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Your connection to industry & member news | March 20, 2025
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FRIDAY IS FINAL DAY TO REGISTER FOR ANNUAL MEETING & AWARDS LUNCHEONIt’s time to register for SCPA’s Annual Meeting & Awards, presented by AdCellerant! Our event is set for April 3-4, at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in downtown Columbia. Friday, March 21 is the last day to register. Here's the schedule of events: Thursday, April 3
Friday, April 4
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Nominations for 2025-26 SCPA officers, Executive Committee The Nominating Committee proposes the following slate of officers and Executive Committee members for consideration by the full membership at the 2025 Annual Business Meeting, which will be held April 4 at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. (All have agreed to serve if elected.)
OFFICERS:
- President: Hal Welch, The Journal, Seneca
- Vice President – Weeklies: Barbara Ball, The Voice of Blythewood and Fairfield County
- Vice President – Dailies: Kyle Osteen, The Sumter Item
- Treasurer: Jonathan Vickery, The People-Sentinel, Barnwell
- Immediate Past President: Nathaniel Abraham Jr., Carolina Panorama, Columbia
NEW MEMBERS:
For Executive Committee, weekly representatives:
- Jeff Evans, The Island News and Lowcountry Weekly
- Ryan Gilchrest, Greenville Journal
- Rocky Nimmons, Pickens County Courier
For Executive Committee, daily representative:
- Jason Cato, The Post and Courier
RETURNING MEMBERS:
For Executive Committee, daily representatives:
- John Boyette, Aiken Standard
- Gina Smith, The State, The Island Packet, The Beaufort Gazette and The Sun News
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Executive Committee will review membership applications on April 3SCPA has received the following applications for membership, which will be reviewed by the Executive Committee on April 3.
Monthly Newspaper Application:
- Island Vibes, a free distribution monthly on Isle of Palms. Bill Macchio is publisher and Zach Giroux is editor.
Online News Publication Applications:
Associate Member Applications:
- Mount Pleasant Magazine - Bill Macchio is publisher and Zach Giroux is editor.
- Charleston Women - Bill Macchio is publisher, Stacey McLoughlin is associate publisher and Lorna Hollifield is managing editor.
Individual Member Application:
- Mark David Susko, Freelance photojournalist and designer, Taylors, SC
Please contact Jen Madden at (803) 750-9561 or via email if you have any comments about these applicants.
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Debate adjourned on media literacy bill; charter school accountability on Thursday agendaYesterday debate was adjourned on H. 3264, a bill that would establish a media literacy and critical thinking pilot program through the S.C. Department of Education. House K-12 Education Subcommittee members voted 7-1 to adjourn debate with only Rep. Terry Alexander, D-Florence, supporting the bill in its current form. Earlier this week, SCPA provided written testimony in support of the bill.
A charter school accountability bill, S. 454, is the only item on a Thursday Senate Education Subcommittee Meeting agenda. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Greg Hembree, chairman of the Senate Education Committee. This meeting will not be broadcast but we will provide updates to the membership.
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S.C. newspapers celebrate Sunshine Week
Thanks to all the SCPA members participating in Sunshine Week! We've seen so much great work this week and will continue adding to this list.
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By FOI Chair
Richard Whiting
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| Let the sun shine and prevent government mildew
“Open government is good government.”
Only five words are strung together to create that powerful and meaningful phrase. It is a phrase that each and every person in the city, in the county, in the state and in the nation should strongly believe in.
It is a phrase that people should carry like a banner, if and when necessary, into battle with the very people who serve them in elected and appointed offices.
In theory, that should not be the case. In practice, it absolutely is and must be the case. Unfortunately.
This is not a broad brush application aimed at any elected or appointed bodies in particular, but all too often it is necessary to remind, cajole and even demand accountability on the part of those who do the public’s business.
They write and pass the laws we must live by. They determine our tax rates, where and how our tax dollars will be spent. The people we elect and who are appointed to work within our town, city and county councils, and our public schools work for you.
As such, they are accountable to the very people who vote and who pay taxes. They are the public’s employees. To let them operate unchecked, to give them carte blanche to do as they wish in passing ordinances, laws, tax rates, in spending public dollars, in making decisions that affect children’s education and so much more is to abdicate your role.
You vote, you elect, they appoint, they hire and fire, and they make decisions that directly affect you. Your role does not end at the voting booth. It is up to you to hold accountable the very people who work for you. Read more
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Editorial: Here's one more reason to close SC's self-appointed charter school authorizers
Last spring, Columbia’s State newspaper reports, seven executives with the Charter Institute at Erskine and 24 leaders of schools authorized by the district spent five days and four nights visiting London to tour three high-performing British secondary schools and study their methods.
That would have been a questionable expenditure of public funds even if the itinerary had been jam-packed with substance. It wasn’t: The group flew across the ocean to spend nine hours — barely more than a standard U.S. workday — on three mandatory school visits; the itinerary set aside an additional 16 hours specifically for tourism, which leaves a lot of hours unaccounted for, but who's counting?
Participants and Erskine officials defended the trip and others as an important bonding exercise, without adequately explaining why taxpayers needed to pay for principals and other officials at multiple schools to bond, or for any of them to bond with district officials.
They also said the cost was less than it would have cost to send those same 31 people to the S.C. Association of School Administrators Innovative Ideas Institute, a four-day conference held annually in Myrtle Beach that features a comparatively burdensome 15 hours of meetings.
We don’t see how the numbers add up that way, but even if it’s accurate, that’s simply more evidence — as if we need more — that government employees and officials at all levels charge the taxpayers way too much money for junkets they try to disguise as worthwhile expenditures.
From The Post and Courier | Read more
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Columbia woman said she was sexually assaulted by officer while in custody. Attorney calls for body cam changes
A woman is suing the City of Columbia, the Columbia Police Department and a former police officer after she said she was sexually assaulted while being transported to jail.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday, Taylor Ishmal alleges the city, police department and former officer Caleb Hickmon-Payne are responsible for gross negligence and recklessness, violation of due process under the 14th Amendment, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, after she was sexually assaulted by Hickmon-Payne during an arrest on Jan. 31.
... Hickmon-Payne didn’t take the woman straight to jail and failed to report his beginning and ending mileage during the transport, Holbrook said. What should’ve been a 19-minute trip from police headquarters to the jail took Hickmon-Payne 41 minutes. In addition, he deactivated his body-worn and in-car cameras during the trip, according to Holbrook. ...
[Attorney Brian] Shealey called on the public to urge state lawmakers to pass a law forbidding officers from having the ability to turn off their body cameras while one duty.
“There’s been a lot of legislation throughout recent years about making sure all [law enforcement] agencies are well funded to have body worn cameras, but it doesn’t do any good if [officers] can just turn them off,” Shealey said.
“There’s been failed ... attempts for real measures, real laws to ... make turning body-worn cameras off an unlawful action,” Shealey said.
Having the inability to disengage body cameras “helps good cops ... protects good officers from false accusations ... and it also protects citizens,” Shealey said.
By Javon L. Harris, The State | Read more
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SC grand jury indicts Williamsburg sheriff, county supervisor on public corruption, money laundering
COLUMBIA — The Williamsburg County sheriff and a former county supervisor are named in a nine count-indictment for an alleged money laundering scheme to funnel government funds to pay the sheriff more than state law allowed.
The South Carolina State Grand Jury returned the public corruption-related indictments against Williamsburg County Sheriff Stephen Gardner and Tiffany Cooks, the county's former supervisor, on March 12, according to S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson. ...
The indictments follow a Post and Courier Uncovered investigation last year that found that six elected officials in Williamsburg County, one of the state’s poorest, received a combined $210,000 in overtime pay between 2019 and 2022, potentially violating a South Carolina law prohibiting salaried officers from receiving additional compensation for working extra hours. Elected officials are not allowed to collect overtime payments. The investigation revealed Gardner received about $75,000 in four years, and Cooks collected about $33,000 in "other" payments.
By Alan Hovorka, The Post and Courier | Read more
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 | Emma Slaven of The Daniel Island News, left, interviews world-renowned female tennis player Victoria Azarenka at the 2024 Credit One Charleston Open.
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| Confessions of a news reporter
By Emma Slaven, The Daniel Island News
Nearly every playdate between the ages of 9 and 12, I pretended to be Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey interviewing my friends.
Before school, I’d listen to Good Morning America to catch up on who won last night’s American Idol finale or whether Obama had become president, thanks to my mom being strict about bedtime.
In our house, news was everywhere – if you knew where to find it.
When I wasn’t religiously reading Tiger Beat magazine, I was flipping through the Sunday comics after my grandpa finished reading the boring stuff. A newspaper was always on the kitchen counter, and by the time I was old enough to understand it, I was already fascinated by the world of journalism. Read more
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You can learn a conference’s worth of data journalism through these NICAR tipsheets
NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending. As the nation’s news nerds descend on a city (this year Minneapolis), they come bearing PDFs and slide decks and GitHub repos and all manner of tipsheets. The digital trail they leave across the web allows those of us at home to benefit from all the tools and techniques they share.
Usually, there’s someone online who tries to gather up all the best NICAR material each year, to assemble them all in one place. Chrys Wu used to do it; Brent Jones used to do it; IRE itself has done it. But the reigning champion is Sharon Machlis, the freshly retired journalist responsible for Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism — a sort of gateway drug into full-on news-nerdery. On her NICAR site, Machlis has assembled all the best of the past six NICARs, all the way back to the cursed 2020 edition in New Orleans, which you remember served as the first COVID superspreader event in the news industry. That’s 225 tipsheets, presentations, or repos in all; if there’s any theoretical journalism + code amalgamation you’ve ever wondered about, it’s probably in there somewhere. The 2025 batch is as rich as any, so dive in; here are a few that stood out to me, with apologies to those I’ve missed.
By Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab | Read more
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Local newsrooms are using AI to listen in on public meetings
On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signed a series of anti-trans executive orders. The lead voice in the story was Sebastian Eaton-Ellison, a gender-fluid senior who has faced relentless bullying, and even physical assaults, at his high school.
As a reporter for Chalkbeat’s Detroit bureau, Dellinger has often found student sources through school board meetings. This story was no exception. Eaton-Ellison had shared his experience with bullying at a recent Traverse City school board meeting — but Dellinger wasn’t in attendance. Instead, she found his testimonial by searching keywords on LocalLens, a database that uses AI to transcribe and summarize local government meetings.
“I’m not able to physically go to every single board meeting. Even watching them online, or looking at all the agendas, can take up an entire day,” Dellinger told me. (Traverse City, for example, is a four-hour drive from Detroit.) In recent months, Dellinger has used LocalLens as an extra pair of ears, listening in on public meetings across the several Michigan school districts on her beat.
By Andrew Deck. Nieman Lab | Read more
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Dan Branyon, founder and retired publisher of The (Ware Shoals) Observer, dies
Stephen Daniel “Dan” Branyon, 70, husband of Faye Cooper Branyon, passed away after a courageous five-year battle with esophageal cancer. He thanks all who faithfully provided his care, especially his wife, Faye.
Born in Greenwood, he was the son of Betty Watkins Branyon and the late Howard Campbell Branyon. He was a member and deacon of Ware Shoals First Baptist Church. As a member of the committee to renovate the entire physical plant of First Baptist Church, he developed a philanthropy plan that helped lead the church family to completely fund the entire project without having to borrow any funds. He enjoyed teaching and the fellowship of dozens of good men as teacher of the Garner-Memorial Sunday School Class. A 1972 graduate of Ware Shoals High School, he earned BA degree in Journalism from the University of South Carolina, Class of 1976.
He began his career as Sports Editor of the Laurens County Advertiser and was founder and publisher of The Observer newspaper for 39 years. He served as Director of Public Relations as Self Regional Healthcare for over 24 years. He was a member and President of the Ware Shoals Community Foundation and a member of the Ware Shoals Schools Hall of Fame Committee since its inception. He was a member and past president of the Ware Shoals Lions Club. Read full obituary (Scroll to bottom of page for photo slideshow. At the end, there are several great photos on Dan at The Observer.)
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Spears, retired T&D production manager, dies
Jennifer Victoria Spears, also known as James Ward Spears, II, 70, of Orangeburg passed away unexpectedly.
Spears was born on May 28, 1954, in Greenville, S.C. She was the daughter of the late James Ward Spears and the late Clara Louise Spears. Spears was a graduate of North Greenville University.
She worked at The Times and Democrat in Orangeburg for more than 39 years. Among her roles was production manager. She also formerly worked as a clerk and typesetter at The Greenville News. Read full obituary
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