The kickoff of the UNITY 2012 convention is exactly 500 days away, when we’ll meet up at The Mandalay Bay Resort & Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nev.

It’s been two-and-a-half years since members of the alliance partners stood 7,500 strong at UNITY ’08 in Chicago. Since then, times in our industry have been exciting as well as challenging – after nearly 400 company recruiters attended the UNITY ’08 Job Career Fair & Expo, it was hard to believe the acceleration of layoffs and economic meltdown that soon followed. It prompted UNITY to begin tracking job losses in the industry for a period of one-year, starting with the day of the historic collapse of Lehman Brothers. A year later, it was clear, as reported in UNITY’s 2009 Layoff Tracker, that the news industry was losing jobs at a rate of 22 percent when job loss in the general economy was 8 percent.

Newsrooms were monitored, and media companies such as ABC, Honolulu Advertiser and The New York Times were encouraged to mind diversity whenever they thought about letting go of journalists. UNITY’s board of directors embarked on a public-policy campaign with the Federal Communications Commission to create an environment that would encourage policy that promotes diversity.  These efforts enabled UNITY to represent the interest of its alliance members with the FCC on media consolidation, Net Neutrality, universal access and issues regarding minority ownership.

UNITY also launched an initiative, New U: Entrepreneurs Working Through UNITY, funded by The Ford Foundation to develop news entrepreneurs of color through a program created by NABJ member Doug Mitchell and co-directed with NAJA member Alli Joseph. The program gave 16 journalists of color an opportunity to develop and advance their news business ideas through training and one-on-one mentoring.  After a 2.5 days boot camp training held at each of the alliance association’s 2010 conventions, one-on-one mentoring and online voting on each person’s 3-minute video pitch, four news entrepreneurs were selected and each received a $5,000 award to support their business ideas. The Ford Foundation has approved funding for another go-around, and twenty additional news entrepreneurs of color will have an opportunity to participate in this initiative before the next UNITY convention.

As we gear up for UNITY in Las Vegas, alliance associations will begin to reach into their memberships for innovative ideas that will help position journalists of color to take the lead in transforming our industry and telling the stories of communities of color. And as the nation buzzes about jobs, as we suspect the political campaigns in 2012 will also be doing, we plan to deliver another successful Career Fair & Media Expo with virtual and onsite opportunities for jobseekers.  Likewise, we expect the educational sessions to be equally dynamic, skills-building and forward thinking to give journalists of color a competitive advantage in today’s newsrooms.  Soon the programming committee, comprised of two representatives from each alliance association and led by AAJA’s Paul Cheung and NAHJ’s Robert Hernandez will assemble to begin the process of calling for session ideas.  Stay tuned and count down with us. 500 … 499 … 498 …