MPA eBulletin

Sunshine Week is March 15-21, 2009. Member newspapers are encouraged to mark the occasion with editorials and news stories reporting on the status of open government in your communities and across the state.

The Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information will hold a press conference on the steps of state Capitol March 17 at 10:30 a.m. to discuss the current climate in the Magnolia State and work done by organizations such as MCFOI, MPA, Common Cause and others to foster more transparency and  openness in government.

Sunshine Week public service ads are available for use online and in print. The ads’ theme focuses on how Freedom of Information and Sunshine laws can make people local heroes by making a difference in their communities when they get involved and hold government accountable.

Web ads are available in three IAB-standard sizes: a 125×125 button, a 468×60 banner and a 120×600 skyscraper.

The print ad, available as a print-ready PDF download, utilizes a colorful comic book style to remind young people that they can make a difference in their communities. There is room next to the Sunshine Week logo for local branding.

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

Two publishers have been appointed to fill vacancies on the MPA-MPS Board of Directors.

Joel McNeece, publisher of the Calhoun County Journal in Bruce, was appointed late last year by MPA President Randy Ponder to fill the unexpired term of Patti Guider, who resigned last fall as publisher of the Ocean Springs Record. McNeece has worked at the Bruce weekly since 2001. He previously was news editor of the Winona Times and Carrollton Conservative. McNeece, who is married to former MPA President Lisa McNeece, currently serves on the MPA Governmental Affairs Committee and is a past board member of the MPA Education Foundation. He is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi.

Paul Keane, publisher of the Wayne County News, has been appointed to fill a weekly board slot created with the affiliation of current board member Charlotte Wolfe changing from the Itawamba County Times to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. Wolfe, in turn, is filling a vacancy created by the resignation from the board of Skippy Haik, whose publisher position at The Hattiesburg American was eliminated in January.

Keane has served as publisher of the Waynesboro weekly since 2007. He previously served as the publisher for the newspaper from 2004-2006. He also has served as publisher of The Atmore (AL) Advance and as general manager of Louisville Newspapers, including the Winston County Journal, Choctaw Plaindealer and Webster Progress-Times. He is a native of Dallas and a journalism graduate from Southwest Texas State University.

“We are very pleased that these two very talented newspapermen have agreed to serve on the board,” said Ponder, publisher of the Sea Coast Echo in Bay St. Louis. “Their enthusiasm and passion for this business will serve us and the entire membership well as we work for the betterment of our industry in these challenging times.”

Both men will serve until the summer convention, at which time their appointments will be ratified by the general membership.

Nominations for the MPA Hall of Fame are now being accepted. The honor is awarded annually to a journalist who made his or her reputation in Mississippi, or who is a native Mississippian with distinguished career nationally or abroad.

Deadline for nominations is April 1, 2009.

The honoree, who may be living or deceased, is recognized during MPA’s annual convention, this year set for June 18-21 at the Beau Rivage Resort in Biloxi. Recent honorees have included the late Edgar Crisler (2008), former publisher of the Port Gibson Reveille, and the late Murphy Weir (2008), publisher of the Weekly Democrat; Ruby Del Harden (2007), longtime publisher of the Itawamba County Times; the late Dan Phillips, former co-publisher of The Oxford Eagle; and Stanley Dearman (2005), former publisher of The Neshoba Democrat and the late Mildred Dearman (2005), longtime executive editor of The Carthaginian.

Nominees stay in contention for a two-year period and anyone nominated in 2008 need not be renominated this year to be considered.

Download the nomination form here. For more information on the Hall of Fame program, email Beth Boone or call 601-981-3060.

The annual O.C. McDavid Journalism Conference, sponsored by the MPA Education Foundation, will be held Thursday, March 26 from 10am-2pm at the Agriculture and Forestry Museum in Jackson.

Dr. Samir Husni, chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi, is the featured keynote speaker and will address the state of journalism and changes in its delivery. Marshall Ramsey, editorial cartoonist for The Clarion-Ledger, will also make a presentation during the program.

About 100 students from journalism and communication programs at Mississippi’s universities and colleges are expected to attend. The program will culminate with the presentation of the Better Newspaper Contest – Student Division awards at 1pm. MPA members and Foundation supporters are welcome to attend; there is no registration fee and lunch will be served. The cost is underwritten by MPAEF.

This is the 10th anniversary of the conference, established in 1999 via the O.C. McDavid Memorial Fund administered by the Foundation. The event is named after the late O.C. McDavid (pictured), a former managing editor for the Jackson Daily News, who actively pursued a second career as an artist and sculptor aftering retiring from journalism. Attendees receive a copy of McDavid’s autobiography, “My Name is O.C.”

For more information on the conference, email Beth Boone or call 601-981-3060.

From CNNMoney.com | Hearst Corp., is getting set to launch an electronic reader that it hopes can do for periodicals what Amazon’s Kindle is doing for books. According to industry insiders…has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

From AP | New York Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch apologized Tuesday for a cartoon that critics said likened a violent chimpanzee shot dead by police to President Barack Obama.

Aggregating the more dour and dire headlines of the past week…

SAN FRANCISCO – Dean Singleton, whose company owns nearly every daily newspaper in the Bay Area outside of the San Francisco Chronicle, remained mum on whether he would be interested in the Chronicle following Hearst’s announcement that it may sell or close the paper.

PHILDADELPHIA – Philadelphia Newspapers, in its bankruptcy filing yesterday, and the Journal Register Co., a Pennsylvania-based newspaper chain that filed for bankruptcy Feb. 21, said they will try to reduce what they owe lenders, using court protection to shield them while they restructure.

NEW YORK – If you think about the free newspaper movement worldwide, you’re likely to think of Metro International, certainly the largest player with papers in key cities around the globe, including the U.S. Now Metro’s in trouble, and its trouble speaks to the troubles facing the entire freesheet business model, which relies entirely on advertising. Can it even work in these new, tougher times?

NEW YORK – The New York Times Co. says it is snapping its wallet shut, and will have enough cash to meet all its obligations in 2009.

DENVER – Colorado’s oldest newspaper will publish its final edition Friday. The Rocky Mountain News, less than two months away from its 150th anniversary, will be closed after a search for a buyer proved unsuccessful, the E.W. Scripps Co. announced.

During its meeting Jan. 29 in Jackson, the MPA Board of Directors approved the membership applications for two southeast Mississippi publications.

Joining the Association as full active members are The ReView of Jones County, a weekly newspaper in Laurel, and the East Central Link, a weekly tabloid-format paper published in Hurley in Jackson County. Representatives for both publications attended the MPA Mid-Winter Confernence recently in Jackson.

The ReView is published by Laurel-based Gin Creek Publishing. Former Star-Herald publisher Mark Thornton is leading the staff at the paper. The Link is owned and published by Cherie Chesser of Hurley.

The additions put MPA’s full-active membership at 107, down from 108 in 2008. The net decrease is attributed to the cosolidation of longtime members the DeSoto Times Today and DeSoto Country Tribune into the DeSoto Times-Tribune and the Amory Advertiser and Aberdeen Examiner into the Monroe Journal.

Additionally, the Newton Record shut its doors Jan. 14.  But that newspaper has been succeeded by the Newton Appeal, launched by Union Appeal owner Jack R. Tannehill. That newspaper will be eligible for membership, per MPA bylaws, in January 2010.

The deadline to enter the 2008 Better Newspaper Contest-Editorial Division is Tuesday, Feb. 10. Entries must be received at the MPA office by 5 pm on this date. Please note: Entries postmarked Feb. 10 but arriving after the deadline will not be accepted.

Rules and entry packets are available by emailing member services manager Beth Boone.

Two bills, one in the House and one in the Senate, that would have paved the way to move public notice (legal) ads from newspapers onto the Internet have died in committee during the 2009 term of the state legislature. A third bill, sponsored by Sen. Walter Michel, has been amended to create a study group to explore future possibilities.

MPA was opposed to the two bills that died in committee, which would have opened to bidding the publication of legal notices by online Websites. Representatives of MPA argued the Association has already initiated a no-cost solution for government agencies by launching mspublicnotices.com several years ago. Although not all Mississippi newspapers are currently participating in the program, MPA will be contacting those publications to get them on board in the coming months.

Participation in neighboring state association online public notice Websites soared in recent years after similar bills challenged newspapers’ position as the trusted third party to publish information about government business.

The two bills that died in committee were sponsored by Rep. Rita Martinson and Sen. Hillman Frazier.

MPA contends that as home Internet penetration continues to be comparatively low in Mississippi, moving public notices wholesale to the web would decrease transparency in government. In the meantime, it acknowledges the importance of having these notices aggregated online on a central, third-party server and continues to build mspublicnotices.com as part of the process.

Saturday, Feb. 7 is the earlybird registration deadline for “REWRITE$: Main Street, Media and the Recovery,” an economic-development conference for journalists and developers from the public and private sectors at Alabama’s Jacksonville State University March 5-6.

The conference will feature an outstanding lineup of speakers, including three keynoters with ties to both journalism and economic development: David Bronner, CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, which owns CNHI and Raycom Media, a group of television stations; Edgar Blatchford, a former mayor and state commissioner of commerce who founded a chain of rural newspapers, ran an Alaska Native Corporation, and now teaches journalism at the University of Alaska; and Jack Schultz of Agracel Inc. and Boomtown USA, a venture capitalist who writes and speaks regularly all over the U.S. about rural development.

Other speakers will include Vaughn Grisham of the McLean Institute for Community Development at the University of Mississippi and Lionel “Bo” Beaulieu of the Southern Rural Development Institute at Mississippi State University, who will discuss community-based economic development.

Full descriptions of the program and logistics are available, on the Web site of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, by clicking here.

Click here for a text-only listing of winners from the 2008 Better Newspaper Contest-Advertising Division. Visit the MPA Photo Archive to view and download photos from the 2009 Mid-Winter Conference at the Jackson Marriott Downtown.

The MPA Education Foundation Roast of Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant was another smash success in raising funds for journalism education. Attendance was on par with the 2008 event, with both topping the list as the best-attended fundraisers for MPAEF this decade.

From philly.com | Newspapers are contributing to their own woes by offering virtually of their intellectual property free for the taking on the Internet. Writes Stu Bykofsky: “…all newspapers have been crippled by the migration of classified ads to the Internet. That’s gone and it’s never coming back. We can, however, recapture content, if we dare.”

From the New York Times | With print media facing serious declines in revenue, many in the industry are beginning to question what exactly Google may owe to them for redistribution of their product content.

From AP | On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: A pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE. The image, as has been acknowledged by its artist, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington. The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation.