The mainstream press will not tell the immigrants’ stories: Ippies Awards speakers
Keynote speaker Jose Antonio Vargas with Essence Magazine founder Edward Lewis (center) and Ippies Awards Executive Director Garry Pierre-Pierre (Photo by Brock Stoneham)
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas called on the mainstream media to tell more of the stories of the country’s immigrant population.
At the same time, he urged anew The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers to drop the use of the word “illegal” in their reporting of immigrants who are in the U.S. without valid documents. He said an act may be “illegal,” but the term does not apply to those who were brought into the country as babies or children.
In his keynote speech at the June 5 Ippies Awards, Vargas said the mainstream media has “failed to contextualize” the stories of immigrants, and it is the ethnic media that has been taking on that responsibility.
‘Journalism is my church,’ says Vargas, a reporter for the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post before coming out undocumented in a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay. The FilAm Photo
The Center for Community and Ethnic Media census cites 270 publications — published in 36 languages — that serve New York City’s immigrant and minority populations.
In another study, the New York Press Association said the combined circulation of 95 ethnic papers is 2.94 million, or about 28 percent of the population. The 80 weekly newspapers have a combined circulation of 1.6 million.
Now on its 12th year, the Ippies Awards is the only awards body that recognizes the achievements of the ethnic and community media. The Ippies presented its first Lifetime Achievement Award to Essence Magazine founder Edward Lewis, who helped build the publication into what The New York Times called the “pre-eminent voice for black women.”
Lewis said the magazine was inspired by his grandmother, his mother and aunts who were the strong and independent women who raised him. He envisioned Essence to be a magazine that would cater to the successful African American women because, he stressed, Vogue, Elle and Harpers’ Bazaar “will not tell their stories.”
“Ethnic media outlets are no longer on the periphery, but are quickly challenging traditional mainstream media, as demographic changes speed up in New York City and across the United States,” Lewis said. “I am truly honored to be the first recipient of the Ippies Lifetime Achievement Award.”
This year, more than 150 submissions were received by Ippies from nearly 50 different outlets for work published or broadcast in 2013. – Cristina DC Pastor
