A new day requires a new structure

Opening membership and electing presidents to longer terms will give the organization the strength to battle those who would raise profits at the expense of standards

By Roy Peter Clark

The proudest moment of my professional life was the day I was elected a distinguished service member of ASNE, which I consider the world’s most important lobby for journalism values. Its leaders, starting with Gene Patterson in 1977, have been my mentors, confidantes and friends. It’s because I love ASNE that I’m calling for its reform.

Why change now?

Because ASNE is losing its influence.

Because many loyal journalists need a stronger beacon than the one ASNE has the power to provide.

Because the lobby for profit is consolidating, while the lobby for journalism excellence is ineffectively scattered.

Because the good work already done by the society is hiding under a bushel when it should be the light of the democratic world.

Consider the attendance list for the 2001 ASNE convention, published on 3/28/01. It shows the effects of an economic downturn: One working editor from each of the following states: Delaware, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. Zero from Colorado. Only three newspapers represented from the state of New Jersey. Some chains not sending anyone. Fewer than 300 working editors in all. With travel, training, and news budgets cut, with staff cuts in the wings, with buy-outs and sell-outs, many top editors chose not to send themselves for a week of surf ‘n’ turf with the hoity-toities.

Beyond the effects of the economy, it was hard not to see ASNE as a shrinking institution: shrinking in size, in confidence, in relevance, in influence. In the 1970s and 80s, with a generation of news titans at the helm, ASNE was afraid of its own power. It shied away from flexing its collective muscles, preferring a loose confederation exercising occasional moral suasion.

The 2001 ASNE convention revealed that the old ways need changing. It took Jay Harris to fall on his sword for the ASNE membership to show a little life. Gone are the days when top editors could call the shots within their companies. Power has shifted way over to the corporate side, and nothing that Harris did is likely to change anything. Most ASNE editors have too much at stake personally to take a stand, and who needs a battlefield full of dead editors, anyway.

A solution, I suggest immodestly, is the re-invention of ASNE. Here’s how it could work:

ASNE would greatly expand its membership to include younger editors, as young as the department head level. As a first step, ASNE and APME must overcome petty territorial differences and merge.

ASNE would create a distinguished service auxiliary — senior writers, first amendment advocates, educators, new technologists, folks who can expand ASNE’s thinking and help it fulfill its public service mission.

With its new membership, ASNE would work to expand its power and influence, revisiting its mission, purpose and strategic position. It would lower the costs of entry, and seek strong alliances with all institutions that share its mission, and forge new relationships with the citizens who need journalists to do their best work.

To make this happen, ASNE would need a new leadership structure. Now obsolete is a president with a one-year term (and a day-job running a newspaper). Imagine an ASNE president with rich editorial experience (a Sandra Rowe, perhaps) who leaves her newspaper job and assumes a three-year term (renewable for another three) as head of the world’s most powerful lobby for excellence in journalism.

Like many journalists and educators raised in the 1960s, I’m suspicious of the exercise of power for its own sake. But some countervailing force to the influence of Wall Street must be created to balance profit interest and public service. The alternative is the creation of secret societies of journalistic goo-goos, wringing their hands, but powerless in the face of an insatiable economic force.

In the important new book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tell a story about a group of editors gathered around a campfire in the Rocky Mountains in 1922. As owners of news organizations began proclaiming the value of editorial independence, these editors seized on the opportunity to create the first organization to promote the values of a responsible press. The result was the founding of ASNE. With many of its values now at risk, it’s time for ASNE to return to the campfire, feel its warmth, and begin again.

Clark is senior scholar at The Poynter Institute, where he teaches writing and editing.