By Tom Waseleski

It's amazing how quickly a year goes by. In September 2009, I stood
before you as NCEW acting president and reported that our organization
faced stiff challenges on membership, revenue and even participation -- most, if not all, of it due to the sweeping changes in our industry.

A year later, I must report that not much has changed. There's good news
on the participation front, though. We have a full slate of six
candidates for three board seats, attendance at this year's convention
is up appreciably and there was a jump in the number of members who went
to the annual State Department briefing. But NCEW is still stymied by
declining membership and revenue. Two years ago, we counted 405 members;
a year later that fell to 340, for a drop of 13 percent. Today we have
289 members, after slightly greater slippage of 15 percent.

For the first time in memory, we have no members at the Arizona
Republic, for instance, no one at the Nashville Tennessean and no one at
the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware. If you know someone there, call
and tell them about NCEW. Word of mouth has always been our best
recruiter. Even so, we took considerable steps on the membership front.
We advertised on the Romenesko web site. Last fall, our membership
committee launched a major drive -- and some of you helped -- in
contacting non-NCEW opinion journalists listed in the E&P yearbook and
spreading the word about NCEW. The board even offered newcomers a
bargain dues rate of $75 and reduced everyone else's dues by 10 percent.
This month, at the suggestion of Pete Wasson, I offered an executive at
one of America's best-known newspaper chains a special deal to enroll
100 of its opinion journalists in NCEW at a low bulk rate. We'll keep
you posted on that.

On revenue, we asked and received major help from our friends at the
Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, who have the contract to run our
home office. After reducing its NCEW management fee for the fall of 2009
by 13 percent, PNA gave us a 20 percent reduction for calendar 2010.
That resulted in our administrator, Pat Stroble, going from five days a
week down to four, but she has been loyal to NCEW and managed to serve
the organization just as well in less time.

Much of our revenue hemorrhage is due, of course, to less dues income.
So in the last year NCEW has tried to become more entrepreneurial. We've
offered advertising on our web site and had at least three takers: the
Heritage, Kettering and Scripps foundations to the tune of $1,500 since
January. Treasurer Froma Harrop has formed a committee to promote and
generate more ads on the web. This year, under the leadership of
convention chair Keven Ann Willey and her planning committee, we broadened
the approach to convention advertising and sponsorship and reaped
significantly more dollars and in-kind services as a result.

Due to the work of board member Miriam Pepper, NCEW dusted off an old
name -- the Opinion Pool -- for use with a new service: opeds that NCEW
is paid by advocacy groups to post on our web site for free use by our
members in their news outlets. The first promotion, including posting
rates, went out to syndicates, trade groups and other oped generators in
July. A special Opinion Pool discount was offered to exhibitors here at
the convention.

Another front on which Miriam has been busy is the iPhone/iPod app.
After months of consultation and prodding with business students at the
University of Missouri, Miriam has been pressuring them to finish a
class project that will result in America's Opinions, an NCEW app that
the world can download for free. It will contain the editorials of NCEW
member news organizations and be sortable by subject, region and other
factors. While there's no revenue stream attached to it yet, we intend
to use it as a membership builder because you've got to join NCEW to have
your editorials included.

One more new NCEW venture is a national opinion writing contest, which
could debut next year, pending NCEW board approval. This has both
revenue and membership raising possibilities. After initial study and
exploration by Vanessa Gallman, the contest was developed by a committee
led by David Holwerk. Its details will be taken up by the board in
Dallas, and you'll hear the results of its decision soon.

NCEW and key members have worked hard this year on other, more
traditional fronts. Lois Kazakoff, who is completing her two-year hitch
as Masthead editor, saw publication last fall of the final printed
edition of our erstwhile quarterly magazine. Now the Masthead, as
reinvented by Lois, is entirely online, visually attractive and
constantly updated with new material.

The Masthead could not have migrated to our web site without the
dedication of web editor Dan Radmacher, who doubles as NCEW's vice
president -- at least for a short time. Today we do more with and get
more from the NCEW web site than we could have imagined a few short
years ago. That's due to Dan's commitment to innovation, which will
serve NCEW well when he takes over as president.

On another front Jonathan Gurwitz, who for years has put together the
annual State Department briefing, was concerned along with me that we
might someday lose this premier members' benefit due to slumping
attendance. To boost the briefing's numbers last April, the NCEW board
voted to hold its spring meeting in Washington, D.C., the day before the
State Department event. And in December I asked the NCEW Foundation to
consider offering a $200 stipend to help cover the costs of any member
who attended. I am happy to say the foundation was very supportive and
approved that stipend. As a result of both actions, attendance at the
briefing was much better. In 2009, 18 people went to the State
Department, but only 12 of them were NCEW members. In 2010, all 20
participants at State were from NCEW, including seven board members.

In response to concerns that the NCEW officers' ladder was too long,
thereby discouraging good candidates for leadership, our members amended
the bylaws to combine the offices of secretary and treasurer, beginning
after the convention. That means no election in Dallas for a
secretary-treasurer. To make the transition, Bob Davis will keep his
secretary's hat and assume the treasurer's post as well for the next 12
months. You'll recall we accomplished this bylaw change with NCEW's
first secured, electronic membership vote back in the spring.

This was the year to produce a new member's directory, and we did so with
the help of $1,430 worth of advertising. You can see that NCEW in a very
short time has gone from a priesthood that marketed only chances for the
Foundation Celebration to a revenue-conscious organization where many
things are for sale.

That is, many things but our principles -- and we spoke out this past
year in a friend of the court brief along with several other news
associations on behalf of Bloomberg News. Bloomberg was forced to go to
federal court to obtain information it had been denied on banks that
received federal bailout money. Bloomberg won the appeal.

Finally, NCEW has been approached by the Associated Press Managing
Editors to hold a joint convention in 2012 to gain some efficiencies. We
have discussed these partnerships with other groups in recent years,
but, as you know, none has come to fruition. Even so, our leaders and
members have to remain open to such moves and think creatively and
aggressively about the future. It's what we have tried to do in the last
12 months. It's what will pave the way for NCEW's survival.


Tom Waseleski
September 2010

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If you haven't followed the lively discussion on the list-serv last week about whether or not to use a letter where the writer says the president is a Muslim, Richard Prince offers a great summary in his thrice-weekly column for the Maynard Institute, "Journal-isms." Here's the link.

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Here's something worth saving in your bookmarks:

http://www.ncew.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=OpinionPool&category=Masthead

It's the link to NCEW's new Opinion Pool, a trusted old name that now describes a new member service: free opeds. These pieces are posted on the NCEW web site and can be used by NCEW members in their newspapers and online. An innovation spearheaded by board member Miriam Pepper, the Opinion Pool is also a way to generate revenue for our organization, since the groups that generate the essays pay to have them posted by NCEW.

If you lose the link, all you need do is go to the NCEW homepage and in the Quick Links section click "Opinion Pool." We've already sent marketing letters to 100 prospective clients (oped services, advocacy groups, trade associations, universities, etc.). If you know of organizations that might be interested, please refer them to Pat Stroble at HQ for more info.

In the meantime, check out the two essays on the Opinion Pool now and feel free to make use of them. Please let Pat or me know if you do. This is a new way for NCEW to help its members while also helping itself.

is Sree Sreenivasan, who will be presented with this year's Barry Bingham Award for his outstanding efforts in encouraging minority students in journalism. Sreenivasan, who is a professor of digital media and the dean of student affairs at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was interviewed on NPR's "Morning Edition" recently�about the Wikileaks story. Check out his comments:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128789544

For NCEW members living and working in the gulf states, the national big story of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is their story. They see it, smell it, live it every moment of every day. It informs their lives, sparks their creativity and animates their writing. In short, they are energized, not exhausted, by the topic.

NCEW member Jane Nicholes tells what it is like to write editorials and commentary on the biggest story of her career and her community in Mobile, Ala. The commentary, she says, is not about some political philosophical debate in Washington. It is about oil fouling her home. You can read her commentary here.

NCEW Secretary Bob Davis, editor of the Anniston Star in Anniston, Ala., lives a five-hour drive from Alabama's coast.� Most readers, if not all, he says have a strong connection to Alabama's beaches. The paper has encouraged readers to submit commentary and has used crowdsourcing, offering readers with first-hand experience at the gulf, to share their stories with readers.

Here are two commentaries from Anniston:

"The gulf's sad season"

"An open letter to Mr. Hayward"

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