Convention Newspaper Proposal
-- a call for discussion

By Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez

Program Chair

 

    The ASNE, the NAHJ, NABJ and the AAJA do it every year at their convention. Maybe it's time for us, in the AEJMC Newspaper Division, to put together a little convention newspaper, too. Emphasis on little -- maybe more like a newsletter, covering only two or three events in a day.

    Some of us have worked on these convention newspapers since the current model was developed in 1988 by the NAHJ. Before 1988, the AEJMC had produced convention newspapers, but not like the NAHJ's Dallas convention newspaper. In Dallas, the NAHJ used college students to write and photograph and working professionals were their supervisors -- assigning, editing, copy editing and laying out. Dow Jones was nice enough to print the first Latino Reporter.

    What made the NAHJ's newspaper different -- and made other groups take notice -- was that it was a daily paper, produced at the Hyatt Regency hotel convention site, in a restaurant that was converted into a working newsroom – with darkroom facilities close by at the Dallas Morning News. The NAHJ model was so successful that Larry O'Donnell, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, promoted it to the ASNE. Alice Bonner, now a faculty member at Maryland, was the ASNE newspaper's first editor. The other groups each adopted the model and each year, they top the previous year's newspaper.

    The newspapers have become huge and very polished efforts, involving dozens of students and professionals and costing tens of thousands of dollars.

    We in the Newspaper Division have the people resources, that is, the skills to assign, edit, lay out and do some photography and to put it on the Web as well as in a small format. What we may not have is the time to do the full-blown production of the other organizations. In many cases, news organizations give one or two of the top convention newspaper editors time off, weeks, to work exclusively on the project. During the week of the convention, those editors and a few more do nothing but work on the newspaper – long days of 12 hours and more.

    Most of us college professors can't really get "time off" to work on projects such as these. (If you can and want to, please let me know!) We all pile more and more and more tasks on to our main job of teaching. Also, during the AEJ convention, most of us want to/need to attend panels and speeches and have meetings. I'm not sure how many of us could dedicate ourselves completely to a convention newspaper. I know I couldn't.

    Frank and I have discussed this and he, being a realist, suggested that perhaps, if we had a smaller format, like a newsletter, we could still achieve the same goals of training future journalists while providing a public service to our members – giving a synopsis of panels that we might have missed. If we had only a few events in a day, and spread out the editing and copy editing, we might be able to put out a very respectable product that we can all be proud of.

    Let me or Frank know if you're interested in helping out. In Toronto, we'll have some numbers for you to look at, as well as a suggested news budget. We'll see where it goes.