A proud moment came in helping select the year’s scholarship contest winner. Paul Bowers of the University of South Carolina — the other USC, was the running, old joke — looks like a good reporter, in that he does not look like a reporter at all. He’ll be a junior but looks and to some extent acts like a freshman, inquisitive but quiet, trying not to stand out.

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation uses a couple of members to winnow through the submissions of three sample columns each. Then a celebrity (for us) judge chooses third, second and first places among those six. [On the professional level, each of the seven categories' judges goes through all of their own entries.] Paul’s happened to fall in my pile. I told the coordinator that the overall level of my set of entries was very good. The worst that could be said about them was the writing in some was flat and others were too self-absorbed, but that was true of some professional published columnists.

Third, second and first nominees were obvious, Paul’s being at the top. The central judge’s comments paralleled mine — he was both a good writer, employing wit with accuracy, but he also did original reporting and knew what how to deploy his research. The information on him published after he won noted he already had served an internship of sorts at The New York Times.

I am not gloating that somehow I “can pick ‘em.” It’s just that any regular reader or card-carrying editor daily comes across so many examples of poor writing that other people hold up as satisfactory or even good that I’ve begun to doubt my own judgment.

Turns out that I’m OK.

• • •

Conferees spent a fair amount of time listening to the concept of branding and expanding our brand. Even if this is fervently believed and not merely the latest career self-help tool, succeeding or complementing networking, I remain unsure of its viability.

Lots of people in the room, and the stars who addressed us (Bruce Cameron, Steve Lopez, Jeffrey Zaslow and Jon Carroll) have moved past Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour minimum practice of a skill set for proficiency. Separate from that, except for their judgment of what makes a good column, Cameron, Lopez and Zaslow have made their name each on a single column. Each of these three already were famous in their home communities and among fellow journalists as being the top of their genres. But they became household names with just a few hundred words apiece:

• “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter“
• “The Soloist“
• “The Last Lecture“

This simply is fascinating. My favorite among them is Carroll, for writing five a week and hitting more than missing. Carroll said in Ventura he has been writing the equivalent of two mystery novels each year. After a Jon Carroll column you smile, you might guffaw, your step definitely is lighter. But nothing he has written has been made into a movie, TV show or expanded into a book and then a movie or TV show. (Carroll does have a book of collected columns.)

Which goes to show that news or opinion writing is a poor economic model. Why not let the pressure go, admit it’s not viable. But confirm it still is fun so keep doing it as a hobby or stronger than that, an avocation. Make your living, get your health insurance, in another trade.

I don’t see that as either fatalistic or pessimistic. It’s realistic yet not grimly so. I could raise orchids and show them at the county fair for similar gratification.

I write. Others can write for fun, too. It’s easier without the pressure. It’s more honest, in that you’re not second-guessing a too-theoretical market. I address subjects, here in Brick, what I don’t find in print or online (though perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places). My dad I fancy would like what I write, were he alive, so most of this is for him, too.

I let it go, and I got an honorable mention in a nationwide column contest. Not a coincidence. I’ll enter next year and may lose because the judge doesn’t understand my work or perhaps my submissions are rotten in the next year. I think nearly all my columns in 2001 were lousy; I was angry and had difficulty lightening up. It can happen again, and again I could loosen up the following year.

Come easy go easy, as archy the cockroach was told by a moth:

our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

Some of Jon’s sagacity:

My favorite: “A question you ask yourself is, ‘Will people understand that?’ The answer is that some of them won’t. I’m not writing for the person who won’t get the joke, I’m writing for the person who will get the joke. Do I know how many people that is? No. Ultimately you write for yourself.”

“If you’re writing five columns a week the single most important factor to longevity is curiosity. … All you have to do, then, is ask questions.” Carroll brought up curiosity again and again. It’s also what drives Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who just a few years ago spotted a homeless man playing a violin with just two strings and without a hat or open case for handouts.

“You always want to be Number 11 on your editor’s list of problems,” Carroll said. “They never get past Number 3.”

His cat columns are among his most popular. “I’m not writing about cats,” he explained. “I am writing about the experience of pet ownership.”

Newspapers have not understood the Internet (Carroll was online beginning in 1986, before there was a World Wide Web). They saw it as a rival or as a promotion tool taking one back to the paper edition.

In answer to a question, Carroll explained why the notice of his e-mail address at the end of his columns is, well, peculiar. The editors were going to “take two-three lines from my finite space so I made it my own,” adding that the “pull quotes” are supplemental word play as well, where most everywhere else the larger-print billboard quotes are merely a direct quote from the column.

“I really like playing games with the reader. You should try anything” to keep your work fresh, a vital concern for someone writing five a week for decades.

“Always give somebody else the good lines. Otherwise, you look like a jerk. … Maybe something didn’t happen exactly the way you write it. But only you and the other person [in the story] know that.”

I ask a chicken-or-egg question. I note that a humor writing workshop leader advises picking a topic then considering which of a number of formats might best illustrate it, a fake quiz show, a letter home, a q-and-a, whatever.

But Carroll says,

“I try to let the format be dictated by the topic not the other way around. I don’t outline. College [courses] have it all wrong [with recommending that]. I think topic sentences are wrong. I work best by just starting out. You should try all these different formats, different styles. If you write short sentences then write long sentences.” If you don’t do vary it up, you get stale, he said.

Carroll in his hour presentation Saturday morning noted he was trying to avoid points he’d make later in his speech accepting the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award. I took only a few notes by pen that evening.

His evening award-acceptance remarks were clever — too writerly for My Beloved who got lost in his turns of phrase and missed his points. I think I caught most of them:

Carroll was grateful that for a change an unsyndicated columnist like himself won. Syndication can soften a writer, he said, who with such a wide audience tries to appeal to a broader set, which can soften his or her language.

“Print just may be a 500-year-long fad, since Gutenberg, that is. The Dark Ages lasted about 500 years, too.” The next age, beginning now, is some sort of post-print era, perhaps.

The good news from the Internet is that it “proves that prose is not dead.”

“Bloggers don’t know that writing is hard.”

“Blogs often are just opinions. And I find just opinions are boring. Stories are where the fun lies.”

“The problem with Twitter is that it has no context, no [room for] attribution. [Young people] don’t know that ‘Mrs. Stephen Fry’ is a parody, that [British comic actor-writer] Stephen Fry is openly gay.” If you don’t have access to that information, Fry’s satirical points are lost, Carroll said, which may be Fry’s point. (I check Twitter, and learn the keyword is ” MrsStephenFry ” and grab a sample tweet: “I’m sick of my neighbour going on about her 3 llamas. All day long it’s yak yak yak.”)

Carroll said there’s two types of people who work for newspapers, those who want to save the world for democracy and those who enjoy explaining things — “the journalists and the writers.” The two groups do the same thing, and both are needed: “We sort things out.” Gertrude Stein called Ezra Pound “‘the village explainer,’ well, that’s what we do.”

“The job we engage in, writing, is both noble and necessary, but with that context. … We have an obligation to be bold. We have an obligation to risk failing.”

The background on The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow is easy to find online, including Zaslow’s experiences in creating the book. Jeff, of The Wall Street Journal, spoke both Friday evening as keynote then Saturday morning in a feature-writing workshop.

He knows his skills and his limitations. He admitted novel-like narrative is not his strong suit yet is a strong explainer in a journalistic style. “I am not a great writer. I am a hard worker, and I’m a storyteller,” Zaslow said, then turned his summary of negative Amazon reader reviews (of his latest, The Girls from Ames) back to the audience. “It’s most important [for us] to be clear.”

Jeff’s speeches to we columnists over the years have a similar format: He uses example after example of his successes and occasional missteps — he uses the funniest or the worst ones — then sums them up pithily.

“The days of the columnist as a rock star are over.” Rock star? Bob Greene and Mike Royko were rock stars in Chicago, he gave as examples, until scandal broke the career of the former and death took the latter.

“I realize that nothing I do in the rest of my life will come up to The Last Lecture. I know that.”

Still, Jeff has a bright future even in the near term, with The Girls from Ames just published and a co-authoring assignment that he is wrapping up with airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger.

The lesson he got as a journalist from professor Rausch?

“You all are storytellers. Go find those stories. And go hug your kids and your spouses.”

• • •

Marcia Meier of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference tells us columnists we “need an online presence: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the rest. You need to invest in a Web site.” More, clearer specifics from her might have been helpful.

• • •

Branding makes me queasy, as it’s the latest psy-pop jargon word, but I wanted to hear its advocates out. Erika Stalder is young but already a pro, a teen advice columnist online for the ABC Family channel. Robert Niles is well-known in journalism circles for his Internet acumen. His opinions on what works and doesn’t in newspaper Web sites make him divisive. I agree with him more often than not. Still it seems he’s been shoehorned into this topic, and I wish he could have been given his head on the weekend’s theme of how columnists can “Survive and Thrive” in our new world.

Niles noted his day job comprises managing a few Web sites, explaining, “I am the cockroach of the journalism business. I look to survive.”

“Don’t be afraid of working for yourself because ultimately that’s what you are doing anyway. That also makes you a pretty attractive employee, too,” he said.

Branding to Niles is “ultimately is the public’s perception of your relationship with them,” while Stalker quotes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as saying, “your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.”

Niles is optimistic that “journalist-entrepreneurs can make it,” thrive in this new news media world.

The branding talk, along with columnists hustling for a paid speech here and a library writing workshop there, makes me queasy. I think of psychotherapists and massage therapists who make $150 or $60 an hour, respectively. That’d be great if it’s 40 hours a week, or 60 or even 30 hours. But much of a professional’s time is spent between those hours in bookkeeping, marketing and washing linens, well that’s the latter. Such hours are not compensated.

I ask the two about the extreme this can go. To illustrate, I describe a friend who not only hustles writing assignments large and small, but solicits commercial photography gigs and even is skilled in audio and video digital editing. He has good months and bad despite this wide variety of marketable skills. Zeroing to my point, I note this gambit is highly likely to be impractical without health insurance through a family member or the upcoming national health plan. My friend gets his policy by working as a camera operator at a TV station, which sticks him with tough hours. I get shrugs for answers, but two conferees come up to me later in the day — and a third the next day — to thank me for posing the question.

Branding will come up later in the trip in a much more pragmatic discussion with a veteran of it, my brother. From him I understand it better than the conference programs. Maybe it helps that he’s not in the journalism trade.

When it’s used as a secondary strategy, I accept “branding.” To make such a process primary seems self-dooming, unless you’re in the self-help business and this is your latest topic. Still, Thurber didn’t brand himself in order to get published. If his kind of writing was popular today, he still would not need to think in those terms. Jim knew the kind of writing he excelled at and what sells, and his query letters for submissions surely reflected that.

If “branding” is today’s successor to yesterday’s “networking” — and my brother would say (did say) both are needed to succeed — then it follows that “branding” is self-oriented and that “networking,” just by dictionary definitions, is other-oriented. Now that says it all.

This evening at a banquet, it was announced that the honor was honorable mention, Online Columns category. Here is a list of all winners.

Here is the judge’s comment:

Ben S. Pollock for the sweet personal observations about Northwest Arkansas life”

I accept the award. After all, this is the first national award for me for anything ever. The best part was the applause from the audience. I didn’t expect gasps and boos, but it was truly sweet music from friends and colleagues. I got to shake the hand of one of my idols, Jon Carroll.

But.

Of my three columns, one is a Benchleyesque fantasy not set anywhere in particular, another is a critique of hypocritical local fundraising and the third is, yes, a sweet personal observation. I am grateful the judge was moved by Nick Masullo; that’s him not me.

Pretty cool, though.

To open, Jody Brannon of Arizona State felt survival would come by columnists being “platform agnostic,” in that writers can publish on paper or pixel. Brannon contributed mainly coinages. Besides “platform agnostic,” she used “technologic” instead of technological and “reality-TV-ization.” I think I know what the last should mean but am unsure what it has to do with personal journalism.

The other panelist was down-to-earth. Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute said that with the layoffs universal among newspapers, columnists must copy-edit themselves rigorously before submitted their work to a desk or posting online themselves. It’s up to us.

Columnists should get extra credit for the more facts and research they use, Prince said, unlike bloggers specifically and non-newspaper-trained commentators in general. Those of us who come up through the ranks know to do reporting for reliability and simply to create original work. Regular bloggers, without criticizing them, he said, react to the reportage and the journalism-based opinions of others.

• • •

Rick Newcombe, 58, is CEO of Creators Syndicate, a major player essentially from its start but now is even bigger through recent purchases of or mergers with other syndicates and their stables of columnists and cartoonists, which for Creators now numbers more than 200. For those who keep up with how to get published, such as studying Suzette Martinez Standring’s book The Art of Column Writing, Newcombe’s advice is familiar: Get thee online with haste. A blog or Web site will do fine. It is quite possible, especially with the Internet, writers like us don’t need the services of a syndicate, he said, especially if you are comfortable with bookkeeping and marketing.

A columnist will be more attractive to Creators if he or she is being published in a newspaper already. Sure it means someone earlier in the chain sees potential in the writer, but it also means the columns produced already have been edited. Creators has a staff of editors, but a solid read by a newspaper staff means a decreased chance for a lawsuit over accuracy or false accusation, Newcombe said. Of course, that’s appealing to his staff.

Newcombe said he is confident that his celebrity columnists write their own work. All have submitted handwritten columns on occasion, he noted, from Hillary Rodham Clinton (now secretary of state but wrote a column as first lady), to Andrew Young and now Bill O’Reilly.

I’ve also quoted Newcombe in this Brick.

• • •

A segment of the remarks by Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times (author of The Soloist) is illuminated in this Brick, but as he spoke for more than an hour and had lots to say, well that’s here.

He continues to cover the parallel issues of homelessness and mental health, but that’s not his column’s sole foci. Lopez finds the best long-term solution for a homeless person is “supportive housing,” where clients get shelter, regular meals, medical and vocational help, and supervision. Shelters where the person gets little more than a meal and a cot is too short-term, he said. Even after all he’s seen, Lopez does not give money to panhandlers; instead he gives them a list of five places where they can find free food, shelter and other assistance. “I don’t see where a dollar here and there helps them.”

Lopez has no problem with bloggers per se, but to him what they write comprises opinion, “That is what everyone is doing online.” Even Twitter, which is “opinion in 140 characters or less.” Columnists, every kind that was represented in the room, he said, offer something the casual set doesn’t: “All that we columnists have going for us is stories, unlike bloggers.”

His first column was for the San Jose Mercury News, and his editor there tortured and taught him by reading his column aloud back to him. The process taught him the “necessity of rewriting.” Then his editor at his next paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, taught him what voice is, which for the editor (Bill Marimow) then to Lopez, is the same as mission. Lopez found his mission/voice in Philly, which on the one hand was empathizing and writing about people who reminded him of his working-class family and their neighborhood, and on the other hand was driven by the old saw about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Lopez has given a lot a attention to mental health issues since meeting Nathaniel Ayers the homeless string player, but he was not before and is not now some kind of Advocate Writer. (Yet, Lopez, asked, “Why is there no Saturday morning 10k run for paranoid schizophrenia?”) He’s a reportage-centric columnist, and such subjects — along with others — catch his judgment as being newsworthy.

As Lopez put it, “We have to get out of the chair, pound the pavement, knock on doors and get our stories.” This differentiates us from bloggers and by extension makes us better than they.

Lopez encouraged the columnists to aim for the newspaper audience as it now is, skewing to seniors: “It’s the old people — specifically the ones who go for the early bird special at such and such a restaurant — who are still readers. So write for them.”

• • •

Frequent NSNC presenter — and sheesh what a good guy — W. Bruce Cameron was asked to talk about writing for movies and TV. He still writes a weekly humor column, but 8 Simple Ways moved him to Hollywood in multiple ways.

He recommends the first professional assistance a writer needs to hire is not an agent but a lawyer specializing in entertainment. Agents, publicists and the like will have multiple clients and can have little reason not to burn one client if that helps another, Cameron said. An attorney is bound by the bar to represent the best interests of every client he accepts.

For Cameron, “The keyword in movies [or other broadcast projects] is risk, how much money are you willing to risk, and how much time are you willing to throw into this.” For him, an iffy proposal that will take six solid weeks to develop is an unacceptable allotment of time.

The now low cost of camcorders and video-editing software puts moviemaking in everyone’s reach. He suggests if you don’t have the resources then to shoot an entire movie instead to create the equivalent of a trailer, which he also called a “reel.” The trailer then can be shown to potential investors or directors.

He recommends one book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field, and one word-processing program, Final Draft. On humor columns and humor writing, Cameron sees Twitter and Facebook as great tools to point people to your work, which would in turn be posted at your paper, blog or Web site.

Cameron quote: “A humorist is a real person who lives in a fictional world.”

• • •

Columnist Dave Lieber of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and self-syndicated columnist Suzette Standring pushed columnists to see markets in related fields.

We’re in hard times, Lieber said, and have less time to learn to become better columnists in the dying newspaper field: “Self-preservation trumps self-improvement. We’re talking entrepreneurship.”

Standring noted the related avenues of books (using her Art of Column Writing as an example), public speaking for a fee and even reading your columns on community access cable, either with you on camera or just audio with a slide show as the visual.

“Note the company you keep if you are published in an aggregator Web site,” she cautioned. Publishers and others will judge you by the others posting at the site.

Lieber calls columnists the “hunters and gatherers of information,” and by making that metaphor literal we become “information entrepreneurs.”

The two then engaged audience members to telling the others what non-column endeavors they use to make money.

It’s grim humor, gallows or M-A-S-H, in the face of adversity. It’s the finale of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Newman-Redford quips (“For a moment there I thought we were in trouble”).

Or maybe it’s just plain old glass half-full. Rick Newcombe, CEO of Creators Syndicate, was asked point-blank. “I am totally optimistic about the columnist profession,” he said. “There are so many outlets now. Years ago there were only so many places you could be published. Now with Google [Analytics], you can get feedback instantly, and can use that, and that’s better.”

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times, currently best known for The Soloist, might feel lucky, or might feel invulnerable given his success. But he doesn’t. He just isn’t glamorous. If he sat down at an empty desk in any newsroom — and all newsrooms (no need to hedge with most) have empty desks — not only would he fit in, he might be invisible. He’s got a goatee and thinning gray hair, and was wearing the right clothes. a denim-looking gimme cap, rumpled plaid workshirt, worn and loose blue jeans and scuffed brown shoes. He’s taller and thinner than he seemed on 60 Minutes.

Lopez noted the huge layoffs at his own paper. His own popularity at the paper won’t save it. He too could be laid off. But he does not intend to ship out early, find another career or go it on his own — though he of all columnists obviously could at this point of his career. As he said, “I look for where to fall, [such as] a teaching job, then I write a column that gets a really great response, then I see it’s worthwhile.*

He chose to quote a friend of his, New York Times business columnist David Carr.

We keep shooting until we run out of bullets.”

Does that need explanation? Deal with the future when it happens is how I take it, because it’s what I’m feeling about my newspaper job, which is not as a columnist but an editor and page designer. For myself I cannot plan now because the more obvious career choices are in as bad a shape as mine. The choice I make in three weeks or six months, if I have to make it, likely will be different at those points. It’ll be different in two years, if it comes up then.

The Brick entries from this conference thus come under the heading, “Few Bullets More.”

* This paragraph was updated after I re-examined my notes.

My first movie with two aids took half the show for me to distinguish between sound effects in back and dialogue in front. We should have come early enough for the trailers.

Here at Los Angeles International Airport — My Beloved and I are heading to Ventura for the 2009 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists — I walk from the gate to the terminal, turn my cell phone back on and see there’s two messages. One I can hear, the guy has a strong voice, but it’s nothing that can’t wait a week. The other I can’t make out. The screen indicates it’s a neighbor whom I e-mailed to watch the house while we’re away. Is something wrong already?

Fortunately, MB is right there, and by this time we’re outside and it’s even noisier so I hear even less. She takes the cell, and we learn the neighbor just wants to make sure someone is picking up our mail. She phones on my cell and assures him the cat sitter is taking care of everything. He’s retired and his voice soft. Would a restroom have been quiet enough for me to use the phone? No. Is there a phone booth around? Hah! MB has to phone the shuttle service for an update; I cannot.

All of which is the explainer for a disclaimer. This weekend I write from the Ventura Crowne Plaza, reporting what I hear experts say about columns, newspapers and writing in general.

Or what I think I hear. Others are posting their thoughts as well. Go to the NSNC Web site and scroll to “Blogging the Conference” and check them out. The search engine of your choice will bring you other links.

Dear Ben Pollock,
Congratulations. You are a winner in the “On-line Category” of the 2009 National Society of Newspaper Columnists annual contest. We hope you will be with us to accept your award in person in beautiful Ventura, Calif. at the NSNC annual conference, June 25-28. For more information about the conference, go to www.columnists.com.
Please acknowledge receipt of this notification.
Thanks and, again, congratulations.
Ann Fisher
Contest Chair
Dispatch Metro Reporter
Columbus, Ohio

It’s a tease, naturally, to encourage attendance. My prize could be first, second, third, or second honorable mention. But in the interest of disclosure, for journalism propriety, the following comprised my contest entry:

• Eat Cancer in our Lifetime
• Hydrangea, Sweet Bird of Youth
• Valiance

End of June, I may update this to announce what I won. Also to disclose: I not only am a member of this organization, but an officer, secretary. More disclosure, I’m typing this barefoot. That is, typing with my fingers — what were you thinking? — but my feet are … I’m wiggling my toes, I mean … nevermind, once you start disclosing, it’s hard to stop.