Minority Media and Convention Coverage

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on how minority media organizations and foreign media have been covering the presidential conventions.

Adam Segal Featured on JHU's Great Ideas Podcast

I had the honor of serving as the guest scholar on the latest edition of the monthly Johns Hopkins University Great Ideas Podcast. It's a huge honor to be asked to participate in this podcast.

August 2008: Adam Segal, who teaches in the Master of Arts in Communication program in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs, is watching two key developments in this year's presidential campaign: outreach to Hispanic voters and increased use of interactive technology to market candidates.

In related news, I finished grading the massive stack of final papers for the students in my Internet Strategies course at JHU in Washington, DC this summer!

"TV One-Dimensional" Politically

Michael E. Ross has a really interesting column today on TheRoot.com about cable TV network TV-One's decision to only cover the Democratic convention, where the Party will nominate its first African American presidential nominee, and the criticism it has received.

On a recent broadcast of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," the host launched into his opening monologue with customary snark. But instead of riffing on a celebrity, he detoured and took on Johnathan Rodgers, the CEO and president of the black cable network TV One. Rodgers had recently announced that his channel planned to cover only the Democratic National Convention, which begins in Denver on Monday, and not the Republican convention, in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September.

Hispanic Athletes Are 4% of Olympians

Associated Press reports "Hispanic growth not reflected on US Olympic squad"

an Associated Press review found only about two-dozen Hispanic athletes on the nearly 600-member U.S. team - roughly 4 percent. By contrast, African-Americans, who make up 13.5 percent of the population, hold more than 120 spots on the team. More than half the 126 U.S. track-and-field athletes are black; only two - distance runners Leonel Manzano and Jorge Torres - are Hispanic.

Meanwhile, Telemundo is raking in millions of viewers during the Olympics, reports MediaWeek:

NBC-owned Hispanic broadcast network Telemundo, over the first 10 days of Summer Olympics coverage from Beijing, has drawn a total of 12 million unique persons, already surpassing the audience for the entire run of coverage for the 2004 Summer Olympic games on Telemundo, by 12 percent.

AOL has a Spanish-language blog, Fanáticos, devoted to the Olympics with coverage of the Hispanic American athletes.

Jacoby: The myth of the white minority

This is an interesting one...

Jeff Jacoby's column in the Boston Globe: "The myth of the white minority"

Here's an excerpt:

But there was another problem with all this coverage of how white America is becoming a minority: The Census Bureau never said it.

You can see the numbers for yourself on the Census Bureau website. In a spreadsheet titled "Projections of the Population by Race and Hispanic Origin for the United States: 2008 to 2050," the bureau forecasts a rise in the number of whites from about 243 million today to 325 million at midcentury - an increase of 82 million. A related spreadsheet gives the percentages: Whites today account for nearly 80 percent of the US population. In 2050, they'll constitute 74 percent - still a very hefty majority.

So what explains the persistent drumbeat about the impending white minority? A statistical distortion: the exclusion of Hispanic whites. If only non-Hispanic whites are counted, the white population today amounts to 66 percent of the total, and will hit around 46 percent by 2050.

Let me know what you think about his view.

RISE UP MAGAZINE REACHES MILESTONE: 7 SUCCESSFUL ISSUES

If you have not yet had the chance the check out Rise Up Magazine, you must.

I found the cover story two weeks ago on "Melting Pot Metros and the Ever-Evolving American Dream" to be quite interesting and was amazed how timely it was given today's news from the U.S. Census Bureau showing the accelerated demographic shifts that are occurring in the U.S.

Strangely, the website for Rise Up lists The Washington Post as a participating paper but I've yet to see it inserted in the paper. Here's the full list of papers Rise Up says it places its magazine in:

- Atlanta Sunday Paper
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Chicago Tribune
- Cincinnati Enquirer
- Kansas City Star
- Los Angeles News
- Louisville Courier
- McComb Enterprise
- New York Daily News
- Philadelphia Media News
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Washington Post

U.S. BECOMES MAJORITY MINORITY BY 2042

Newsday has apparently broken a strict embargo from the U.S. Census Bureau (a top national news organization was holding for 12:01 am but may now release). This is very news worthy info - though no shock to many of us.

The most important point is the rapid Hispanic population growth and the fact that the projections move the date of this dramatic demographic shift a full EIGHT YEARS SOONER than the last estimates.

Looks like I may need to change the name of my PR and multicultural marketing agency from The 2050 Group to The 2042 Group or maybe something safer like... well you get the point.

These demographic changes, in the coming decades, will mean enormous changes in minority political and economic/consumer strength not to mention that they could result in significant social/cultural changes. How corporations and the government reach minority communities will obviously become more important aspects of their work.

Excerpts from the Newsday report:

In a new report out Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau projects the nation will become much more diverse by midcentury, with minorities forecast to become the majority population by 2042, experts said.

and another excerpt from the report on Newsday.com:

The Census Bureau projects that minorities, now roughly one-third of the nation's population, will become the majority by 2042, and grow to 54 percent by 2050. Hispanics are projected to nearly triple their numbers -- rising from an estimated 46.7 million today to just under 133 million by 2050, out of a projected total U.S. population of 439 million.

The black population is expected to rise from 41.1 million, or 14 percent of the nation's population today, to 65.7 million, or 15 percent by 2050. The Asian population is projected to rise from 15.5 million people now, or 5.1 percent of the U.S. population, to 40.6 million, or 9.2 percent, by 2050.

UPDATE: Drudgereport is now linking to the Newsday article as its top story.

UPDATE2: I shortened the excerpt. Anyone who reads this should go to the Newsday site to read the complete article. Perhaps others will have posted by the time you read this.

UPDATE3: Presumably four hours early, Associated Press has posted its story. Perhaps a longer version will post soon. In the meantime, here's the headlines from The Washington Post page with the AP story: "White Americans no longer a majority by 2042."

UPDATE4: CNN.com has a lengthy story on this new report and deals with the role immigration and birth rates play in the estimates.

UPDATE5: The New York Times and other national news organizations are reporting on these data this morning. I found this comment on the rapid demographic changes in the Times piece to be interesting:

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

UPDATE6: And this USA Today story quotes a Pew spokesperson on the impact immigration has had on these new numbers:

Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, says the earlier projections were low because they underestimated immigration. "We've measured a much higher immigration in the '90s," he says. "In this decade, those high levels continued."

Award-Winning Film "Trouble the Water" to Open in Washington, DC Next Month

The 2050 Group has been hired to promote the DC opening of the film "Trouble the Water," the Sundance 2008 Grand Jury Prize Winner for Documentary. This is a good summary of the film:

The film tells the story of an aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning. It’s a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes that takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen.

Check out the trailer:



And join the "Trouble the Water" group on Facebook.