In mid-May, I received the following e-mail: 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 […]
There’s been e-talk among the membership about renaming the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I was for it, liked some of the proposals, but now I’m agin it. It’s not that I’m sore that my suggestion, International House of Toast (nod to Bob and Ray) was ignored. We would be following the path of a […]
The 2009 deadline of a long-running column-writing contest, now open to bloggers, is less than a week away. Entries for the seven categories of the annual contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists need to have a postmark — or time-stamp — of Sunday, March 15. Five of the categories are traditional: humor and […]
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock NEW ORLEANS — You had to be here, you have to go here, to fully realize what’s going on here. If that is true then what of the Indonesian tsunami that began Dec. 26, 2004? Do you have to go to Iowa to understand its massive flood this month? You […]
NEW ORLEANS — The second speaker for the columnists conference was Jarvis DeBerry of the Times-Picayune. He had a heck of a column Sunday showing how this month’s flooding in Iowa and The Storm (Katrina-Rita of 2005) have at least this much in common: deliberate damage to wetlands to benefit humanity in what has become […]
NEW ORLEANS — Come, see for yourself. My fellow conferees and myself, being journalists, have read about The Storm since it blew in Aug. 29, 2005, and refreshed ourselves before coming to town. Even though we’re writers, some of us very good, none can explain the devastation and slow recovery as effectively as being here. […]