| President’s
Letter
Improving the knowledge base
by Steve Roll, National
President; Senior State Tax Law Editor, State
Tax Report
 With
the conclusion of our highly successful National
Editorial
Conference began the term of a new slate
of officers for ASBPE. It
will be a tough act to follow. The previous
administration — president
Roy Harris; vice president Portia Stewart;
and treasurer Ira
Pilchen — orchestrated a highly useful
and improved meeting in
New York City in which attendees heard from
the likes of Norman
Pearlstine, former editor-in-chief of Time
Inc., and Stephen Adler,
editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.
But the past administration’s two-year
term wasn’t limited to
glitz and glamour. They also transformed
ASBPE’s ethics code into
an effective tool for addressing some of
the latest business-to-business (b2b) industry
gray areas that have emerged in the age
of the Internet.
The Stephen Barr Award
To me, one of the
most meaningful contributions that the
now immediate past president
Roy Harris made to ASBPE was his work in
helping implement the Stephen
Barr Award for Feature Writing. Named for one of ASBPE’s
most honored journalists who died of
cancer in 2002 at age 43, the award honors
individual writing from among the best
entries
in all of the Society’s Azbee competition
feature writing categories.
Since inception, we’ve seen this
award bestowed to b2b journalists who have
depicted
the lurid world of China’s scrap
metal industry, pointed
out that minorities run
a higher
risk of drowning in community swimming
pools, and exposed
Harvard University’s
disastrous
dealings with the newly post-Soviet Russia
in the early 1990s.
Hardly fading away
Fortunately for ASBPE, volunteer past
presidents do not “just fade away.”We
will continue
to look to Roy for guidance on how best
to serve the needs of journalists employed
in the business, trade, and association
press. Of course, we can’t ask too
much of Roy
because he will be busy promoting his new
book due to be released in December,
Pulitzer’s
Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service
Journalism.
Rob
Freedman and Paul Heney — the past
presidents who preceded Roy — continue
to play vital roles. Rob, who authored
a book due out this fall called Second
Life
Business
Strategies, recently gave a fascinating
keynote address at the Central Southeastern
Regional
Azbee Awards banquet about why the virtual
3-D world of SecondLife has real-world
implications for b2b editors. Paul, who
now is in charge of ASBPE’s international
sister organization, Trade
Association and Business Publications International,
moderated
an engaging discussion on ethics at the
national
conference in New York.
Why all this talk
of the past? The contributions of ASBPE’s
past presidents and other national officers
have built
a solid foundation
for our organization’s future efforts.
This
will include continuing to refine the Azbee
Awards entry process and increasing access
to educational forums specifically aimed
at the b2b press through webinars and chapter
events. It also means continuing to honor
and uphold ASBPE’s new ethics code,
and a
host of other ideas you’ll be hearing
about.
Go
to President’s
Letter Archives
Return
to the Main Archives Page
|
