The 1990 student newspaper of AAJA was known as The Daily AAJenda, published during the convention in New York. By 1991, the newspaper project was renamed AAJA Voices.
Voices
There is no chicken-or-the-egg debate here.
The Daily AAJenda, AAJA’s first convention news program, emerged in 1990 as a precursor to a legacy that’s lasted 20 years and counting. In 1991, AAJA Voices debuted.
Since then, Voices has heeded The Daily AAJenda’s marching orders: Invest in newsroom diversity. It was a goal achieved by The Daily AAJenda’s seven young journalists and their 28 professional mentors in ways that still prevail in Voices.
Sandy Louey was a political science student at the University of California, Berkeley, when she joined The Daily AAJenda’s five other college students and one recent college graduate at AAJA’s 1990 convention in New York.
Before The Daily AAJenda, AAJA supported students through scholarships, said Louey, who herself was a Bay Area and AAJA national scholarship winner. But The Daily AAJenda endorsed students further.
The Daily AAJenda showed “not only can AAJA provide you money and support for your endeavors, we can also give you a taste of that experience – a taste of writing on deadline, of being in a newsroom, of being flown into a new environment,” Louey said.
Dara Tom had just finished her first year of working for the twice-weekly newspaper at her school, San Francisco State, when she arrived to be a Daily AAJenda reporter.
“It was great coming as this sort of starry-eyed college student and going in to work with professional people,” Tom said.
By the end, Tom learned more than simply the workings of a daily newspaper.
“I walked away from The Daily AAJenda feeling like Asian Americans have an important voice in the newsroom and have just as much a right to be there as any other skilled journalist,” Tom said. “I was entering the profession at a time when people were still talking about quotas – that was the big, dirty word.”
Tom was hired by The Associated Press in 1991, when the wire service and most major news outlets had eliminated official quotas for hiring minorities, Tom later said in an email. But efforts to increase newsroom diversity at the time were “still being equated with quotas,” which had acquired negative connotations.
Quotas originally steered news outlets to think about newsroom diversity. But meeting quotas meant news media outlets could then simply wash their hands of any accusations of discrimination, Tom wrote.
“If AAJA does not train young students in a setting with (Asian Pacific American) AAJA staff for a daily convention newspaper, then how can we help to boost newsroom diversity?” said Corky Lee, one of The Daily AAJenda’s professional mentors, in an email. “It was a sense of self reliance that guided us.”
The vision shared by Lee and other professionals was for “the AAJenda to be a vehicle for short but intense internships for a week,” Lee said in the email. “Sort of a boot camp to see if the students really had the guts to grind it out, stay focused and use those tear sheets to advance their careers in journalism.”
But creating a daily from scratch was no slim challenge.
David Kim, the managing editor that year, arranged for computers – paid for by small corporate contributions – and “maxed out his credit card for this venture,” Lee said in the email. Lee sold advertising that helped pay for printing costs and later oversaw The Daily AAJenda’s daily 1,000 copies from printing press to distribution.
For Kim Moy, then a UC Berkeley student and Daily AAJenda reporter, the professionals’ work “was really quite visionary. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to pull it off, I know.”
Now Yahoo’s director for front page editorial programming, Moy said, “(The Daily AAJenda) made me realize how exciting and intense journalism could be. I was already in love with journalism at that time. It just furthered my understanding of what it took to be a newspaper reporter.”
Follow Kiali Wong @KialiWong.
