Centerpieces

By Juan Gonzalez and Will Sutton

As the media industry changes, we, too, must change.

Individual media professionals must change. Media associations must change. In our opinion, UNITY must change, too.

When we first started talking about the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) working together on some common areas of concern and interests, we didn't have a game plan for eliminating either association, creating a new membership organization or singing "Kumbayah" once every four years at a joint national convention. We simply wanted to acknowledge and appreciate our differences while using the strengths of our diversity and numbers to work for significant media changes.

As time went on, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) joined our budding alliance. Even then, there was no discussion or decision to combine our associations into a single organization or even to have a joint convention.

As things developed, and especially after the success of the UNITY '94 convention in Atlanta, it became clear that we were onto something big, something important, something that would benefit us all. We agreed to have a joint national convention and to create a coalition and not an organization with a 12-member board of directors and a UNITY-specific staff.

Twenty years have passed since the first four-organization board gathering in Baltimore, several association members have been UNITY board leaders and, including this one in Chicago, four joint national conventions have been held.

As we reflect on our past and consider our future, it's time for significant change. Specifically, we suggest that individual association members, the AAJA, NABJ, NAHJ and NAJA boards of directors and the UNITY: Journalists of Color board of directors consider these suggestions:

• Find a way to fund an education and research position on the UNITY staff to start producing proactive public policy positions.
• Create a UNITY publishing incubator funded by venture capitalists to provide our coalition association members with opportunities to launch smaller media outlets to compete with the media companies that have failed to hire, promote and retain enough of us as we continue to work with the media companies that are serious about diversity.
• Reduce the size of the UNITY board of directors and add non-association media stakeholder representatives.
• Hold UNITY conventions every two years to provide more association members with the opportunity to attend UNITY conventions at a lower cost as the conventions occur more frequently and rotate among more geographic locations across the country while ensuring that more media companies will continue to work with us as a coalition since too many media companies no longer attend and participate in each of our four individual association conventions.

We are serious about each of these proposals. We were a part of creating the structures that exist today. We have been a part of creating things that others are implementing. But good leaders look at what's been done as well as what could be, and then propose and implement change.

We call on individual UNITY coalition association members to engage in a vigorous discussion about these proposals in the weeks after the UNITY convention so our board leaders can implement these and other proposals that will better ensure a future, a place and a role for UNITY as the media landscape continues to move below our feet.

We're standing on top of quicksand and it's important that we quickly grab hold of each other and the nearby branches and limbs to pull ourselves out of the pit and onto more secure foundations, upon which we can build a brighter future.