Thank you for electing me president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Didn’t you hear? I have not published a running column since Sept. 16, 2001.

Instead I’ve written at www.benpollock.com/brick for nearly seven years. After the first year, the water warms up. Blogging is how I’ve coped with the recession and the panicking publishing industry. We’re all attacking this differently. The iceberg appeared so suddenly. As president, I’ll help the NSNC help you.

We cannot reverse the value of your home, though.

I joined the NSNC in 1991, toward the end of its First Wave: staff columnists but also writers like me, editors or reporters with columns on the side. Through conferences and newsletters we gave one another advocacy, support and education, leavened with irreverence.

In the mid-1990s the Second Wave began to roll in, free-lance columnists from veterans to novices. The First Wave hung on, with more staff columnists joining. High jinks ensued.

The Third Wave has started. We added online-only columns to the annual contest. Then we welcomed blog-columns, where entries must be bound by commonly accepted journalism values and honor the three-century history of newspaper columns in tradition, format, spirit and variety.

Important: The NSNC needs all three waves. The NSNC serves columnists everywhere at all levels of experience, in all media and formats, through education, support and advocacy. A column is a running series of essays, from personal to persuasive, employing research and reporting or extending to fantasy and satire. Written columns are the most common, but audio and video essays are no less valid. Journalism standards and ethics are observed in columns.

A column is a column in essentially any media. It’s a technical term, medium, meaning canvas, stone, paper, pixels etc. Newspaper as a medium is abstract. It always has had different forms.

Decades ago, neighborhood sheets would be run off on mimeographs (Google it) and be called X. In San Francisco and Liberia, a few journalists now write news and comment on chalkboards calling them X. Our papers call their websites online X. Salon.com and Slate.com update several times a day like multiple-edition X — they’re all newspapers.

So we columnists board the good ship NSNC — lifeboat or yacht — and watch for icebergs. Maybe I’m thinking arctic because it’s past 90 and not even noon yet in Arkansas.

– This column was first published in the August 2010 edition of The Columnist,
the monthly newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

The 2010 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ended with the annual general membership meeting. It had the usual agenda — the executive director reviews numbers from the budget (holding the course), of members (only slightly down), of contest entries (up a bit) — plus committee reports and (drum roll) election of officers.

Views and details on the conference are linked at a special page in Columnists.com. No one probably will write up the business session. Still, the page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indefinitely.

NSNC Oath of Office, Sunday, July 11, 2010. Photo by Bonnie Squires

With no nominations from the floor, we elect a slate, conference chair, secretary, vice president and president. The last job on that list now is mine through summer 2012. I claimed all weekend that I’d vote for any write-in candidate, serious if they were, but none offered.

Now I start pleading for impeachment. The self-deprecation is getting old, but I did not seek this job. Helping the NSNC as a board member for five years has been a blast. But it has had a few resignations, due directly and indirectly to the Good Depression, so here I was Sunday, neither “acting” nor “interim” but letterhead-official.

What’s unexpected is how confident I feel.

The membership meeting aims for 90 minutes because people always start leaving for the airport, and President Samantha Bennett wrapped it up in 60, including a non-agenda discussion on the society’s advocacy role. I had ready an inaugural address, about what I said at the Thursday board meeting, but I scuttled that in favor of writing it up for the NSNC newsletter. I’ll post it as a Brick, too. But I did organize a mock Oath of Office, perhaps to join the Sitting Duck and Mystic Tie traditions.

NSNC Education Foundation Secretary Dave Lieber administered the oath. First lady Christy Pollock held an Ernie Pyle volume, on which I placed my left hand. In my right I hoisted a fountain pen. It was loaded.

I, (name), do soberly swear,
To advocate for the craft of columns, in the field of journalism,
To abide by the Code of Conduct of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists,
To represent the National Society of Newspaper Columnists as (title).
How great Art –
– Buchwald.
Thy Will –
– Rogers.
So help me, Erma and Ernie.

-30-

Columnists tour Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, Ind. Photo by Christy Pollock

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Saturday night, July 10, 2010 — The learnin’ part of the Saturday portion of the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ended at noon, unless you’re a columnist (published or not). The usual field trip either can be written about or learned from. Lunch and and tour this time were both, a visit to the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center.

• • •

The hour “On Creativity” featured not a writer but a veteran jazz composer and musician, David Baker, chair of IU’s jazz studies department. He was right, the chops of creativity are about the same for any of us.

Baker has three rules, and they seem to come from the motivational world.

1. From a late pastor, A.W. Tozer: “Time is a resource that is nonrenewable and nontransferable. You cannot store it, slow it up, hold it up, divide it up or give it up. You can’t hoard it up or save it for a rainy day — when it’s lost it’s unrecoverable. When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.”
2. “Excellence is not an accident. It comes from hard work and vision.”
3. A riddle: “I’m your constant companion,” and continues with good and bad traits, such as “I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.” and ends, “Who am I? I am habit.” Good advice from “author unknown,” but it’s office-poster copy.

Baker says he needs a deadline for composing. He finds word games helpful, he’s especially fond of anagrams, as they keep his mind sharp even musically. “Compose at a regular time. in a regular place, have all necessary materials at hand.” “I don’t get locked in any single element. Anagrams help in this. The goal is to state what you’re intending with the greatest possible economy. Anagrams help me see things from different angles, to find the best one, to find an unusual one.” “I’ve written over a thousand pieces; that’s not an overestimate. Some were awful and thank goodness have never been performed.”

Another good quote that Baker recited, and I didn’t catch its author, “Any music that is not heard live is doomed to extinction.”

Baker mentions he teaches a course on Duke Ellington. At the Q&A, I noted that Ellington and Pyle were contemporaries, coming into prominence in the 1930s, and ask how he makes Ellington relevant in 2010 to non-music majors and non-jazz fans, which we could use with Pyle, increasingly obscure with time.

“To teach Ellington, it helps to show what was contemporaneous with Ellington at the time. What we know and what is less known of those times. He didn’t live in isolation.”

• • •

The columnists couldn’t convene in Ernie Pyle’s home state and his home university without a panel on the renown newsman. Lauri Lebo is researching a book on Pyle’s life in the 1930s — before the World War II writing that engraved his name in history. Owen Johnson, an IU professor, is a longtime Pyle scholar. Moderating was longtime NSNC member Mike Harden.

They reviewed Pyle’s life. Johnson has a solid biographical essay online. In the 1930s Pyle traveled the country with his wife and wrote columns on small-town America. The panelists had a fun word for these pieces, “vagabondage.” I have a book of these, and they recall CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road.” But Kuralt died 13 years ago. That’s three generations of journalism majors who didn’t see him on TV.

The best feature of the hour was receiving a copy of a collection Harden co-edited, On a Wing and a Prayer: The Aviation Columns of Ernie Pyle, 1928-32. I read them on the return to Arkansas. I’d grown a little tired of the NSNC patron saint and his halo, but these pieces were a revelation. Ernie Pyle in his war columns had occasional wit, but a dozen years earlier he could be downright funny, even snarky.

• • •

An authentic buffet awaited us at the Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center: Mo-mos (dumplings), chicken and vegetarian, fragrant rice, marinated cabbage salad. A local woman, Dawa, dressed in native costume, touchingly sang traditional songs a capella (not on purpose but the CD player wouldn’t work), and the center’s director, Arjia Rinpoche, explained the center and the monastery elsewhere on the 108-acre grounds.

Also speaking was a center board member, Elaine Irwin-Mellencamp, wife of rock star John Mellencamp. They live with their children in Bloomington. She and Rinpoche summarized the principles of Buddhism (compassion and wisdom) and how a major center for Tibetan culture and Buddhism ended up in south-central Indiana. Well, it was founded by the eldest brother of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Thubten J. Norbu (1922-2008) was a professor at Indiana University.

The rinpoche (no mere monk but a high-level, recognized-in-childhood, reincarnated lama) also gave a short autobiography. Earlier this year, Rodale Books published his memoir, Surviving the Dragon: A Tibetan Lama’s Account of 40 Years under Chinese Rule. I’m halfway through it, and it’s a fast read, and sad. He stayed in China-controlled Tibet for years longer than other Tibetans (most of whom fled to India), which helped the people greatly but put him in danger many times.

We ate in the library of the center, of which one corner is a Buddhist alter, then had a walking tour, past prayer wheels (one solar-powered), two stupas (shrines), ending at the monastery, whose major room downstairs was a temple. No pews, folks, floor pads and just a few chairs, and by the way leave your shoes on the low shelves at the door on entering. The alter is stunning, full of two- and three-dimensional religious pieces. Nearby on two displays are holy books and ritual objects of major religions, whose spiritual leaders helped dedicate the monastery not that many years ago.

Some colleagues have put their insights on the center and overall conference in columns and blogs, many of which can be found at a special page at Columnists.com. The page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indefinitely.

• • •

Besides the Sitting Duck award, which goes the easy column subject or target of the past year, the annual ugly tie award went to the same entity to BP.

The Sitting Duck specifically went to BP executives over their handling of their oil spew in the Gulf of Mexico. As the press release noted, “In this year’s case, the Sitting Duck is like shooting fish in an oil barrel.”

The Kramer Mystic Tie Award is named after Jeff Kramer, whose left-behind necktie at an NSNC conference in 198-something in Mystic, Conn., was mounted on a plaque. The contest is announced by the previous year’s winner, who gives a topic for which columnists have 24 hours to write its opening paragraph.

This year, 2009 winner Smiley Anders of the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate provided the set-up: “BP has a foolproof way to stop its oil gusher.” The winner was Brian O’Connor of The Detroit News, who explained the best cap for the leak has turned out to be a truck load of the pillow-sized, anatomically correct (well, not the colors), Peruvian fair-trade puppets, one of which was shown to us Friday by researcher and blogger Debby Herbenick of the Kinsey Institute.

• • •

There’s two kinds of speeches delivered by recipients of the annual Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award, older-professional to younger-professional tips and what newsroom veterans call war stories, the latter being journalists explaining how they won or lost major scoops, the odder the better. The best are a combination.

Our 2010 winner, Carl Hiaasen of The Miami Herald (not to mention best-selling writer of humorous mystery novels) did both. He accented “war stories.” How could he not, being a Floridian? (“You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. … Florida, folks, land of perpetual sunshine. Let’s get the auction started before we have a tornado.”) — Groucho Marx’s character, The Cocoanuts, 1929)

One thing I’ve come to admire in Hiaasen’s books, whether adult or juvenile, are his manly men. Huh? His protagonists, and I say this as a straight guy, are hunks, reminiscent of the witty and decisive guys like Raymand Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. I love the Michael Chabons of our generation, but the men are too much like me, wimpy, with page upon page of wondering what to do. Hiaasen heroes just do it. May screw it up, but they up and do.

I mentioned that to Hiaasen, and he shrugged. That view was new to him, he said. He works hard to ensure his heroes have serious flaws. Well they do, but they’re still not sissies.

Hiaasen, 57, was a reporter then had a metro column that ran several times a week. Now it runs just on Sundays, and he writes from home.

“I don’t know how anyone stays fresh as a columnist without waking up each morning with a feeling of injustice, of anger. We have [plenty of] material.” “I think it’s good to be angry. … Newsrooms were exciting, the smoke, the energy. … Now they’re like mortuaries. I’m glad I don’t have to go in anymore.” “Stay pissed off. That’s my best advice. It’s what I tell students. It’s not hard.”

“I do believe in karma. Columnists can do good, even if we feel we’re not reaching anyone, maybe you are, it [may be just] one person.” “Jimmy Breslin said, ‘The worst sin for a news writer, is to be boring.’ With south Florida, I don’t have that excuse, though I have been boring sometimes.” “You have a duty to your readers to do your best.” Effective columns can have different frames: “You can write a scathing satirical column or a soapbox rant or just focus on one little guy [and how he was victimized].” “A columnist is a virtuoso. Not every piece is a masterpiece. I do think it’s the Lord’s work, and I don’t talk like that lightly.”

Along the topic of newspapers weakening, often apparently at the hands of short-term corporate owners who don’t understand their customers’ true wants and needs, Hiaasen said, “If you don’t do anything bad, you can outlast these bastards.” “You become more important to the community, the longer you go. Some newspapers dump columnists, and they live to regret it. The columnist is a franchise. It doesn’t matter the size of the community. It’s a voice that you can’t find in any other medium.”

Asked he how does both columns and novels, he said, “For me, it’s therapy. If I didn’t write satires, I’d take a rifle up into a tower.” “The advice I’d been given is, and it’s true: ‘Ass in chair,’” referring to a daily writing schedule, not waiting for inspiration. “You go home [from work, in the years when he was in a newsroom] and write. That’s it. No, it’s not easy on the family.” “Novel-writing uses a different muscle than columns, 100,000 to 120,000 words versus 700, 800 words.

What began his environmental focus? “I can’t show my kids where I played. Those places are gone, they’re parking lots or worse.” “The [BP] spill is an atrocity against the planet, a criminal atrocity.”

Ed Grisamore accepting Will Rogers Humanitarian Award at Oliver Winery, Ind. Photo by Christy Pollock

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Friday, July 9, 2010 — “Get Schooled” was the columnists’ theme this year, our conference hosted at a university for the first time, Indiana. Appropriately, our informal welcome Thursday night was at one of the town’s oldest college hang-outs, Nick’s Pub.

The meat of a conference like this is made up of lectures and panel discussions, and this meet was one of the most abstract held by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. A few people were disappointed and I could see what they meant, but most loved it. Russell Frank of Penn State called it mind-expanding. For the first time, My Beloved attended nearly every session, because the schedule looked promising and it fulfilled that.

What was it? First, what it was not. There were neither one-hour how-to’s on writing and publishing or state-of-the-business/craft analyses, which are our norm. Bloomington’s Mike and Mardi Leonard instead found people to talk about creativity itself, with a couple of insightful tangents.

This and the next Brick are on the long side, but they’re not complete. More than ever this year, reportage and comment can be found at a special page at Columnists.com. The page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indefinitely. It’s not just that every conferee got something a little different from the next fellow from the presentations, but also that the writing is fine.

• • •

Leading up to the conference every year, one program whets my appetite. This time it was “Choosing the Right Words,” with three published novelists who are former reporters or columnists.

Scott Russell Sanders, a novelist but mainly a memoirist. For him (and me) columns are essays: “Montaigne created the word essay, defined as a trial, an attempt, and it also survives in the word ‘assay.’ It looks for understanding that we don’t yet have,” he said.

Historical novelist James Alexander “Jim” Thom, participated with his wife in all conference events. Thom finds a famous moment to weave fictional pieces through: “The historical incident defines where I can go in my story, its boundaries.”

“We columnists — and I am a former columnist also — are the first historians of anything that happens,” Thom said. “Compare something present with something in the past. To get the reader’s attention, you have to connect [it] with the big picture.”

The celebrity role was played by Michael Koryta, whose latest novel, So Cold the River, has been well reviewed this summer. He cited storytelling techniques, the narrative toolbox, pointing out “the visual points of contrast: “All this [the tools of the novelist] can be helpful to columnists. Showing place, story and character in short fashion.”

“As long as the protagonist wants something, even just a cup of coffee, the audience will go along,” Koryta said. “A novel always starts with character. I want to mirror the internal battle of the character with the plot, which is external.”

“I’ve always want to write fiction,” Koryta said. “But took Hemingway’s advice to heart, about any fiction writer should first work for a newspaper, for as short a time as possible. [My] working for a small paper was especially useful, because it was small: Not too much exposure. Plus close witness of great writers” at their craft nearby in the newsroom.”

• • •

The communications-research presentation was near and dear to the NSNC, a presentation on a content analysis of Bill O’Reilly. Let’s put “near and dear” in quotes, that’s it. O’Reilly spoke at our Philadelphia conference in summer 2007 and his talk was, shall we say, consistent with his cable talk show.

Two IU academics, Mike Conway and Betsi Grabe, explained their award-winning paper, which studied the language O’Reilly uses on his program The Factor. Grabe and Conway believe O’Reilly employs propaganda tools, and cited two books from the 1930s, when Fascism and Naziism surged, with the great help of radio. In this country was the periodic growth of isolationism and hate speech. The volumes are The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father [Charles] Coughlin’s Speeches — edited by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee,  and The Fine Art of Propaganda by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.

From these Conway and Grabe told us of the Seven Propaganda Devices: Name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, plain folks, bandwagon, testimonial and card stacking. Their definitions are self-evident and, while I’d agree, to me it’s also an applied form of rhetoric, which debaters, lawyers and even spouses use to enhance communication as well as to game it. My conclusion is the scholars have a point, now what? O’Reilly ain’t going anywhere, and there’s more where he came from. Importantly, it’s nothing new.

• • •

Dinner was at the nearby Oliver Winery, with largely organic, locally raised food from the Farm restaurant.  The Friday night event was highlighted by Ed Grisamore of the Macon, Ga., Telegraph accepting the 2010 Will Rogers Award for humanitarian works by a columnist. Grisamore said, “Once I might have said I was lucky, and now I’d rather say I am blessed, that I always wanted to be a writer.”

The society created a new honor this year, to thank longtime NSNC members for service to the organization and to mark their successful careers. The inaugural recipients of the Legacy Award were Bob Hill, retired from the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, and George Smith of the Anniston (Ala.) Star. Smith said, “What we do is not rocket science. What we do is tell stories about real people … just like Ernie Pyle did.”

• • •

It may have little to do with creativity, or come to think of it quite a lot, but the most-anticipated  speech of the weekend did not disappoint. Debra “Debby” Herbenick, Ph.D., talked about her place of employment on campus, the Kinsey Institute, its history and its founder, Alfred Kinsey, played by Liam Neeson in the 2004 bio-pic.

She noted the importance of Kinsey’s champion, late IU President Herman B Wells (no period after B). Oliver Platt played him in the movie. Wells’ name came up other times during the weekend. As a resident of the University of Arkansas’ home town for over a decade, I couldn’t help but admire Wells. Indiana is no more liberal than Arkansas, which is to say not much, so his successes in promoting academic freedom to state officials is impressive. I wondered about the forested look of the campus — that was Wells’ environmentalism. He fostered a top music school and campus art museum (so fine I hope the curators of Bentonville’s coming Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art have studied its collection and presentation), as well as recruiting international scholars, such as the brother of the current Dalai Lama and refugees from Nazi Germany.

Back to Herbenick. How she steered a middle course in communicating itself provides a writing lesson. She could’ve made this a biology lecture. After all the institute studies biology and behavior. Or we could’ve watched her channel a routine by Chelsea Handler. After all a research facility not only gathers but distributes data. After her engaging talk she answered written, anonymous questions from us, demonstrating a Kinsey principle that she said began in the 1960s: “We provide information, not advice.”

• • •

My friend Bill Tammeus guided the remarks of Alvin Rosenfeld from IU’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, an on-stage interview, as seen on BookTV. Bill having left the Kansas City Star has continued a religious journalism, exploring spirituality. Nearly every year he gives a program at the conference, and it’s always worthwhile.

Rosenfeld hit all the expected marks, and that was disappointing. Bill and colleagues in the  audience kept after him with close questions, but he kept to his lines. Washington politicians these days are accused of working from the same scripts. Late night comedians feast on showing clip after clip of Democrats and Republicans using identical catch phrases. I never thought of pro-Israeli Americans doing that but gosh, Alvin, we’ve heard all this before, for 62 or more years. The same people are listening — well, dozing off because they’ve heard it before — and the same other people still refuse to listen. The victim-to-underdog “shtick” no longer “kills,” to channel Jackie Mason (Am I the only Jew never to have found Mason funny?).

• • •

Speaking of humor killing, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Joel Pett is hard. Talking with him the evening before then after his presentation, he’s a quiet, gentle soul, reminding me of our mutual friend, the cartoonist John Deering. But when Pett runs his slideshow then easel-and-marker live-show, I found refreshing his undisguised rancor, anger and hostility. I enjoy lots of editorial cartoons online and haven’t seen in contemporary editorial panels venom like Pett’s. It’s old-fashioned and in the best way. Where Deering is thoughtful and pointed, Pett doesn’t bother cleaning his knife in-between.

Opening for Pett, if that’s what it was, was NSNC member Rick Horowitz of Milwaukee. Besides his print work, my friend Rick creates video columns for public TV in Wisconsin, often employing song parodies, perhaps the Jewish Mark Russell? No one then may have been surprised when he asked for volunteers to sing with him, a childlike round about the BP oil gusher, “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.”

It closes, “There’s a risk to the pol in the poll of the gasp at the slick from the plume from the spill / In the hole in the bottom of the sea.”

These are the sorts of insights that help columnists. Just like hearing fiction writers. We have no limits, except the ones we put there. Pett — and Carl Hiaasen — have publishers who understand readers want strong, unique voices and not timidity. Lesson: You can blame economics and it wouldn’t be wrong, but we do have other avenues if we choose. That’s why the Internet in general and blogs in particular are growing.

I had a question of Pett, “You’ve said you’re the only employed cartoonist in Kentucky, We columnists have noticed that cartoonists are the canaries in the newspaper coal mine.”

Pett’s answer: “If you can’t bite the hand that feeds you, … it’s not real, it’s not fun. There were 250 of we cartoonists and now 54 of us — with jobs, that is. Democracy will survive without cartoonists, but it will not survive without reporters. The bastards will get away with even more.”

A college or visitors’ bureau — I forgot which and couldn’t find it again on the return to the airport on Monday, July 12 — mentioned it was No. 16 in the country for some best-of poll. In a poster, mention means boasting, else why would it be in the corridor welcoming you to the region?

Proud of 16th place?

Another placard, for West Baden Springs (Ind.) Hotel, proclaims it is ranked No. 15 as a destination hotel by Conde Nast Travel. Ooh, 15. Say I’ve got a couple or three thousand bucks to fly to then use the facilities of a resort spa. Wouldn’t I aim for one of the 14, probably hit a Top 10? (Caught my eye because we did stay there Sunday night the 11th. We were very happy with everything about the place, a top-shelf spa-resort whose staff are professional without being snooty, and my is that rare.)

Indiana Southeast University wants airport travelers to know it has the ninth best part-time MBA program.

These are bragging rights? I’ve never seen anything like that, not on highway billboards or news articles I edit.

Here’s a trick from Arkansas, which places often in two lists — among the most poor, most illiterate, most uninsured and the other list comprising the least wealthy, least literate and least sufficient medical insurance.

Round ‘em off.

The resort hotel, if it were in my home state, would be in the top 15. Think of all the resorts around, and that’s high praise. The business school would shout it’s in the top 10. Colleges like being in the top 10.

On a scale of 1-1,000, Brick has a Technorati Authority of 110. No. 1 most weeks is Huffington Post with a TA of 921. If you poke around in there, most blogs have an authority of 1.

On the other hand, a town up the road, Rogers, is No. 10 on the CNN/Money list of 100 Best Places to Live. Doesn’t need an “in the top 10,” not when there’s thousands of similar cities considered. Doesn’t need fluffing at all.

Card-Carrying Columnist Card

A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in July in Bloomington, Ind.

VP should be just another officer and not particularly noteworthy. First I was archivist from 2005-07, then elected secretary and last summer re-elected minutes-taker. It’s cool that it’s a national group, but also comfortable in not being too big, around 300 members in a given year.

But veep is not just another officer. According to the motion, I am “to be willing to be on the slate as a nominee for president at that meeting.”

That’s what I’m in for. And barring nominations from the floor — a qualified candidate could get my vote — I’ll be out front for 2010-12.

Here’s the thing. I am a former newspaper columnist. My last print-published column, Loose Leaves, was dropped when I was downsized from that newsroom, in fall 2001. I’ve repeatedly made the fact known to board and lay members alike. For several years, different people have suggested I make myself available to the nominating committee, but I’ve insisted the NSNC president has to be a columnist. It’d be like the Bar Association run by a subpoena server, the Teamsters headed by a CPA, the American Veterinary Medical Association led by a Shih Tzu.

Times are changing. No need to detail here changes in the newspaper business/craft/industry/profession/racket.

The motion by longtime member, and currently newsletter editor, Robert L. Haught lists, too generously, my alleged qualifications:

The president needs to be someone who has been a member of NSNC long enough to know the organization well, who has demonstrated genuine interest in the future of NSNC, who is attuned to the conditions in the news business that affect columnists, who is articulate, promotion-minded, persuasive and able to lead. Ben possesses all these qualities and more. He has gone beyond the responsibility of the offices he has held to provide valuable assistance on the web site, the contest, the bylaws and other areas. He is the right person at the right time to move into a leadership position he has earned.”

But, I am a former newspaper columnist. For nearly six years, my 40-hour, insurance-carrying job has been news page designer and copy editor. When I was a columnist, it was always a weekly gig, a few hours taken from my business-card title of some kind of editor or another.

On reflection, though, I’m a former lots of things. Ex: reporter, metro editor, editorial page editor, low-brass musician, watercolorist, freezer assembly lineman, wire editor, photojournalist, book and show critic, public radio news producer, journalism scholar, college instructor. …

Former isn’t forever. Most of these things I can pick up again, should something happen to the current gig. Buy a picture of a trombone?

No worries: I am a columnist in a 21st-century sense: I blog. I opened my Web site back in 2002, a long time for this medium.

Most of our members who still produce columns for newspapers have an online presence as well, both staff and freelance writers. Yet we’re gaining members whose essays run solely online, either at their own or on broader sites.

Sure, among my former selves, newspaper columnist is tops. I’m a realist, though, so I press on under my own masthead. Brick gets a lot of hits.

These are interesting times. Thank heavens I’m still a columnist.

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.