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ESSENCE FEST SAYS ‘HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM’: Organizers lament traffic issues; plus editorial changes at Ebony and Jet.
*Apparently, Houston is no New Orleans when it comes to handling traffic for the annual Essence Music Festival.
Organizers, who decided to move the event to Houston this year from its usual location in New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina damage, say the Texas city was unable to maintain the flow of traffic around the city, which frustrated staffers and participants involved in the three-day extravaganza last weekend.
"Houston will have to address mobility problems that hampered Essence Music Festival fans before the city will be considered to host next year's event,” organizers said Thursday, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Jordy Tollet, president of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, said his office did everything it could to address transportation concerns. “Everything Essence asked, we did it,” Tollet said according to Journal-isms.
The Essence folk, however, were not happy at all.
“It was a difficult city to navigate and that can't be ignored,” Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications Inc, told Journal-isms. “The end result was a general lack of systems to manage the sprawl. Houston underestimated the enormity and significance of this event.”
"Had the city or county invested more we could have had a different result,” she continued. “If a $126 million economic impact doesn't register there's nothing more that can be said.”
*In other black magazine news, Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, has been named the new vice president and editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines.
Monroe’s appointment marks the first time in history that the two publications, owned by Johnson Publishing, will share one editor.
"I am going to spend my initial time just learning, because I come from the newspaper side of things,” the former assistant vice president for news at Knight Ridder Inc. told Journal-isms. “I've got to learn a lot about magazines. I'm so excited and honored that I'll be continuing a great legacy with Ebony and Jet and Johnson publications."
