Brick

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

Dear Larry,

[NSNC Vice Pres­i­dent Lau­rence D. Cohen is on the slate of nom­i­nees for the May 6 elec­tion, for 2012–14 president.]

This, the colum­nists pres­i­dency, has been a hum­bling expe­ri­ence. I’ve had plenty of hum­bling expe­ri­ences in my life, so I should know.

When you were nom­i­nated for vice pres­i­dent, you asked me for tips so I sug­gested you con­sider U.S. vice pres­i­dents such as Alben Barkley and Charles W. Fairbanks.

Now I offer:

Hoist your opin­ions as the leader’s con­sid­er­a­tion counts.
Avoid say­ing any­thing, it’ll upset someone.

The board is a sin­gle entity, proved by many unan­i­mous votes.
The board is a hydra of per­son­al­i­ties, proved by many flur­ries of emails.

The NSNC is trend­ing down like the rest of the print media.
The NSNC remains sol­vent with a con­sis­tent num­ber of mem­bers, if you weigh 15 years not the last six.

While I have held sev­eral mid-level news­room man­age­ment jobs, a nonprofit’s pres­i­dency proved sur­pris­ingly different.

In busi­ness, work­ers accept pay in return for labor. That doesn’t mean the boss has much direct author­ity — that’s why book­stores have dozens of shelves of advice. In non­prof­its, peo­ple offer to be offi­cers and other posi­tions for no or mod­est remu­ner­a­tion, so a pres­i­dent has lit­tle clout.

Per­sua­sion is overrated.

What pres­i­dents do is make scores of deci­sions. Even with an able exec­u­tive direc­tor — and Luenna Kim is a peach — there’s a zil­lion choices that fall below trou­bling the board for a vote yet demand direction.

Some of these deci­sions are impor­tant enough to seek input from the board. Yet many deci­sions come to a pres­i­dent because they are too minor or too broad to be han­dled by any­one else. (This is also true in busi­ness management.)

Over time, I real­ized direct­ing a thumb up or down, along with an expla­na­tion, was so cre­ative that it resem­bled writ­ing columns!

Being the pivot of a writ­ers group (maybe other non­prof­its) takes the skills of a colum­nist. You find or are assigned a topic, then there’s research (maybe min­ing your mem­ory) and imag­i­na­tion. A col­umn must be framed — satire or seri­ous, story or expo­si­tion. Not least is weigh­ing the impact of all these choices on the audience.

When I didn’t feel like writ­ing my blog, I’d recall that I’d spent 10–90 min­utes sev­eral times that week answer­ing NSNC e-mails.

Les­son: Impa­tience or exhaus­tion pushes clar­ity to be inversely pro­por­tional to tact.

Unless you’re an extro­vert or believe your­self called to lead­er­ship, then you spend most of life try­ing not to be noticed. Expo­sure was just as vul­ner­a­ble as I feared: I have pissed peo­ple off. I regret acci­den­tally anger­ing peo­ple in these two years.

Every time there’s been a mis­step, it was mine — I could tell you sto­ries, but that would spoil every­one else’s fun. Every time some­thing right hap­pened, another offi­cer or mem­ber deserved the credit.

Because I was not seek­ing a lead­er­ship job, when nom­i­nated my first goal was to think up some goals. I announced them at the 2010 Bloom­ing­ton conference:

I. Con­sider NSNC a triad: Edu­ca­tion, sup­port and advo­cacy. Every­thing we do pro­vides all of these but in vary­ing ratios. Greater suc­cess, fewer wasted moves, can be had by aware­ness of this.

II. Respect all Three Waves of mem­ber­ship: Our first mem­bers were staff colum­nists. The sec­ond set com­prised novices and free-lancers. The cur­rent, third wave are online colum­nists, bloggers.

III. Use Points I and II to con­tinue to ride out the Good Depres­sion in gen­eral and in par­tic­u­lar the media’s thrash­ing car­niv­o­rous evolution.

Today, the NSNC is in the black, has great mem­bers and is days away from what promises to be a spec­tac­u­lar conference.

What will suc­cess be for you, Larry? Your call. As for me, this Boy Scout dropout tried to leave the camp­site just a lit­tle cleaner than I found it.

[Note: Ben joined the NSNC board as archivist in 2005. He has been nom­i­nated to be 2012–14 NSNC Direc­tor of Online Media.]