting bug in high school while working as a part-time sports reporter for the local newspaper in Elyria. He spent six years in the armed forces, then earned a journalism degree from Kent State University in 1956.
He then landed a job as a reporter on the state desk at The Akron Beacon Journal - but for the first 18 months, his editor refused to send him out on a story. The reason: "I was the only black in the building when I was hired at The Beacon Journal," he said. "And for 10 years, I was the only African American in the newsroom."
He finally persuaded his editor to assign him a beat, covering an Akron suburb. It was the first step in a historic climb up the career ladder.
Fitzpatrick moved through several jobs, including writing a farm column. After five years, he became assistant state editor, then assistant news editor, and then in 1970, he was in the news editor's chair, directing the coverage of the Vietnam War protest at Kent State at which four students were killed by the National Guard. The Beacon Journal's extraordinary coverage of that tragedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot Reporting. In 1990 NABJ presented Fitzpatrick with a medallion for his contribution to the prize.
In 1973, Fitzpatrick was named managing editor of The Beacon Journal, the first African American to run a major metro newsroom. He was promoted to executive editor in 1977. Two years later, he moved up again, to Coordinator of Minority Affairs for Knight-Ridder, a position he held while still based in Akron. In 1985 he moved to corporate headquarters in Miami as minority affairs director and in 1987 was promoted to assistant vice president.
In that role Fitzpatrick's latent evangelical zeal came to the fore. In addition to advocating for more minorities as president of NABJ, he campaigned within Knight-Ridder for greater involvement of non-whites at all levels of the company. Among his innovations:
Adding a diversity goal to Knight-Ridder's Management by Objective (MBO) bonus program. Creating a corporate internship program that offered editors a year's funding for promising new minority hires. Launching the Knight-Ridder minority management development program, which helped minorities with high potential to create plans to reach their career goals. Creating the Knight-Ridder minority scholarship program, which offered graduating high school seniors $5,000 scholarships for each of their four years of college, plus a summer internship at a Knight-Ridder newspaper each year. More than 80 Knight-Ridder scholars were named before Fitzpatrick retired in 1994. Seventy percent of them still are employed at Knight-Ridder. Setting up two-year Knight-Ridder scholarships for juniors and seniors at four historically black colleges. The one at Morehouse College in Atlanta is given in Fitzpatrick's name.
Now retired and living in Akron again, Fitzpatrick continues to champion diversity as chair of Coming Together, a non-profit organization that seeks to improve race relations. The effort was started by The Beacon Journal as part of its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on race in the Akron region. Three years later, when it was transformed into a non-profit community organization, it seemed only fitting that Fitzpatrick, the former Beacon Journal executive editor, be named its chairman.
Fitzpatrick, who still teaches courses in journalism and diversity at Kent State University, has won many awards through the years. But he is proudest of his Frederick Douglass Lifetime Achievement Award from NABJ and the Ida B. Wells Award, presented by the National Conference of Editorial Writers, National Broadcast Editorial Association and NABJ for his lifetime achievements in journalism.
"I was in love with the newspaper business; it was always a dream of mine," Fitzpatrick said.
"I had the opportunity to get into the business and grow. I'm very grateful for that. I had a great career, no major disappointments. Whatever I could do for others, I tried to do that. That was a great satisfaction to me."
John L. Dotson Jr. is publisher of The Akron Beacon Journal. |
Foreword
