Many of you may remember Dallas South and a few other Spear members were featured in a Philadelphia Tribune article titled Blogger Nation.  With that in mind, it give me great pleasure to announce that the Tribune has been recognized for their fine work.  Congrats to Heather Faison who wrote the article and everyone else there in Chicago. PHILADELPHIA, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), at its recent 68th Annual Merit Award Ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky, presented ten awards, including its highest honor, the John B. Russwurm Award for "Best Newspaper," to The Philadelphia Tribune, the nation's oldest black newspaper. In seven of the last twelve years, The Tribune has been named the nation's best black newspaper at the award ceremony. The Philadelphia Tribune, which has been serving the Greater Philadelphia region's African-American community for more than 124 years, took home, in addition to "Best Newspaper," five first place awards, including, "Best Special Edition," given for its 2007 Martin Luther King supplement; "Best Editorial," presented to its Sunday edition editor, Mike Bruton, for his editorial titled End The Chaos; Start Snitching; "Best Business Section," "Best Youth Section," given for its weekly supplement, The Learning Key ...

Thanks -as always- to Farai Chideya, Devin Robins, and all the folks at NPR's News and Notes for allowing me to participate on today's bloggers roundtable. I was on with Shay Riley of Booker Rising, and Arlene Fenton of Black Women Vote. We discussed the "fairness doctrine", Ralph Nader, and increased traffic at white supremacist websites.   Click on the picture above to listen to our segment.

Friday was a busy day. I started out with a 6 am visit to WVON - The Talk of Chicago. There I sat and watched my Texas A&M Chapter Brother (A-Phi) in a rare studio airing of his show. Fortunately the sun rises at 5 am in Chi-Town so it didn't feel quite so early. The Executive Producer of the Roland S. Martin Show Ms. Geneen Hartson greeted me when I arrived and walked me into the studio. It was quite cool of her because I only asked Roland if I could sit in the night before and he was cool with it, but I pretty much just showed up. The lead topic on the show was the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a Washington D.C. gun ban. The majority of the callers agreed with the Court's decision, which Chicago's mayor Richard Daley vehemently disagreed with in the Chicago Tribune. He vowed to fight to keep a similar ban in Chicago. At around 7 o'clock, one caller chimed in as a dissenter against the Court's 5-4 ruling. That was Father Michael Pfleger (more on that later). Roland tossed out ...

Fox News is not a news station. I'm amazed at how much credibility people give to a right wing PR outfit like Faux. Maybe it's because people don't have the chance to listen to their hosts on the radio. Driving around throughout the day, I have time to fly by Sean Insanity's propaganda filled 3 hours as well as Bill O'Reiley's radio factor. I keep getting emails asking for people to boycott Fox News. That's an unreasonable request because most of the people getting the emails don't watch Fox with any consistency. The closed minded race baiting crowd who believe in Fox have no intentention to stop watching. But back to the point, just because they call themselves "fair an balanced" doesn't meat that they are. There has never been a solitary action taken by the station to make one believe fair is their intent. Whether it's immigration or God forbid the thought of a black man running for POTUS, Fox takes the position of the hard right on at all cost. People should treat Fox as what it is, a tool to stir up fear; fear of cooky liberals, dangerous immigrants, fanatical Muslims, and angry black ...

Des Moines — Howard Witt, national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, has won the 2008 American Judicature Society’s Toni House Journalism Award. Witt is the Tribune’s Southwest bureau chief based out of Houston. The award is named after the late U.S. Supreme Court public information officer Toni House. It honors outstanding journalism that enhances public understanding of the courts and contributes to the improvement of the administration of justice. The award will be presented at a ceremony later this year. Witt was selected as the recipient for a career body of work that has heightened public awareness of continuing racial disparities in America. Most notably, Witt wrote the first national story on racial tensions in Jena, Louisiana, now commonly known as the Jena 6 story. Witt’s other prominent stories led to the release of Shaquanda Cotton, a black teen who received seven years in jail for shoving her school hall monitor in Paris, Texas, and to a large civil award for Billy Ray Johnson, a mentally disabled black man in Texas who was beaten and left for dead by four white youths who received only a slap on the wrist in criminal court. Witt is the tenth recipient of the award. Previous ...

African-American Teen Unemployment at 32.3 Percent Is Six Times the National Average; Teen Summer Job Climate Worst Since World War II WASHINGTON, June 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) drew attention to the teen employment drought with a full-page advertisement in the USA TODAY. The ad raises the issue of minority teen unemployment, calling it the biggest crisis currently facing this population group. The ad reads as follows: The Biggest Minority Teen Crisis? -- Pregnancy -- Smoking -- Unemployment "Sadly, African-American teen unemployment is nearly six times the national average and almost twice that of teens in general. Find out more about what's preventing teens from finding work and what it means for their future at www.minimumwage.com." The national unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent in May from 5 percent in April driven in large part by the 3.3 percentage point jump in teen unemployment. Researchers at Northeastern University, who described summer 2007 as "the worst in post-World War II history" for teen summer employment, recently concluded that 2008 is poised to be "even worse." One of the prime reasons for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that policy makers have ...

Karen Brooks of the Dallas Morning News writes a follow up article to her story from a few weeks ago regarding black bloggers and the Democratic National Convention.  Some of you may recall that African-American bloggers were pretty upset when the DNC announced their state blogging pool, the first pass of credentialed websites for Denver. After an additional list of bloggers receiving credentials was released -which included Dallas South- many felt a lot better about the black blogger presence in Denver.  Here are some highlights from the article Ms. Brooks wrote for the News. Click here to contribute to Dallas South's trip to Denver. Minority blogs that felt spurned by the Democratic National Committee got some vindication recently when they were added to the list of blogs invited by party officials to cover their convention in August – but some still say the white blogs got preferential treatment and will get better access. A few weeks later, the Democratic National Committee released their "General Blogger Pool" list, with an additional 69 blogs on them, many of which are minority blogs – including the Dallas South blog, published by Shawn Williams, who had written a letter to U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson expressing his ...

I have to credit Gordon Keith and Muse in the News for alerting me to an innovative idea proposed by CNN Contributor Roland Martin. Martin suggests that the U.S. Government should consider moving election day from the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, to the first Saturday in November. See Roland's article We should vote on the first Saturday of November. It's not the first time I've heard this topic tossed around, but it is the first time I've seen the idea articulated in any meaningful way. Here are some of the high points from Roland's article: Now that the political parties have informally settled on their nominees, the focus turns to November 4, when the nation will go to the polls to choose a new president. But why is Election Day on a Tuesday? Why in the world do we continue to insist on voting on a weekday when we are supposed to be encouraging as many people to vote as possible? The purists are likely to argue that everyone knows that a Tuesday in early November is set aside for Election Day. So with that in mind, just leave the election in November. Sure, it would ...

This was a pretty big deal for me.  CNN contacting me about running  a post about the MLK special and  I asked for an email interview with Soledad O'Brien.  Simple enough, but then they asked  if I'd like to do the interview live.  Uh...yeah.  Interviewing Ms. O'Brien was one of the coolest things I've done with this blog to date. Here's something I wrote in the comments section of the post. I had talked to some folks who mentioned how the sound in the interview cuts out a little towards the end, thinking that the call was dropping or something. To pull the curtain back a little, I was conducting the interview sitting in my car over the phone. Well when you hear some noise around minute 7 or 8, it had actually started raining outside. I prayed that it wouldn’t last, and it was only a sprinkle, but that’s what you’re hearing - Rain hitting the top of the car. Thanks again to Soledad and CNN. April 3rd, 2008 · 14 Comments Dallas South is excited to share with you an interview I conducted with CNN Anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien. We talked about tonight’s special airing at 8 p.m. Central on CNN titled ...

I couldn't help but laugh on Wednesday when I turned to the editorial page of the DMN and read a column written by WBAP's Mark Davis (Time for Hillary to wait). In his article Davis suggests that there is still time for Democratic superdelegates to somehow come to their senses in support of the runner-up before the party's convention. As he calls on Hillary Clinton (yes I'm back to saying her name) to "suspend" her campaign, Davis is the last person I would expect her or any Democratic leader to go to for advice . Why would the guy who just last week filled in on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program offer any form of constructive counsel to the Democrats? Tuesday on his show, Davis equated Senator Barack Obama to a rock star and warned Democrats against running a candidate with style over substance. You'd think if anyone would be able to identify style over substance it would be Mark Davis. Eight years ago, he and his cohorts stumped for George W. Bush, a man less read, less traveled, and less accomplished than most anyone elected to serve in the oval office. Mr. Davis may not recognize authoring two ...