Whither NLGJA?

On December 16 the board of directors of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association sent out an e-mail to its members, who are mostly working writers, editors, and photographers in outlets as varied as national magazines and local radio stations. The e-mail was not a Happy Holidays message or even an electronic pep talk to its many members working at media companies who are facing layoffs, budget cuts, or worse.

The e-mail did not “bury the lede,” to use a journalistic term that describes putting the big kicker at the end of a story. “We need your help,” NLGJA’s national president, David Steinberg, wrote bluntly. “Today, we ask all NLGJA members to join together to show support for our mission and programs by making a gift of at least $25 by the year’s end.”

The money will be used to help fund NLGJA’s ongoing education program, a newsroom outreach project, internships, and its Rapid Response Task Force, which works behind-the-scenes to ensure fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues. In years past NLGJA had the money to cover all these programs through dues plus corporate and foundation grants, but in today’s economy that’s no longer possible.

“It’s been rough, no question about it,” Steinberg said on the phone a few days after the e-mail went out. “I don’t think it was a surprise to many of us -- we’ve been in a recession for a year. And next year is going to be really tough as well.”

First off, some disclosure; I am a former NLGJA Los Angeles chapter president and I serve on the local chapter’s board. NLGJA was an important organization for me when I began to write full-time about eight years ago. Founded in 1991 by the late Leroy Aarons, NLGJA was an outgrowth of a survey Aarons did for the American Society of Newspaper Editors of LGBT journalists in newsrooms (Aarons, the senior vice president for news at TheOakland Tribune at the time, publicly came out when he presented the report). In 1992, NLGJA held its first national convention, where The New York Times announced it was adding domestic-partner benefits. Over the years the annual NLGJA conventions have been must-attend events for networking, socializing, and even newsmaking; major media players like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Judy Woodruff, and Harry Smith showed up to moderate and participate in panels. And along the way NLGJA helped develop style guides and worked with media companies as they added nondiscrimination policies and addressed domestic-partnership issues.

As a working journalist who freelances for a number of different outlets, I’m more than aware it’s a tough time in the media industry. Thanks to the explosive success of websites like Craigslist, there has been a precipitous decline in classified advertising revenue at big daily newspapers, devastating the bottom line of outlets from The San Diego Union-Tribune to The New York Times. Add to that the general advertising malaise, which has depressed revenues in not just print but also TV and radio media. The current issue of TheNew Yorker noted newspaper readership has been dropping modestly for decades, “but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout.” The Advocate has not been immune to changing times; as part of a major redesign the print magazine is going from biweekly to monthly publication.