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9. TNS Shuts Down
- University Press of Mississippi
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102 9. TNS Shuts Down The eighteen-month grant that funded the payroll for TNS researchers— reporters, in fact—ended in July 1979. Cooper and Leid apparently worked for months without a staff. Two months later, in September 1979, I left for graduate school at Columbia. I occasionally wrote news stories for TNS that appeared in the Amsterdam News under my byline.1 When I graduated in May 1980, Cooper offered me a job at $15,000, nearly double what I had made two years earlier, but I took another other offer, a $12,000-a-year reporter’s position at the Daily Argus of MountVernon,NewYork.I believed that joining a daily newspaper was true to what TNS and graduate school had prepared me for.2 Instead of returning home to Brooklyn, it was time to spread my wings and fly. That same year, Morris McKoy enrolled in law school. After he completed his studies, McKoy worked at Rodriguez and Leid law firm in the Bronx.3 In June, the TNS paused to celebrate. Reporters Utrice Leid, Morris McKoy, and I received the top award from the Public Relations Society of America for our four-part series on Crown Heights in May 1979.4 In September , I collaborated with my fellow Columbia Journalism School graduate Betty Winston Baye on a three-part Trans Urban News Service series on the West Indian experience in New York. We based much of our reporting on interviews with elder immigrants who had settled in Harlem in the 1920s and, in many cases, migrated to Brooklyn to live in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. The pieces were published in the Amsterdam News.5 Cooper and Leid won another grant-funded contract from the New York State Department of Labor and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and opened the twenty-week TNS intensive writing and training workshop that summer.6 Two dozen students put in twelve-hour days covering stories around the city and writing, on deadline, what they had learned. The students were highly motivated. Senior instructor Leid said they had to be, because “we’re not in the business of running your basic anti-poverty program. If classes start at 9 a.m., we lock the doors at nine, and those who come late don’t get paid.We don’t do very much hand-holding . We stress that heavily that our students find their own way.” Their ages TNS Shuts Down 103 ranged from twenty to forty-six, and many of them held undergraduate and advanced degrees. There was Marlene Canty, twenty-seven, a Hunter College graduate who said she had “half of a master’s degree from NYU.”“This program,” she said, “is not for the faint-hearted or the immature. A mature person won’t have any problems dealing with the work.”7 Another mature student was Vinette Pryce, who learned about the program after seeing an advertisement posted in local media by Colony SouthBrooklyn Houses, a co-sponsor of the workshop. Pryce was a U.S. Army reservist, and she had learned broadcast journalism in the military. Pryce sought print experience from TNS. Qubilah Shabazz, a daughter of Malcolm X, was in the class, Pryce recalled, but she was kicked out.8 That summer was the season of the Atlanta child murders. Some mothers of the dead children visited Rev. Daughtry’s church. Pryce reported on the mothers’ visit and, independent of the workshop, sent stories to several newspapers. A community newspaper and several out-of-town papers picked the stories up.9 The students were each paid $108 a week to cover the cost of classroom time and long hours of street reporting. In November 1980, twenty-three workshop students graduated from the twenty-week program. Joan Roper, the program job developer, contacted one hundred employers. Unlike the Michelle Clark Program at Columbia University, TNS did not guarantee jobs to the students. It did promise job interviews.10 Every student in the inaugural class pledged to Roper he or she would go beyond New York if jobs were offered.“They will go to Alaska if they have to,” said Roper. Sister Mary Hegarty of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn convinced her institution to give the TNS program a $10,000 grant.That money helped to underwrite newsgathering costs. Guest lecturers who visited students in the classroom included journalists Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, and Thomas Johnson; judge William Booth; Paul Robeson Jr.; and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry...