BOSTON — In any year you have extraordinary times, where many are surprises. That’s to be expected. A few instances are scheduled, and their worth increases with planning. I’ve attended every annual summer conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists since 1999 except 2004’s in New Orleans.
I love the camaraderie most of all, which is a good thing because the serious work of a conference — panels and lectures and mini-workshops — seem to wrap up nearly before they start. Hey, you try to keep a common hour special, much less one that the presenters have planned for months. One problem is the occasional bad session, where sometimes it is rotten and other times it just wasn’t what you the participant wanted or expected. On the good hours, and the NSNC has maybe 85 percent good working sessions, you find yourself panting for the one good comment that will inspire you for months. You get it, but the time receiving it — there goes that whisp.
This morning Mary Ann Lindley of the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat recalled the early days of the society. She was president when I attended the 1991 Charleston, W. Va., convention, which got me hooked. Lindley, and Bill Tammeus of Kansas City performed my request of critiquing a few of my columns in the weeks after the conference. Even nice people don’t have to do that, but they did. But Mary Ann apparently left the Omni Parker House shortly afterward; I didn’t get to thank her.
By the way, I’m just recalling a very few key moments of the work of the conference. You want solid reporting on this, click on Editor & Publisher and poke around the magazine’s search engine with words like “columnists” for Dave Astor’s reports.
Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe recalled one of his early, good editors advising him when starting to write a piece to tune in a jazz radio station and form the “gist of your piece in one sentence. You get one comma.” This forces you to do good reporting before you get to that space, he said.
Obviously it forces you on the next story, a bit late for this one. He lamented Americans in generally running away more than ever from facts and contradictorily wanting the news media to “rattle the cages” while criticizing us.
A panel of female editorial writers followed. The best tip, for me, was Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press (and previously of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier advising, “back up your opinions with reporting, even if it never appears in the copy.”
The session I anticipated the next following: Blogging. As with the best Christmas/Hanukkah/birthday gifts, I felt slightly disappointed, here because there were no huge revelations or insights. I appreciated the small ones, though.
Bill Tammeus of Kansas City noted these wild days of newspaper-sponsored blogs being unedited or slightly edited are dwindling. The trick to increasing hits is to create “links, links, links” in your posts.
Sheila Lennon of the Providence (R.I.) Journal to my relief called RSS a “big wastebasket.” Lennon prefers to just bookmark her favorite blogs and to find others via Google, rather than the news feeds that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) compiles.
Moderator Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor (the NSNC conference rookie I most appreciated meeting) sought the best clear definition of the ideal blog. It’s a “snippet,” he said, though the usual definitions — journal, diary, essay — are accurate too.
Lunch gave us a Harvard man, Alex Jones of the Shorenstein Center. He was a pessimist on continuing financial stability of newspapers, although he allowed that commentary is for the moment “hot, so hot that The New York Times can get away with charging” for its opinion makers like Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman.
Tom Regan spoke on Editing Columnists in the afternoon. The trick with columnists from other fields, especially scholars or professionals, is to consult with them before they begin writing so they know what to do to some extent and what to expect what happens when you edit them.
Ending the day formally was a reception at Suffolk University Law School’s new library. My favorite part was the library’s collection of antique maps of Africa, discussed casually by its chief cartographer. My first work-study job at Stanford was in the map collection of its Main Library, where I learned a bit about such old charts. -30-
