Austin Scott

After getting a B.A. in journalism from Stanford in 1961, Austin Scott, as his parents named him, became the first African-American reporter hired full-time by The Associated Press. AP put him in Sacramento covering the California Legislature for three years, then in 1964 moved him to New York City. He covered the Harlem riots that year, and reported on similar urban uprisings in city after city over the next five years. By late 1969, as AP's senior black reporter, he had covered most of the nation's major African-American urban uprisings, except for Watts. He also traveled extensively in the South, beginning in 1965, to make periodic assessments of the civil rights movement, of efforts to end hunger, and of other efforts to bring social change.

"I figure I've driven all the main roads in the state of Mississippi at least once, and a lot of the secondary roads," he once said. "There was a time when you could blindfold me, drop me into any big city in America, and if it was downtown or in a black neighborhood, I'd know where I was as soon as I pulled off the blindfold ... It was a stunning education in how America deals with people it despises."

There were two time-outs from reporting in the 1960s. He was in the first group of Professional Journalism Fellows (now Knight Fellows) at Stanford University in 1966, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1969-1970. He returned from the Nieman to AP's Special Assignment Team, an investigative unit based in Washington, DC. In 1972 he moved to The Washington Post's national staff, where he covered politics, poverty, social change and civil rights issues for six years, ending up as a relief White House reporter during Watergate, and a regular White House correspondent during Jimmy Carter's presidency. It was at The Washington Post where a divorce left him the single father of four children, a job that was more challenging and much longer lasting than even the toughest news assignment.

In 1978 he moved to the Los Angeles Times where, working out of Los Angeles for the metro staff, he continued to do some national reporting and  went overseas once, covering Jesse Jackson's first trip to the Middle East. While in Los Angeles, he met and married community organizer Ethel Long, and became Austin Long-Scott. When Robert C. Maynard's Oakland Tribune advertised for a metropolitan editor in 1984, he jumped at the challenge and was soon pulling into shape a demoralized and disorganized staff of 55 reporters and editors. Three years later, he became an editorial writer and occasional columnist for The Oakland Tribune. In 1988 and 1989 he was a Pulitzer Prize juror.

Then he jumped at an unexpected opportunity, the chance to report serious issues for television, creating five- to eight-minute "cover stories" for KRON-TV's hour-long 6 pm local newscast. But one year after he took that job, the San Francisco Channel 4 NBC affiliate changed news directors and dropped issue stories in favor of fluff. "TV news is an incredibly powerful communications tool when it's done right," Austin said, "but in our economic system, commercial television generates so much money pumping out simplistic, trashy non-news that it can't afford to do things right." He moved into teaching in 1990.

As a professor with an experience-based doctoral equivalency from San Francisco State University, Austin was twice acting chair of the journalism department, and spent one year as a Freedom Forum Fellow studying how historically black colleges teach journalism. Courses he taught ranged from beginning newswriting through journalism ethics to advising the student newspaper. He had prior teaching experience. In 1970 he co-taught a course on blacks and the news media at Harvard. From 1972 through 1983, he took vacation time every year to teach at the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, acting as its city editor in 1973 at Columbia University, and as co-director in 1981 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Along the way he helped found the Washington Association of Black Journalists, the Black Journalists Association of Southern California, and was co-chair of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association. He spent four years on the advisory board of the New California Alliance, formed to increase media responsiveness to communities. He has been a judge for the MAMAs (Media Alliance Meritorious Awards), board member of the economic policy think tank Redefining Progress, and is an advisory board member of Watching The Watchdogs, a media criticism project based at St. Mary's University in Moraga.

Read "From Then to Now" by Austin Long-Scott