George Curry, the legendary columnist, commentator and champion of black journalists, died of sudden heart failure on Saturday. He was 69.

Curry grew up in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he was childhood friends with Bernard Lafayette, the current chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “This is a tragic loss to the movement because George Curry was a journalist who paid special attention to civil rights because he lived it and loved it,” Lafayette told Trice Edney News Wire.

Curry began his career as reporter for Sports Illustrated and The St. Louis Dispatch. In the 1990s, he was the editor of Emerge, an edgy political and cultural publication with the tag line “Black America’s Newsmagazine.” In 1993, the cover depicted Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas wearing an Aunt Jemima-style handkerchief next to the word “BETRAYED.”

Curry was the first African-American to be elected president of the American Society of Magazine Editors.

After Emerge folded in 2000, Curry led the news service for the National Newspaper Publishers Association for nine years. He wrote a syndicated column that was published in black newspapers all over the country, and he frequently appeared as a commentator on television and radio news programs.

NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates interviewed Curry on numerous occasions. In 2012, she spoke to him about how the media approached the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was shot to death by a white man in Florida.

Bates reported:

“Syndicated columnist George Curry says the black media have a long history of highlighting anti-black violence, which mainstream media often picks up on later.

” ‘The black press plays a unique role, because they know right away and can recognize these kinds of stories and the value of them,’ Curry says.

Curry thinks part of the lag between when black and mainstream media began covering the Martin shooting can be accounted for by the communities’ different interaction with law enforcement.

‘I think that stems from the fact that whites have a different experience with the police than blacks and Latinos,” he says. “To whites, he’s Mr. Friendly. To blacks and Latinos, he’s Mr. Unfriendly.’ “

In 2014, Curry told Bates “there is no event in my life that has been more transforming than the murder of Emmett Till,” adding that another major black magazine, Jet, had been crucial to his understanding of the murder as a young man.

In an obituary, the current editors of Jet wrote, “Curry was largely thought of as an unapologetic steward and champion for the Black press and frequently expressed the need for it in the civil rights narrative.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The massive container ships that ply the high seas bring us pineapples and mangoes in winter, and computers and cheap t-shirts all year round. But the shipping industry is a volatile, cyclical and ferociously competitive business. There are good years and bad years.

And then there’s this year.

“This is likely to be one of the worst years ever in terms of losses,” says Janet Porter, editor-in-chief of containers at Lloyd’s List, a shipping industry news provider. She says over the years, global shipping companies got used to growth of 6, 7 or 8 percent. This year it’ll be close to zero.

“It is a very simple supply-and-demand imbalance — too many ships and not enough cargo,” she says.

Container ships are vital cogs in the global economy. Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst at Braemar ACM shipbroking in London, says slowing economies in Europe and China are hitting the industry hard.

Indian shipbreakers work at the Sosiya-Alang Ship Recycling yard on March 4, 2013. Many ships are heading to scrap heaps, like this one, the world’s largest, to help reduce the number competing for market share. SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images

“China is a big factor in the container industry — where China is really the factory of the world and when the advanced economies slow, we’re seeing less exports coming out of China,” he says.

The economic slowdown comes as fleets of huge, new ships are coming online. The major shipping companies in Europe and Asia began ordering the state of the art, super-sized ships back in 2011, when times were better.

Porter says this is partly a self-inflicted crisis because many of the companies are over-ordering.

“There’s a little bit of ‘boys and their toys’ in the shipping lines,” she says. “One line will order so the next one does and the next one does, and now all these ships are starting to be delivered.”

Now, orders for new vessels have dried up. William Bennett, a senior analyst at VesselsValue in London, which follows the cargo markets, says companies ordered about 1,500 new vessels in 2015.

In contrast, “What we’ve had in the first half of this year, we’re looking at 293 vessels ordered,” he says. “There’s just no appetite for ordering at the moment.”

Bennett says the shipping crisis will have little impact on consumers. He says shelves in your favorite shops will remain stocked.

It’s the ship owners bearing the brunt, he says — they’re hemorrhaging money at the moment.

A truck carries a container past a ship at the port in Qingdao, in China’s Shandong province on Feb. 15, 2016. China’s sagging economy has hurt the shipping industry this year. STR/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption STR/AFP/Getty Images

Because of the glut of ships, freight rates have plummeted over the past year, cutting deeply into profits, says Nils Haupt, the communications director for Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s fourth largest container shipping line.

“I can just tell you that the costs for shipping are enormously low,” he says, adding that transportation costs for manufacturers are at rock-bottom.

“A t-shirt, just for shipping transportation, this is like one or two U.S. cents… a pair of sneakers which is $100 in the shop…ocean transport cost per pair approximately between 20 to 25 U.S. cents. So this is a ridiculous amount of money,” he says.

For oil tankers, the situation is even more dire. Earnings at the turn of the year were around $50,000 to $60,000 per day. Bennett, with VesselsValue, says they’re now looking at $1,000 a day. “So you can see the situation has gone incredibly sour,” he says.

Bennett says shipping lines are looking to be more efficient and cut costs. He says mergers and acquisitions are happening at a record rate. And many ships are heading to scrap heaps, like the one in Alang, India — the world’s largest — to help reduce the number competing for market share.

“We need 1,000 ships to be scrapped in order for a market recovery,” he says.

At least that will be good news for the scrapyards.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

For Gawker Media’s websites to live, Gawker.com, the actual namesake website, has to die. It will be shut down next week by its new owner, a victim of its own poisoned legacy.

Any obituary should start by acknowledging the good the subject rendered to the world. There’s no reason not to do that here, other than the extent to which that impulse might appall some of Gawker’s own writers were it a piece about the demise of another publication.

Gawker itself was born of the insight of founder Nick Denton, who quite rightly concluded that what journalists told one another over drinks was invariably more interesting than what actually appeared in print, online or on the air. He set out to correct that in 2003, with a publication that knit together news analysis and gossip in the same stories. It was, as former Gawker editor Max Read recently wrote, “an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom.”

Its offerings were often brutally satiric and unsparing in their conclusions.

Gawker’s reports that its reporter had viewed video of Toronto’s then-Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack rightly made his rampant substance abuse a topic fit for wider media scrutiny. The site also bird-dogged the powerful who bullied other people with less stature or fewer resources. Gawker was rarely in better form than when, say, writer John Cook showed how Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly used his influence with senior police officials and organizations on Long Island, N.Y., to start an investigation of his estranged (and now ex-) wife’s boyfriend, who was on the force. It proved to be an instance in which a celebrity’s private acts proved newsworthy.

Gawker was built on a cadre of young and often poorly paid writers made to work long hours with little or no access to the people they were writing about or the glamorous worlds they inhabited. It meant they had no fear of offending the subjects of their stories or their layers of publicists intent on steering entertainment writers for established publications to safer topics, with the threat of withholding their presence when the next wave of interviews hit to promote the next big project. At its best, Gawker felt like a corrective to the airbrushed reality fed to readers in glossy magazines or highly curated social media accounts.

From a business perspective, Denton showed a way to profitability for a midsize digital media company, one built on clear voices and identity. He experimented with verticals, adding one here, dropping another there, but catered successfully to the appetites of his young urbanite audiences with sister sites on such topics as gender, tech, cars, lifestyle and sports.

Unbound by the niceties of convention, however, Gawker blurred the lines between public and private, and cast aside such journalistic luxuries as figuring out whether something is actually appropriate to publish. It seemed fixated on the dating lives of celebrities (and the less famous), especially those in the media, and on the question of unarticulated sexual orientation. (CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who later publicly attested that he was gay, was a frequent topic of gossip and mockery.) Gawker’s targets often felt small-bore, its grievances petty.

In 2010, Deadspin, Gawker’s sports blog, posted video of a college student having sex in the bathroom of a bar. She asked A.J. Daulerio, Deadspin’s editor, to take the video down: “I am the girl in it and it was stolen from me and put up without my permission.” His initial response: “Blah, blah, blah.” He later conceded that what the video showed could be “possibly rape.”

The site’s judgment reached another low point last summer when it published the saga of a male New York media executive who, despite being married to his wife for years, was said to have arranged for a weekend in Chicago with a male escort. The story read very much the product of the escort’s inability to extort money from the executive.

Gawker’s corporate leadership had the posting pulled after widespread outcry. Writers fought back, some over the process and others on the merits. A young writer for Gawker’s sister site, Jezebel, tweeted, “Stories don’t need an upside. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. If it’s true, you publish.”

The tweet betrayed a nihilistic impulse that had been part of the site’s DNA. Denton, the genetic parent, publicly promised a Gawker that would be 20 percent nicer.

He had reason to do so. In 2012, Gawker had published a brief excerpt of a tape of former wrestler Hulk Hogan having consensual sex with the wife of a then-friend who was a shock jock. Hogan (né Terry Bollea) appeared unaware he was being videotaped and sued. The shock was the point — yes, it was brief, and yes, we all think of Hogan/Bollea as a human cartoon rather than a human being — but as it turns out, Hogan proved just as capable as any other human being in getting legal representation.

“We told a real story that cleared a lot up about what was out there,” Gawker’s general counsel and president, Heather Dietrick, told Fortune magazine in defending the decision to post the video. “Hogan himself was out there talking in color detail about his sex life again and again.” She said that public sharing of the video excerpt was necessary to prevent Hogan from denying its contents.

The Florida jury’s verdict totaling $140 million against Gawker Media and Denton forced both to go into bankruptcy and the company to be put up for sale at a court-overseen auction.

Bollea’s case was underwritten by the Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whom Gawker had outed as gay in 2007 very much against his will. Denton has said Thiel promised revenge for disclosing his sexual orientation. Thiel acknowledged he had subsidized other lawsuits against Gawker and would do so indefinitely.

The Spanish-language broadcasting giant Univision bought Gawker Media this week for $135 million. Univision had first explored buying Gawker last year, according to a person knowledgeable about those discussions, while Bollea’s suit was in the courts but well before the jury verdict in June. Univision wanted the company, including Gawker.com, to round out its suite of digital offerings for English-speaking millennials, which include The Root, The Onion and Fusion. But Univision will instead shut down Gawker.com, a site whose brand is too toxic to touch. The case remains on appeal, but Univision’s executives are trying to insulate their company from any liability that could potentially extend to the new owners.

Thiel’s crusade comes off as a vendetta, and one with ugly implications for press freedom in light of adversaries with nearly infinite resources. Yet Gawker’s demise was almost foreordained by its origin. It proved to be a mix of the irresistible with the indefensible.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari reasserted their control of Viacom Thursday night, resolving a crisis gripping the media conglomerate by arranging the departure of their renegade executive chairman, president and CEO Philippe Dauman in exchange for a $72 million payout.

The Redstones’ holding company, National Amusements, approved the proposed deal earlier in the week and it was passed by Viacom’s corporate board on Thursday evening. The resolution settles a series of legal proceedings gracing courtrooms in three different states in which Dauman and Viacom were wrestling the Redstones for the right to determine the fate of the company that owns MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures, among other properties.

The deal, which had not been formally announced by late Thursday evening, was described to NPR in separate interviews by two people well versed in its details. They spoke on condition they not be identified.

Veteran Viacom executive Thomas Dooley, currently the company’s chief operating officer, will become its interim CEO and president until Sept. 30, the final day in the company’s fiscal year. Dauman will continue on as corporate board executive chairman until Sept. 13 and will have the chance to present his proposal to the Viacom board to sell a major stake of Paramount to a Chinese investor.

The board, which will soon have five additional Redstone-approved members, is expected to reject Dauman’s Paramount proposal. Five others with ties to Dauman will resign or cycle off as their terms expire. Though Viacom is publicly traded, National Amusements owns 10 percent of Viacom’s equity and 80 percent of its voting shares. National Amusements has already kicked Dauman off its board.

Dauman was for years a trusted lawyer, adviser and chief protege of Sumner Redstone. Dauman cited what he said was Redstone’s support in proposing to sell the stake in Paramount; Redstone’s representatives said he actually opposed the sale, and Dauman later said he had misunderstood.

Redstone also objected to the precipitous drop in Viacom’s stock price: it has lost about 40 percent of its value in the past three years. Additionally, Dauman’s critics inside and outside the company say it has experienced a brain drain among the executive ranks and an astonishing loss of creative talent. Exhibit A: Comedy Central, where the loss of Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Jason Jones and Key & Peele sting (even, or especially, in the case of Colbert, now a marquee name at CBS, which is also controlled by National Amusements).

Former Viacom CEO Tom Freston, who was himself fired by Redstone a decade ago next month, told NPR in June that the story of the company was one of decline. “It went from really being number one in its class, as a cable networker and as a creative enterprise, to pretty much the bottom of the barrel,” Freston said.

Dauman had defended the mental capabilities of Redstone, now 93, as recently as last year when it was an issue in a lawsuit filed by an ex-girlfriend of the media mogul. Once that was dismissed, however, Dauman challenged his former mentor’s capacities. This week’s settlement will allow Sumner Redstone to avoid disclosures in court about mental competence, physical frailties and personal peccadillos, as well as the potential loss of control of much of the media empire he assembled.

Shari Redstone, Sumner’s 62-year-old daughter by his first marriage, had long been estranged from her father. The settlement allows her to avoid inconvenient questions about the timing of their reconciliation, which neatly dovetailed with her ability to help take control of Viacom and CBS through National Amusements.

For Viacom, the agreement allows the company’s leadership the chance to unite to take arms against a sea of troubles. Despite Dauman’s lucrative departure, Viacom does not yet pretend to have the answer for them.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)