NSNC Shuffles Off to Buffalo in 2019 Riding Huge Wave of Enthusiasm President’s Message By Chris Carosa NSNC President No sooner had the last bit of swag been packed up from our sold-out June 7-10 Cincinnati Conference then your tireless leadership issued forth a survey asking attendees what they liked most and what they would…
Category: Articles
Miscellaneous articles.
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Mike Leonard, NSNC 2018 Legacy Award Recipient
By Suzette Standring NSNC Executive Director No one does it better than Mike Leonard, the longest-serving member of the NSNC. For selfless leadership over the past 33 years, he receives the 2018 NSNC Legacy Award. And he started just like you. In 1985, Mike wrote his first general-interest column with the daily Herald-Times in Bloomington,…
Nick Clooney: Things I Thought I Knew, and Other Reflections
On June 9, 2018, as people applauded Nick Clooney’s wonderful speech, NSNC member Rick Horowitz sprang into action. Rick asked me, “Any way we can ask Nick for his speech notes?” It hadn’t occurred to me that Nick Clooney had his entire speech written down on the yellow notepad in front of him. Bullet points, sure. But…
Tulsa Writer Accepts Humanitarian Award Quoting Will Rogers
By Bob Haught NSNC Member Ginnie Graham, columnist and editorial writer for the Tulsa World, accepted the 2018 Will Rogers Humanitarian Award with a Rogers quote that expressed her main goal as a writer. Rogers said in 1931: “These people that you are asked to aid, why they are not asking for charity, they are…
Understanding Gender-inclusive Pronouns
By Curtis Honeycutt NSNC Member June is LGBT Pride Month, commemorating the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. Since then, the U.S. cultural understanding of LGBT rights has progressed considerably, although we’ve still got a long way to go (which is akin to saying hammerhead sharks have more to learn about rules of the road before they’ll be…
Isn’t It Amazing What You Do?
You, the Columnist By Dave Lieber Dallas Morning News columnist Isn’t it amazing what you do? Isn’t it amazing that you can… – Get an idea about something interesting and after you write about it, thousands of people know what’s on your mind. – Get paid for that. – Easily take high-quality photos to go…
Rochelle Riley’s NSNC Ties Span Two Decades
By Dave Astor NSNC Archivist Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley has a long and varied history with the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. When Riley worked for the Louisville (Ky.) Courier Journal two decades ago, she was asked by fellow CJ writer and NSNC co-founder Bob Hill to help Hill plan our organization’s 1999…
Ask Alex: Who Owns My Columns?
Dear Alex: I have been working hard on my book. It’s a compilation of about 80 of my columns from the last seven years. However, when I uploaded the completed manuscript to my preferred self-publishing software, it was flagged because the content “is freely available on the web” and they were “unable to verify your…
A Bold Punctuation Prediction for 2018
By Curtis Honeycutt NSNC Member Welcome to the golden age of outrage. If you’re just finishing a three-year social media cleanse, I’ve got some bad news for you: people are ticked off. People are royally ticked about pretty much everything: guns, kneeling, not kneeling, walls, refugees, Starbucks (in general), and anything that remotely resembles a…
Keynote Speaker José Antonio Vargas Exemplifies the Power of Narrative
By Suzette Martinez Standring NSNC Executive Director Putting a human face to a controversial issue is more difficult when that face is your own. NSNC keynote speaker José Antonio Vargas, founder of Define American, will share his story and the power of narrative at the NSNC’s Will Rogers Humanitarian Award banquet on Friday, June 8,…
How to Write Your Most Popular Column of the Year
You, the Columnist By Dave Lieber Dallas Morning News columnist My newspaper added a new tag word for stories. Joining “courts,” “crime,” and “education” is this one: #UpliftingNews. These two words are the key to big stories in 2018. The American audience is so burned out by the brutal news of late that anything that…
Prominent Man from Prominent Family to Speak in Cincinnati
By Dave Astor NSNC Archivist “Fame is relative. Only my relatives are famous,” Nick Clooney quipped when I interviewed him for this story. But that’s a bit of self-deprecation, because the father of actor/director George Clooney and brother of late singer/actress Rosemary Clooney has been – among other things – a well-known TV news director/anchor,…
The Internet Craves Writers
By James A. Haught NSNC Member Newspaper collapse is a sickening reality. More than half of U.S. newspaper jobs vanished rather quickly as advertising revenue eroded. Back in 2001, the industry employed 411,800, but by late 2016 the total had dropped to 173,700. Scores of papers died or went online-only. My own paper, The Charleston…