Brick

This col­umn first was pub­lished as the “President’s Mes­sage” in the Feb­ru­ary 2012 newslet­ter of the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists.

Spring — OK, this is win­ter but I’m an opti­mist — is busy-time for the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Columnists.

• We’re halfway through gath­er­ing entries for the annual Col­umn Con­test. Have you sent yours in? Blog­gers: You can’t win if you don’t enter. Like pre­vi­ous years, online columns have two of the six cat­e­gories. News­pa­per is a proud part of our name, but news­pa­pers these days take sev­eral for­mats. For the cost of two large supreme piz­zas, you have a chance to be judged with your peers. If you’re one of the three final­ists or, dare to hope, the win­ner, you earn brag­ging rights. Dead­line is March 1, so there’s not much time.

Tell you what: For 2012, we’ll throw in an extra day to get your copy in: Feb. 29.

• Plans for the annual Colum­nists Con­fer­ence are firm­ing (detailed else­where in the newslet­ter). Like Easter and Passover, the con­fer­ence is “early” this year, May 3–6.

For the first time in a spell, we’re con­ven­ing in the South, Macon, Ga. Merle Hag­gard just left Macon the other day, feel­ing bet­ter than when the music leg­end arrived.

Expect to learn prac­ti­cal and cur­rent tips to improve your writ­ing and improve the mar­ket­ing of your work. Expect the infor­mal­ity and hijinks that other jour­nal­ism and writ­ing groups only wish they had.

He couldn’t take any with him, no bill buried in Grant’s Tomb.

• Under­ly­ing these is a call to join the NSNC. Annual mem­ber­ship is $50. That earns you dis­counts to the con­fer­ence, $50 off reg­is­tra­tion for mem­bers ($100 off for non­mem­bers, though deduct­ing the $50 for dues leaves …), and the con­test, where the $45 fee is cut to $25. The con­test fee is just 20 bucks’ dif­fer­ent, almost half. That could add up if you enter in sev­eral cat­e­gories. We allow that.

If you pub­lish in dif­fer­ent for­mats and styles, you can, say, enter three columns in a print cat­e­gory and three oth­ers as online works (that never were pub­lished in ink), as long as they’re all dif­fer­ent columns. If you’re a broad-range scribe you might enter three seri­ous pieces in Gen­eral Inter­est and three funny ones in Humor (read the rules care­fully). Is the NSNC trea­sury get­ting more cash from you? Sure, but you ARE upping the odds of intrigu­ing at least one judge.

Intan­gi­bles

There’s far more to NSNC mem­ber­ship. You can learn about these cours­ing through our web­site, espe­cially the page “What Do I Get from Join­ing NSNC?” The NSNC is not a Sam’s Club or Costco; the value for your Grant (the pres­i­dent on a $50 bill) comes from the strength of belong­ing to a group. This is a great club. It’s proved in every arti­cle in every eColum­nist newslet­ter and through­out columnists.com.

Another intan­gi­ble came to the fore, though, dur­ing the last month. That’s in the mis­sion state­ment, that the NSNC “advo­cates for colum­nists and free-press issues.”

The NSNC stood up, joined oth­ers and opposed some online piracy leg­is­la­tion before Con­gress. Leg­isla­tive lead­ers with­drew the drafts.

The society’s board believed colum­nists, and all Amer­i­cans, would see lim­its to First Amend­ment rights with­out sub­stan­tial revi­sion to the House bill “Stop Online Piracy Act,” H.R. 3261, or SOPA, and the Sen­ate ver­sion “Pre­vent­ing Real Online Threats to Eco­nomic Cre­ativ­ity and Theft of Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Act,” S.968, or PIPA.

[A good sum­mary was cre­ated by a staffer at the Poyn­ter Insti­tute, “What Jour­nal­ists Need to Know about SOPA.”]

We don’t make stances lightly. First, we’re jour­nal­ists, and the only lob­by­ing I’ve seen the best of us do is on Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion and Open Meet­ings issues. Sec­ond, we colum­nists are ornery indi­vid­u­al­ists, tak­ing pride in dis­agree­ing with all comers.

Third, we’re a small-r repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tion, the board by being elected by the gen­eral mem­ber­ship — a major­ity of mem­bers who wake up for the Sun­day morn­ing annual meet­ing at the con­fer­ence. The board con­sid­ers stances on a few issues as they come up dur­ing the year.

Yet, NSNC offi­cers reject more than they accept. Folks, your board has nice peo­ple. There’s never a “nay” vote. That’s rude, among friends. The pref­er­ence I’ve seen over my years as an offi­cer is we’ll talk an issue to death (group emails, actu­ally) until the pro­po­nent with­draws the motion.

On rare occa­sions on my own I’ll just send an e-mail or a blog-comment, mak­ing clear I am speak­ing for myself. A few times, and with board con­sen­sus, the NSNC signs on with stands taken by fel­low mem­bers of the Con­fer­ence of National Jour­nal­ism Orga­ni­za­tions, journalismassociations.com.

Swash­buckle

On Jan. 18, promi­nent web­sites like Google led other orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als in a 24-hour “Inter­net Black­out” to notify Wash­ing­ton that SOPA / PIPA would cause seri­ous harm to free speech /free press in this elec­tronic age. Some sites went fully dark and inop­er­a­ble, except for a notice explain­ing why, such as wikipedia.org. Oth­ers put a black box atop the home page; that’s what was seen at google.com, and that’s what we did, explained at “Free­dom of the Seas.”

Check­ing the ana­lyt­ics for that day, we found that hits were dra­mat­i­cally high at columnists.com. Our shout-out was heard widely. Fight­ing piracy (on the sea or the web) takes the finesse of a Ulysses.

With mem­ber­ship just under 300 mem­bers, the soci­ety is just big enough to be noticed and small enough where we can know one another (when you click “like” on Facebook.com/columnists, you’ll see lots of famil­iar names). But I’d be fool­ing no one to deny that what we do (write essays of opin­ion, humor, anec­dote, advice and reportage) car­ries some seri­ous weight when we speak out as an organization.

Did I say 300 mem­bers is a good size? I meant 500. Think of high school and how you knew, or knew of, most every­one. Five hun­dred dues-paying colum­nists would be a force to reckon with. Huzzah!