The Grant Professionals Certification Institute has conferred the Grant
Professional Certification upon JPS Health Network/Partners Together for Health
shining lights Johnell Kelley, left, and Janet Neff. Four people in Texas
received the honor this year, and only 170 nationally.
Van Artiaga and René Smith have joined the Hondo Group as traffic manager and public relations
director, respectively. Artiaga, far left, was an account director for Lowe
Worldwide in Vietnam, with clients including Coca-Cola and Unilever, before
moving to the United States. She holds degrees from the University of Sciences
and Humanities in Vietnam and the University of Economics in Vietnam. Smith, a
graduate of Texas State University in San Marcos, was a senior account
executive at a communications firm in Houston prior to joining Hondo. She
specializes in the technology, health care, real estate, transportation and
consumer goods industries.
“Where in the world are Richie and Tom?” PRSA’s Richie Escovedo, left, and Tom Burke are still on the road, searching high and low for interesting locations and new members. If you recognize this stop in March, tell them at tcburke@us.ibm.com or rescovedo@mansfieldisd.org. That was Bob Keller in the February photo greeting them at the Petroleum Club in
downtown Fort Worth. Keller has been the Petroleum Club's security officer for
the past 13 years. Watch the May eChaser for a new photo and March’s location revealed.
SPJ national update: FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is seeking an inquiry into why an Alabama television station blacked out a
controversial segment of the CBS News magazine “60 Minutes.” WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, blacked out civil rights footage from the
1960s in a Feb. 24 story on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on corruption charges. Siegelman says he was wrongly
convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican
prosecutors and White House political adviser Karl Rove. More here and here. ... The Hachette Book Group recently distributed hundreds of Sony Readers to
its editors and publishers. “People are evangelical about it,” says publisher Jonathan Karp, who has about 30 submissions on his Reader. “If you’re traveling, this is so much easier than lugging around manuscripts.” Agents selling to Hachette’s imprints now must e-mail their texts to acquiring editors, who download them
to their Readers; paper manuscripts are no longer routinely circulated. More here and here.
SPJ national update II: A judge is trying to bankrupt an ex-reporter with daily
fines of as much as $5,000 for refusing to disclose her sources for stories
about the 2001 anthrax attacks, press advocates assert. They also say that the
case involving Toni Locy, a former Associated Press reporter and now professor at West Virginia
University’s journalism school, shows why Congress should pass a federal shield law. “What he’s (U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton) doing is essentially saying, ‘Toni Locy, I am going to destroy your life,’ “ said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. “This is just plain crazy. I know you’re not supposed to call a federal judge arrogant, but this is arrogant.” More here and here.
SPJ national update III: Critics of Fox News regularly complain that the network beats up on Democrats and takes comments out of context. Usually, though, those critics are not Fox anchors. Chris Wallace, host of the weekend political talk show “Fox News Sunday,” took the hosts of “Fox & Friends” to task for their conversations about Sen. Barack Obama’s comments about race. His complaint — which created both a tense moment and some must-see TV — was that his colleagues were taking those comments out of context. “It seems to me that two hours of Obama-bashing on this ‘typical white person’ remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say,” Wallace said March 21 during his regularly scheduled segment on the morning show. More here.
SPJ national update III: Critics of Fox News regularly complain that the network beats up on Democrats and takes comments out of context. Usually, though, those critics are not Fox anchors. Chris Wallace, host of the weekend political talk show “Fox News Sunday,” took the hosts of “Fox & Friends” to task for their conversations about Sen. Barack Obama’s comments about race. His complaint — which created both a tense moment and some must-see TV — was that his colleagues were taking those comments out of context. “It seems to me that two hours of Obama-bashing on this ‘typical white person’ remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say,” Wallace said March 21 during his regularly scheduled segment on the morning show. More here.
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Gun Rights: All Talk, No Bolt-Action
by Cory Armstrong
“If the Second Amendment were simple to understand, it would not have been taken
to the Supreme Court.” There you have it, Fort Worth SPJ’s March meeting at Saltgrass Steak House in north Arlington, capsuled by J.R. Labbe, gun owner and Star-Telegram deputy editorial page editor.
Labbe, Second Amendment specialist Bob Franklin and Marsha McCartney, co-president of the Dallas chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun
Violence, presented a lively lob and volley, complete with anecdotes,
statistics and insults from the audience. Nothing was resolved, but the drama
was high.
“Even among scholars, the Second Amendment is the most misunderstood of all the
amendments,” noted Franklin, a Collin County Community College history professor. “Is it a federal guarantee for an individual to carry a gun?”
Franklin said the Second Amendment should be read in the context of the Tenth
Amendment as well as the Supremacy Clause. Together, he said, they show why the
U.S. has 50 gun laws in 50 states. Had the founding fathers intended to give
individuals the right to have guns, they would have used the word “people” in the Second Amendment instead of “person,” he said.
McCartney took a similar stance. The Brady organization wants to increase public
awareness of guns, show people how to stop gun violence and especially
strengthen background checks. “Every journalist should attend a gun show,” she said, citing the ease with which all manner of firearms are bought and
sold.
On the other side of the issue, Labbe cited often long or nonexistent emergency
response times as just one justification for owning guns for protection. “In Fort Worth, 10 percent to 16 percent of emergency calls are put on hold,” she said. “A lot can happen in five to seven minutes.” Emergency response does not even have to answer a call, she said, much less
send someone to a house.
Concerning the role of the media in the debate, all agreed that more education
is needed. “It (reporting) is hard. That’s why we’re trained,” Labbe said, “so you can learn how. Words matter and how things are phrased.”
Franklin said the media has a responsibility to explain both sides of the story.
McCartney put it this way: “We all need to do our homework.”
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PEOPLE & PLACES
The Hondo Group plans an opening celebration May 1 for its newest office, in
Darlington, Wis. ...
Mike Cochran won the Jack Douglas Award for contributions to the Texas Associated Press
Managing Editors, and UTA’s The Shorthorn was named the state’s top college daily newspaper at the Texas APME convention March 29 in
Galveston. The TCU Daily Skiff tied for third with The Daily Toreador at Texas
Tech. Star-Telegram/La Estrella stalwarts Andrea Ahles, Charean Williams, Jason Crane, Jack Z. Smith, J.R. Labbe, Gaile Robinson, Danny Robbins, Jan Jarvis, Robin Loveman, Mark Hoffer, Jeremy Cannon, Constanza Morales and Raul Caballero won 12 awards, including three first-places. Shorthorn alumni Darren Barbee with the Star-Telegram and Reese Dunklin, Laurie Fox, Tom Fox, Jamie Huckaby and Tom Setzer, all with The Dallas Morning News, also won awards at the APME convention. ...
TheShorthorn.com, propelled by Daniel Johnson, Troy Buchwalter and Adam Drew, is one of nine four-year daily college papers in America, and the only one
from Texas, to be named a finalist for the Online Pacemaker Award, a
prestigious honor bestowed by the Associated Collegiate Press. And the UTA
paper won 13 awards, including first-places to Isaac Erickson, Marily Jacob and Matt Raney, in Columbia University’s Gold Circle competition on work by Caleb Gremmer, Zabrina Ransom, Cassie Smith, Anthony Williams, Rebekah Workman and Dominic Bracco.
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