Selected articles from the NSNC newsletter; only members get the entire contents of the monthly newsletter
Samantha Bennett NSNC President I’m taking the buyout. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for which I’ve worked for 14 years and written my column for a decade, offered buyouts to the entire staff in late December, with a get-out-if-you’re-going deadline of New Year’s Eve. Happy holidays. I weighed my joblessness in a vile economy…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram www.yankeecowboy.com There’s a recession in the U.S. economy, but a depression in the newspaper business. Not a financial depression, but a mental one. Everybody in the newsroom and in the executive suites is giving up. Worse, nobody in the business is standing up on a chair…
By Dave Lieber, Fort Worth Star Telegram I am insecure about my life as columnist. I worry about my next column, my next error. I worry about repeating myself. I fear the next time my boss gets irritated with me. My hate mail adds fuel to the fire, as does my lack…
By Mike Argento, NSNC President I was reading a New York Times story about a $7 million libel verdict in a case filed by a judge and former Chicago Bear kicker against a newspaper columnist in Illinois when I stumbled upon a stunning passage. The story said, “The newspaper’s lawyers said they were handicapped because…
Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star Telegram Columnist Secretary, NSNC Education Foundation I feared the worst. Of the 110 columnists whom I hosted in Grapevine, Texas three years ago for the 2005 NSNC conference, how many still have columnist jobs? I decided to find out. Sent an e-mail survey to all e-mail addresses…
Samantha Bennett Pittsburgh Post-Gazette NSNC President Got that tired, run-down feeling? Are you pressured to do more with less, slash your expenses, take on extra duties, learn technologies you’d rather not? Worst of all, are you worried that your column is getting into a rut? You can’t wangle any more vacation, and besides,…
By Samantha Bennett NSNC President I don’t mean to frighten you, but I’m also sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know: This is a weird and scary time to be a columnist. Almost every week, it seems, another newspaper announces layoffs or buyouts. Polls show the public doesn’t trust us or…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist www.yankeecowboy.com My first journalistic mentor was noted writer H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger. While in high school, I read his columns in the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper and decided I wanted to be like him. I enrolled at Penn, and in my first week as a freshman…
Samantha Bennett Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Hello, NSNC. I’m Samantha Bennett, and I write a weekly humor column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Having been your membership chair and vice president, I’m now your president for the next two years. I ran on the strength of my cartwheeling prowess — but let me tell you a little more…
I was going to write about our upcoming conference in New Orleans, or how I’ve spent the week doing stuff like recording podcasts and scripting Web videos and producing parody ads. But I can’t. Not right now. My friend Jim Hubley died. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor just a few days…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Secretary, NSNC Education Foundation www.yankeecowboy.com I looked all over for my Wall Street Journal. But it wasn’t there the other day. No, the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News and my own Fort Worth Star-Telegram were lying there on the driveway. But no Journal. This bothered me. I…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation www.yankeecowboy.com Listen up! If you write a newspaper column that appears three times a week, once a week or once a month, and that’s all you do related to that work, then you, my friend, are dead in the…
By Mike Argento, NSNC President York (PA) Daily Record A couple of episodes ago on “The Wire,” a terrific TV show created by former ink-stained wretch David Simon, there was a scene that may be of particular interest to columnists. To digress, each season of the show has dealt with a different institution that has…
By Dave Lieber www.yankeecowboy.com Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation Suzette Martinez Standring underwent a career change in the 1990s, deciding to pursue her dream of becoming a newspaper columnist. She launched a column, joined the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, became a self-syndicator, acquired a base of several papers,…
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation www.yankeecowboy.com By Dave Lieber [Editor’s Note: Dave Lieber’s longstanding “Really Bad Column” is changing its name to “you, the columnist.” In a reflection of changes in our industry, the old title was a mirror image of the author’s own definition of his work,…
By Mike Argento, NSNC President York (PA) Daily Record A new baseball stadium opened this summer in our small city here in the heart of what we fondly call Pennsyltucky. It’s a beautiful ballpark, even if it is still under construction. It sits in a crook of the Codorus Creek, which flows through the center…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation Competitors One of the best things about being a newspaper columnist is you get to compete, really compete, with columnists on other regional newspapers. And you can laugh at their foibles, and they can laugh at yours, too. It’s all…
