American Society of Newspaper Editors

ASNE, in full, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is a membership organization for daily newspaper editors (both print and online) and people who serve the editorial needs of these publications (wire service editors, news executives at newspaper companies, people who work for journalism think tanks, etc.)

The organization was founded in 1922. Its members come together to share ideas and maintain relationships primarily through its annual convention. The current president is Charlotte Hall of the Orlando Sentinel. The 2009 ASNE convention will be held in Chicago.

ASNE has several initiatives carried out by its committees. One of those is through its Diversity Committee: the Newsroom Employment Census, which queries every daily newspaper in the United States to determine the number of news staffers as well as their gender and race. Conducted since 1978, it is the most accurate reflection of the current state of newspaper newsrooms. Issued at the organization's annual convention, it is used extensively by scholars and others for studying newsrooms. Another initiative is the ASNE Awards. The Distinguished Writing Awards and Jesse Laventhol Prizes are designed to foster, recognize and reward excellence in writing in daily newspapers, eligible news services and ASNE member publications. The Community Service Photojournalism Award recognizes a body of work that contributes to an improvement or heightened awareness in the community through photography. They are for work in a calendar year and are generally announced in February. Winners receive money and are invited to come to the ASNE convention to discuss their work. Given that the overlap of winners for the ASNE Awards and the Pulitzer Prize correlates very closely, they are said to be second only to the Pulitzers in importance.

ASNE also runs several projects, generally carried out by staff with advice from committees. Projects subject areas have included diversity, credibility and readership. Additional projects have included the Institute for Journalism Excellence, a program for reacquainting educators in journalism schools with the newsroom and the International Journalism Exchange, which brings international journalists into U.S. newspapers to share ideas and work experiences.

A major project of ASNE is the High School Journalism Initiative, launched in 2000. Supported by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the initiative hopes to reinvigorate scholastic journalism and student newspapers through partnerships between high schools and daily newspapers and by providing resources to high school journalists like online hosting, a wire service and a national advertising network, as well as a major educational Web site.

The association runs the national Sunshine Week initiative promoting the importance of open government.

ASNE's headquarters is at the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia.

History

The founding of the organization is a colorful one.

In 1912, Louis Hill, the son of "The Empire Builder" James J. Hill, was less enamored with running the Great Northern Railway than he was with promoting Glacier National Park and the "American Alps." To that end, the railway built a series of hotels and backcountry houses with a Swiss chalet theme throughout the area. But before they were finished, to build interest he gave newspaper editors of all stripes free group publicity junkets to the park, whereupon they wrote some truly scintillating copy (a virtual cool respite in some of the oppressive summers of that decade). During one of those - and there were several - Casper Yost of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat was joined by editors from Kansas City; Detroit; Cleveland; Cincinnati; Sioux City, Iowa; Des Moines, Iowa; and Saint Joseph, Missouri. Yost was enraptured both by the stunning beauty of the park and by the fellowship of the editors he met on the trip. It started an idea in his mind of a national newspaper editor's group.

At the time, no editors' organization existed. The American Newspaper Publishers Association (forerunner to the present-day Newspaper Association of America) had existed for years. Formed in 1886, ANPA was the group that newspapers and their publishers belonged to. ANPA's publications were largely tip sheets on deadbeat advertisers and summaries of the legislation (for good or ill) then pending before or passed by the Congress of the United States. Likewise, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association and Inland Press Association existed - largely at a regional level - to serve the interests of publishers.

Yost ruminated over the dream of an editor organization for another 10 years - with World War I intervening - until he was spurred into action by two magazine articles. Published in January 1922 in "The Atlantic Monthly", the articles were by Moorfield Storey, a well-known political independent and the first president of the NAACP, and Frederick Lewis Allen, secretary to the Harvard Corporation and creator (and likely first employee) of Harvard's news bureau. Later he became known for his history "Only Yesterday." The men laid out arguments criticizing newspapers and calling for changes in them.

The articles were thorough in their criticism and proposals and Yost was just as thoroughly incensed. He saw the need for editors to come together to combat such attacks (ironically, something Allen advocated): "I didn't know a half-a-dozen editors in the United States at that time. I couldn't name a dozen of them. We were all living a sort of monastic seclusion in our individual offices, and I thought it would be a good thing if we could get together. Why doesn't somebody do that, I thought. Why doesn't somebody take the initiative and start a society? Then it occurred to me with rather a shock, why not do it yourself? So I did."

Once committed, Yost wrote to a few dozen editors soliciting support. The responses were positive and, just a month later, in February 1922, a small meeting was held in Chicago. Attendees included Yost and editors from Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago. They gathered to discuss action they could take for the advancement of the news and editorial side, to develop a constitution and a code of ethics and to launch a recruiting campaign for the group.

As the best way to reach the largest number of potential members, the editors called a meeting in New York that April, when editors would be joining their publishers and congregating for the annual ANPA meeting (despite no formal mention of them by ANPA in its bulletins). Their efforts were so successful that by October nearly 100 charter members had signed up.

A key question at the time was how ASNE would be different from the existing organizations. ANPA was concerned with publishing issues and legislation; the SNPA and Inland Press were decidedly regional. And membership in all of these organizations was for newspapers - not individuals. The founders decided that ASNE would be an organization of individual editors of big-city papers - limiting membership to editors of newspapers in cities of 100,000 or more. (This became less elitist as the years went by.)

In October 1922, ASNE was launched with directors and officers; they hammered out a code of ethics, named committees and made preparations for the first convention at the New Willard Hotel in Washington the next April.

That convention was the first for the society; it has been held annually - with the exception of 1945 - mostly in Washington.

Since then, every U.S. president has spoken at the organization's convention and it is considered a premier venue for politicians to appear.

External links

* [http://www.asne.org Official Web site]
* [http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=1138 ASNE Newsroom Employment Census page]
* [http://www.highschooljournalism.org ASNE High School Journalism Initiative Web site]

References

* [http://www.asne.org Official Web site] accessed Sept. 10, 2008.