A group of Tampa Bay journalists had spent a year at Poynter learning
about the area’s ethnic diversity and weaving new people and insights
into their storytelling. As the program wrapped up, one reporter told
of how, having heard about a recent tragedy in China, she’d found
herself worried that maybe someone she knew had been hurt.
It
was a silly thought, she said, using the point to prove how much she
still had to learn. Here she’d met just a handful of Chinese Americans
over lunch in St. Petersburg, and now she was thinking she might know
someone suffering on the other side of the earth. She laughed at
herself.
Aly Colón stepped in and adjusted her vision.
Maybe,
he said, you’re looking at it all wrong. You may not know anyone
directly affected by the tragedy. But now, he told her, whenever you
write about someone from that part of the world, you’ll do it from your
heart, as though they were the people you just sat down with over lunch.
“Imagine,” he said, “how much better that story will be.”
That
quick burst of insight and perspective lifted our departing group from
self-deprecating humor to the highest aspirations of the journalism
ahead of them. Aly has often had that effect. In 10 years of teaching
journalists at Poynter, he has moved with ease along the continuum from
funny to profound.
“Aly has an amazing knack for getting into
the hearts and souls of the journalists sitting around the table,” says
Susan LoTempio, readership editor at The Buffalo (N.Y.) News and a regular teacher in Aly’s signature “Untold Stories” seminar. “He respects and values them, and he brings out the best in every one of them — personally and journalistically.”
Now
he’s moving on, trading journalism for geography. He’s taking his
family back to their favorite address, Seattle, where he’ll start a job
in corporate America at Safeco,
the insurance company. It’s a big loss for Poynter and comes during a
distressing period in journalism. The unrelenting layoffs and buyouts
in our profession have left newsrooms depleted and done great violence
to the cause of diversity in newsrooms and in the news. That last part
strikes at the core of Aly’s legacy.
Diversity has been his greatest passion from the start.
He first came to Poynter in 1996 as a participant in a diversity seminar. He and columnist Jerry Large arrived as a team from The Seattle Times, where Aly held the title of diversity writer and coach. We’d soon get a taste of that passion.
One
night, we combined our seminar group with journalists who’d come to the
Institute for a reporting seminar. We’d brought in a racially and
ethnically diverse panel of local folks and set about asking them how
journalists might cover their communities better.
It didn’t go
too well. Reporters in the other group were blunt bordering on rude.
One reporter told the visitors that the real problem was that people
like them needed to do a better job of bringing their stories to the
attention of reporters, rather than waiting for the journalists to come
to them.
Aly’s diversity group, which focused all week on
reaching out to people in under-covered communities, found their
colleagues particularly insensitive. As the night session ended, Aly
stormed out of the amphitheater and proclaimed loudly, “I’ve never been
so embarrassed for my profession!”
Well, the profession had a little shame left in it.
Over
the next decade, Aly became a voice for ethical journalism as well as
diversity, leading Poynter’s ethics and diversity programs during some
of the industry’s more infamous meltdowns: the plagiarism and
fabrication scandal at The New York Times, a fake news controversy in the state of Washington, the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and countless others.
Through the years, whether launching the “Journalism With A Difference” column for Poynter Online or editing the “Best Newspaper Writing”
anthology, whether running workshops in the building or helping
journalists on the phone, on the Web or in the newsroom, Aly has
brought passion and insight to the job.
“He and others gave me
something my degree and my career experience had not: the courage I
needed to look inside myself, as a reporter, a writer, a Salvadoran, an
immigrant,” says Esmeralda Bermudez, a reporter at The Oregonian in Portland. “For that reason, I now feel whole as a journalist.”
Aly
has engendered that kind of appreciation over the years, in spite of
the volatile, sometimes draining nature of diversity work. He has told
the story frequently of once wrestling with a good friend over a race
relations matter completely unrelated to journalism.
“Don’t you ever go off duty?” the friend finally asked.
Apparently not.
Aly’s new title in Seattle?
Diversity program manager.