 |
|
|
Your connection to industry & member news | July 1, 2020
|
PALMY Ad Contest deadline is 9 days away!Friday, July 10, is the final day to enter submissions into the 2020 PALMY Advertising Contest!
The PALMYs recognize the Palmetto State's best, brightest and most enterprising advertising professionals and advertisers, and the impact they have made in their communities.
Thanks to the SCPA Foundation, all member newspapers will receive five free entries in this year's competition.
Contact SCPA if you need your newspaper's login information or if you have any questions about entering the contest.
| |
Have a safe and happy 4th of July!
SCPA will be closed Friday, July 3, to celebrate Independence Day. This year, we are most thankful for all S.C. newspapers do to help the public understand the essential role of a free press. America's Newspapers has released the following editorial cartoon and column (at bottom of this email) to educate the public about this important issue.
| |
|
| Staff Spotlight: Jen Madden
| |
 | When Jen isn't at SCPA, she's got her hands full with 14-week-old Miller.
|
|
Assistant Director, SCPA
What do you like best about your job?
I enjoy working with our members! Whether it is small services like running SLED Checks or larger ones like planning the annual contests and convention, I love tackling challenges and learning new skills. I'm passionate about the role newspapers play in educating and informing readers, and I am especially interested in open government and First Amendment issues.
What's the most exciting thing going on at SCPA?
In the 13 years I've worked here, we've prided ourselves on delivering top-notch training and events. COVID-19 has forced us to re-imagine how we deliver some of our services including workshops and other events. In July, we're hosting a handful of virtual roundtables and webinars (with several more coming soon). We're busy exploring additional ways we can serve you until we can be together in person again. Be on the lookout for lots of exciting announcements in the coming weeks!
What’s your favorite SCPA member service?
I love all that we do to support our news and advertising members. If you need help, we are just a call or email away!
What is something most people don’t know about you?
I used to take trapeze lessons and I've swum with pigs! I'm also responsible for SCPA's website, social media accounts, newsletters and digital platforms (like the News Exchange, public notice site and contest entry platforms). Oh, and my late dog, Captain Von Trapp, saved my life on three separate occasions (fire, blizzard, robber).
What do you like to do outside of work?
On March 25, my husband, Jeremi, and I welcomed a new baby boy. These days, free time involves snuggling sweet Miller, keeping up with our very energetic and extroverted five-year-old, Grace, and taking long walks with our favorite four-legged child, Ellie Puppy.
We're bringing back eBulletin Member Spotlights! Know someone that you’d like SCPA to spotlight? Email us your recommendations.
| |
New judge releases James Brown papers requested in 2011 under FOIA
A new judge has taken the reins in the James Brown estate proceedings, and on May 12, he issued an order that may help to conclude nine years of legal battles in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
Aiken Judge Clifton Newman has ordered the Columbia law firm of Kenneth Wingate to release a document requested in 2011 under the FOIA from Attorney General Alan Wilson by former Brown co-trustee, Adele Pope of Newberry.
The document, known as the “Wingate contract,” retained the firm of Sweeny Wingate and Barrow to bring a 2010 lawsuit against Pope and former co-trustee Robert Buchanan of Aiken.
By Sue Summer, The Newberry Observer | Read more
| |
Romando Dixson named Journal Star executive editor
Longtime journalist Romando Dixson will take over as the executive editor of the Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois, next month, USA Today Network news leaders announced Thursday.
Dixson will become the first African American to serve as top editor of the Journal Star. Dixson joined Gannett nearly 17 years ago and has covered an array of topics and communities during his career. ...
A Michigan native, Dixson comes to Illinois after working at the Clarion Ledger, a Gannett publication where he served as the sports editor for the past year for the largest newspaper in Mississippi. Dixson previously worked in South Carolina at The Greenville News as an editor, breaking news reporter and digital producer. As an editor, Dixson has directed coverage of topics ranging from breaking news and public safety to higher learning and religion.
Dixson, a 2003 graduate of Michigan State University, plans to start his new role July 20.
From the Journal Star | Read more
| |
Columbia Star owner publishes book
“Sunnybrook” is the new book from The Columbia Star Owner and Publisher Mike Maddock. It’s a story that sends its readers to a time when kids played outside from dawn to dusk without rules or referees.
The year is 1980 and eleven-year-old Joey Moore has just learned he has to move away from his beloved neighborhood by the end of the summer. Instead of waiting around to find out why, Joey runs off to find his best friend, Chris, and together they decide Joey’s last few months in the neighborhood will be legendary.
With the help of the rest of their gang, Joey will avenge every dog that has was ever hurt by Old Lady Callahan and her “Pinto of Death.” He’ll find the mystical stack of nudie magazines supposedly hidden somewhere deep in the woods.
Joey will kiss Jamie Hollins, the best-looking girl ever to throw a tight spiral, and he’ll do something no one has ever done before, successfully skateboard all the way down Sunnybrook Lane, the longest and steepest street in the neighborhood. What Joey doesn’t know is that his toughest task isn’t on the list he and Chris created, and life as he knows it will never be the same.
By Pam Staples, The Columbia Star | Read more
| |
Post and Courier receives top SPJ award
The Society of Professional Journalists on Friday awarded a prestigious national Sigma Delta Chi Award to The Post and Courier for the newspaper’s special report last year, Our Secret Delta.
Written by Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith with photography by Lauren Petracca, Our Secret Delta detailed the history and increasing vulnerability of South Carolina’s storied Santee Delta watershed. ...
The Post and Courier won first-place honors in the feature category for a newspaper with a circulation less than 100,000. The Boston Globe won the large newspaper category for its climate report, “At the edge of a warming world.”
From The Post and Courier | Read more
| |
Two new studies about media and diversity can help newsrooms through their reckoning with racism
Two new studies this week couldn’t be more timely.
Amid a reckoning with institutionalized racism in the news media industry, the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation conducted separate studies that drew similar conclusions: American news consumers don’t feel that the news media represents them and the industry’s lack of diversity is a huge contributor.
“Roughly similar portions of black (58%), Hispanic (55%) and white Americans (61%) say the news media misunderstand them, but they cite markedly different reasons for this misunderstanding,” Pew found. One third of Black Americans, for example, said their personal characteristics were misunderstood. On the other hand, 39 percent of white Americans said their political views were misunderstood. Then, 26 percent of Hispanic Americans felt their personal interests were misunderstood.
By Hanaa' Tameez, Nieman Lab | Read more
| |
Here are five ways you can start holding your police department accountable
The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis has drawn historic levels of interest in police misconduct and drawn condemnation from law enforcement leaders nationwide.
As a reporter covering law enforcement for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, and now in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, I use investigative reporting techniques to strengthen police accountability. Other journalists do the same. But, in truth, any citizen can apply the same methods to ensure the law enforcement system they’re funding is serving them well.
Police culture can be insular and tough to penetrate. But I’ve been surprised by how often it’s possible, though time consuming, to expose important issues by requesting and examining records and data from police departments and other government agencies and engaging citizens and key leaders. So here are five techniques concerned citizens, journalists and policymakers can use to examine police conduct in their communities.
By Andrew Ford, Asbury Park Press for Propublica | Read more
| |
Could McClatchy become a nonprofit newspaper chain?
... Tomorrow, the case will reach an important milestone—the deadline for final bids for McClatchy’s newspaper assets. McClatchy’s board will disclose the winning bid next week, pending judicial approval at the end of July. Yesterday, Ken Doctor, an industry analyst who writes for Nieman Lab, assessed who might be in the running to take over. Chatham has long been seen as the frontrunner, and in May, it filed a formal bid in the area of $300 million. According to Doctor, however, Chatham’s lawyers have said they’re open to being outbid. “As a hedge fund, it’s in McClatchy for a financial return, not long-term investment or community service,” Doctor writes. “If someone else thinks McClatchy is worth more than they do, they’ll happily take their money.”
The someone else could be Gannett—America’s biggest newspaper chain by circulation, which already merged with GateHouse last year—or Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that’s notorious for devastating cuts at its media properties, or an unnamed “newish player” from the financial sphere. Or, intriguingly, it could be a leader or leaders from the world of nonprofit journalism. Doctor reports that unnamed people in those circles are actively discussing whether to acquire McClatchy, or part thereof, with the idea of turning into a nonprofit newspaper chain.
By Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review | Read more
| |
Opinion: A reckoning over objectivity, led by Black journalists
It was a brief interaction, during the first weeks of my career. There had been a stabbing, and I’d been dispatched to a block in Roxbury, a predominantly black section of Boston, to snag quotes from anyone who might know anything about what had happened.
“Who are you with?” inquired the first person I had approached, a black man in his 50s. “The Globe?” he exclaimed after hearing my response. “The Globe doesn’t have black reporters. What are you doing over here? You lost? Y’all don’t write about this part of town.”
His complaints and his skepticism were familiar, voiced for decades by black people both outside newsrooms and within them — that most American media organizations do not reflect the diversity of the nation or the communities they cover and too often confine their coverage of black and brown neighborhoods to the crime of the day.
Now, almost a decade later, as protesters are taking to the streets of American cities to denounce racism and the unabated police killings of black people across the country, the journalism industry has seemingly reached a breaking point of its own: Black journalists are publicly airing years of accumulated grievances, demanding an overdue reckoning for a profession whose mainstream repeatedly brushes off their concerns; in many newsrooms, writers and editors are now also openly pushing for a paradigm shift in how our outlets define their operations and ideals.
By Wesley Lowery, a reporter and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes to the New York Times | Read more
| |
Be patient on election night 2020. Counting the returns will take time.
The expected increase in voting-by-mail will pose challenges for how election officials and journalists report the results, and how voters absorb them.
By Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman, PolitiFact/Poynter | Read more
| |
 |
By Dean Ridings
CEO, America's Newspapers
|
| On this Independence Day, recalling the Founders' views of a free press
America’s Founders regarded a free press as so vital to the new nation that they took care to include that right in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Founders spoke glowingly about the press as a pillar of democracy and guarantor of liberty. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, famously wrote in 1787 that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
George Washington framed the issue of free expression in almost apocalyptic terms: “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
Yet discussing the free press of their day, the Founders also could often sound like those who are decrying “fake news” in 2020.
Under a barrage of criticism from newspapers published by his political opponents, Washington painted journalists as “infamous scribblers.” Benjamin Franklin, himself a very successful newspaper publisher, described the press of his time as a resentful, vicious institution comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. Read more
| |
 |
By John Foust, Advertising Trainer
|
| Read any good catalogues lately?
Over the years, I’ve heard ad professionals talk about the outstanding copywriting that can be found in catalogues. Of course, there are other approaches to advertising creativity, but catalogues excel when it comes to descriptions of product features and benefits.
Some of the best examples can be found in L.L. Bean catalogues. Let’s take a look at a two-page spread featuring their famous snow boots. Even if you live in an area which doesn’t have snowy winters, it’s easy to appreciate this well-crafted concept.
A color photograph occupies the entire left page and half of the right page. The close-up photo shows the boots being worn in the snow. The tops of the boots are just below the cuffed jeans, demonstrating the ankle height of one of the styles. Although there is snow on the boots, it is clearly not soaking through. The headline reads, “Bean Boots for the Snow.” Read more
| |
| Thanks Annual Meeting Sponsors!
| |
Even though the Annual Meeting has been postponed until September, please take a moment to visit these special organizations online.
| |
|
|
|
