The NSNC president’s newsletter column
President’s Message By Eric Heyl President National Society of Newspaper Columnists My concern for your jewelry ultimately made it an easy call. I’m sure that after seeing Russian President Vladimir Putin step one of his Russian presidential toes into the waters of column writing, many of you were wondering: Would he be invited to speak…
President’s Message By Eric Heyl NSNC President Originally published in The Columnist members-only newsletter As you probably have long suspected, being the NSNC president is extremely cool — and not just because of the large army at my command, the life-or-death decisions I often make and the high-quality stationery that comes with the position. It’s…
President’s Message By Eric Heyl President National Society of Newspaper Columnists What if you crave some pretzels? I’m sure that question is running through some of your minds as the NSNC’s 37th annual conference in Hartford draws near. You’re probably looking forward to the program as much as I am. And why not? The folks…
President’s Message By Eric Heyl President National Society of Newspaper Columnists In retrospect, the email’s timing could have been better. I don’t recall much about the day except a random check of my inbox that proved startling. It was a communique from Sheila Stroup, a columnist from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, whom I didn’t…
President’s Message By Eric Heyl President National Society of Newspaper Columnists The question is well worth pondering. “Why aren’t we promoting the value of NSNC membership?” The query was posed recently in an unsolicited email from long-time NSNC member and author Anne Louise Grimm. Her message recommended selling the organization’s merits not just to columnists,…
President’s Message By Eric Heyl President National Society of Newspaper Columnists Circle the dates. Trust me, it’s OK. The calendar cops won’t appear at your door to arrest you for beginning to arrange next year’s schedule with a full two months of this year still to go. With the nation’s prisons being chronically overcrowded, they…
President’s Message By Larry Cohen President National Society of Newspaper Columnists Decades ago, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant shipped me off to the national conclave of the Episcopal Church, in Louisville. The Anglican natives were restless. There was news to be reported. Sure enough, the assembled faithful slapped around the sort-of-liberal church leadership at the time…
President’s Message By Larry Cohen President National Society of Newspaper Columnists When Steve Lopez, the great L.A. Times columnist, spoke at an NSNC convention a number of years ago, he joked about being labeled a “local” columnist. What exactly did “local” mean in a Los Angeles metro area that sprawled for hundreds of miles, with…
President’s Message By Larry Cohen President National Society of Newspaper Columnists Larry Cohen With the financial help of my mysterious Political Action Committee in the Cayman Islands; with a last-minute surge of support from the National Rifle Association; and with my foreign policy promise to transform Syria into a Disney amusement park; I was able…
By Ben S. Pollock President, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Dear Larry, [NSNC Vice President Laurence D. Cohen is on the slate of nominees for the May 6 election, for 2012-14 president.] This, the columnists presidency, has been a humbling experience. I’ve had plenty of humbling experiences in my life, so I should know.…
By Ben S. Pollock NSNC President It must have been this time of year in 1999, I was on the phone with my mom about soon flying to Louisville, Ky., for that year’s NSNC conference. “You go there and ‘network’ your heart out. That’s what they call it now, right? Chat people up and…
By Ben S. Pollock NSNC President With certainty, the renowned physicist Garrison Keillor noted in his radio spot The Writer’s Almanac: “On this date [Feb. 23] in 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle in a letter. In a nutshell, the Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely we can determine a particle’s…
Ben S. Pollock President National Society of Newspaper Columnists Spring — OK, this is winter but I’m an optimist — is busy-time for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. • We’re halfway through gathering entries for the annual Column Contest. Have you sent yours in? Bloggers: You can’t win if you don’t enter. Like…
By Ben Pollock NSNC President . Who among us still owns a typewriter? My Smith-Corona manual portable that saw me through high school and college is in the attic, but it works. On a desk for addressing envelopes is a bulky Royal office manual. I bought it when the Arkansas newspaper for which I interned…
By Ben S. Pollock President, National Society of Newspaper Columnists A correction has been made. It is noted below the column. The momentary loss of Jim Romenesko writing a well-regarded blog on news media news is the latest example of corporate journalism losing its way. Or it’s another inconsequential demonstration of panic in the halls…
Where’s the Sin in Synchronicity? By Ben S. Pollock NSNC President “How can there be any sin in sincere? “Where is the good in goodbye?” — “Sincere” by Meredith Willson in The Music Man It may be yet another way of stalling the labor of writing, but I’m inspired when I chance upon quotes from…
By Ben S. Pollock President, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Your president is looking out for your welfare. Thank me later. Tracy Beckerman, chairman of the Social Media Committee, although an NSNC member for several years, still is trying to figure us out. Just before Labor Day, the new board member e-mailed me: “I would…
