MPA eBulletin

The presidents of the three state press associations participating in the Tri-State Press Convention met in Tunica for an afternoon session planning the upcoming event. Pictured (from left) are MPA President Reece Terry, publisher of the Daily Corinthian; Arkansas Press Association President Barney White, publisher of the Ashley News Observer in Crossett; and Tennessee Press Association President Victor Parkins, publisher of The Mirror-Exchange in Milan. The convention kicks of June 23. Full details and registration information will be mailed to members in April and also available from the Tri-State Web site.

An annual observance promoting transparency in government is coming up and MPA will coordinate shared editorials and commentary for the use of member newspapers. Sunshine Week is March 14-20 and a number of editorials written by contributing members and FOI advocates will be available for release in the days prior.

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, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

Sunshine Week is led by the American Society of News Editors and is funded primarily by a challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami.

Information on the editorial series will be emailed to members in the coming days. For more information, email Layne Bruce.

Member newspapers who are contributors to the MPA Education Foundation are eligible to receive a grant up to $1,100 for the employment of summer interns at their newspapers. The program is funded annually by MPAEF; up to 21 grants will be awarded this year.

Members interested in applying for a summer internship can download the form here.

In 2009, 18 member newspapers participated in the program, which allows journalism, communications or media students to work at member locations for a period up to 11 weeks. As long as members employ the interns at a rate of no less than minimum wage, MPAEF contributes an additional $100 per week to help offset living and other expenses.

Deadline to apply is April 31. For more information, contact Beth Boone.

Registration is open for college and university students attending the annual O.C. McDavid Journalism Conference later this month at the Mississippi Craft Center in Ridgeland. Around 100 students, educators and MPA members are expected to attend.

The keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Will Norton and visiting Professor Michael Stricklin of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss. The Student Better Newspaper Contest Awards will also be presented during the program.

MPA members are invited to attend and lunch will be served. There is no registration fee. The program begins at 10 am March 25. For more information, email MPA Education Foundation coordinator Beth Boone.

AP | Shares of newspaper companies rose last week, helped by a series of positive quarterly results. In the most recent round of financial reporting, publishers have generally shown that they can cut enough costs to deal with drastic declines in ad revenue. Many say they see things trending in the right direction despite an uncertain economy and online competition for ad dollars.

USA Today | The U.S. Postal Service must make drastic changes to avert a projected loss of $238 billion over the next decade, including closing post office branches and raising prices, Postmaster General John Potter said Tuesday. The Postal Service also released further details about its proposal to scale back to five-day delivery, saying it wants to eliminate Saturday deliveries. The move from six days to five could save the Postal Service $3.3 billion a year, Potter said.

The Associated Press is setting up a division to help the news cooperative, newspapers and broadcasters sell digital products directly to readers on the next wave of Internet-connected devices such as Apple’s iPad. The AP’s chief executive, Tom Curley, announced the new business unit, called AP Gateway, during a speech Friday to the Colorado Press Association.

The annual O.C. McDavid Journalism Conference, sponsored by the MPA Education Foundation, will be held Thursday, March 25 from 10am-2pm at the Mississippi Crafts Center in Ridgeland.

Dr. Will Norton (right), Dean of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at Ole Miss, will be the keynote speaker.

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 11th 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,  a former editor of the Jackson Daily News who actively pursued a second career as an artist and sculptor after 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.

A Publishers Roundtable, sponsored by MPA and the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, will be held in Tupelo March 11, the first of a series the Association will host over the next couple of years.

MPA executive director Layne Bruce said the purpose of the sessions is to hold an open conversation between publishers and general managers concerning common goals and challenges currently facing the industry. “This program will be somewhat informal and conversational in its style,” Bruce said. “And it is open to managers at newspapers of any size; we want everyone to participate.”

SNPA has been hosting roundtables across the southeast for some time. The first Mississippi meeting will be held at the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. If successful, future sessions will be held at several other points in the state. The sessions will begin mid-morning, include lunch and adjourn by mid-afternoon so those attending will be home by the end of the work day.

“We’ll be sending invitations to publishers, owners and general managers within a couple hours drive to Tupelo,” Bruce said. “But any member is invited to these sessions.”

Invitations will be mailed to members in the next 10 days. For more information, email Bruce.

MPA is looking for volunteers to help judge the Arkansas Press Association editorial Better Newspaper Contest in April. The judgings will take in two locations – April 22 in Jackson and April 23 in Grenada.

Judging sessions will begin around 9 am and end by 4 pm each day. Lunch will be provided for volunteers.

About 30 judges, 15 per location, are needed for this contest. Please consider volunteering; it is a very important component for reciprocal judging between states. If you are someone on your staff is interested in helping, please contact MPA contest coordinator Monica Gilmer.

Photos from Mid-Winter, including the MPA Education Foundation Benefit Roast of Blake Wilson, are available by clicking here. In addition to the roast, photos can be downloaded of winners from the annual Better Newspaper Contest-Advertising Award presentation.

If you attended the conference, please take a moment to fill out the post-event survey. Responses and feedback are a big help in planning future conferences.

Associated Press via ABC News | Gannett Co. posted its largest profit of the year in the fourth quarter as cost-cutting efforts were aided by a lessening decline in advertising sales. But shares of the biggest U.S. newspaper publisher tumbled after company executives didn’t offer any hope for an upturn in newspaper advertising this year.

New York Times | Extracting payment from online readers has been called everything from the next great folly of print journalism to its salvation, but to get a glimpse of how it really looks, head to Lancaster, Pa.

MORE: Murdoch says pay model coming in next two months.

eMarketer | The recession has inspired a thriftiness in consumers that some believe will outlast the economic downturn. Bargain-hunting Internet users have turned to price comparison hubs and coupon sites in increasing numbers, but according to data from Adweek and Harris Poll, Americans think the best places to look for deals are still offline.

The board and staff of the Mississippi Press Association and Mississippi Press Services wish all our members and clients a Merry Christmas! We will be closed Dec. 24-25 for the holiday. Our offices will also be closed on Jan. 1 for New Year’s Day.

Speakers on topics ranging from print ad sales to online revenue streams to designing effective advertising for both mediums will be on the agenda at next month’s annual Mid-Winter Conference in Jackson.

Joe Piergrossi, president of PIER Associates, will address conference attendees on subjects such as building effective sales teams and helping advertisers meet their needs. Alan Jacobson, a noted news and advertising design expert and a popular speaker, will presents programs centered on video advertising and putting the advertiser first with display advertising.

Gary Sosniecki of Townnews will also present a program for small-to-mid-size newspapers for improving online advertising revnue. Sosniecki previously made a presentation to MPA members on launching Websites for small papers during a multimedia conference here in 2008.

The conference will kick off with the 2010 MPA Education Foundation Roast on Jan. 28. A special reception at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in the Renaissance at Colony Park will highlight Friday evening. Events will again conclude with the annual BNC-Advertising Awards Luncheon Saturday, Jan. 30.

Click here for information on registering for the 2010 conference. You may download a registration form or choose to sign up online with a secure payment through PayPal.

House ads promoting the upcoming MPA Education Foundation Roast of Mississippi Economic Council President & CEO Blake Wilson are now available for download.

Wilson will be the guest of honor for the 20th annual roast, which has honored Gov. Haley Barbour, longtime journalist Sid Salter and the late Jerry Clower in past years. Salter will again serve as roastmaster for this year’s event.

Click here for additional information on the roast.

Make your reservations soon at the Jackson Hilton for the annual Mid-Winter Conference to be held Jan. 28-30. The cutoff date to receive the MPA group rate of $105 nightly is Wednesday, Jan. 6.

Members attending the conference should call the Hilton direct at 601-957-2800. Reservations can be made online by clicking here.

Updated criteria and entry forms for the 2009 Better Newspaper Contest-Editorial Division will be released Dec. 31. The information can be found by logging on to mspress.org/bnc.

Contest entries are due to MPA by 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, March 2, giving members an extra month’s time to get their submissions in. The contest has traditionally deadlined in early February. For more information on BNC, contact Beth Boone.

This year’s contest will be judged by the members of the Arkansas Press Association. Awards will be presented during the Tri-State Press Convention in Tunica, June 26, 2010.

From Editor and Publisher | Due to overwhelming reader and advertiser demand, Editor & Publisher will publish its next issue, the January 2010 edition, as planned, Editor Greg Mitchell announced Thursday.

Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal expounds on the paper’s call for donations to support its Website | “A longtime reader called recently with an unusual response to one of our investigative projects. As an online customer of The Miami Herald, he said, he wanted to make a contribution to support aggressive journalism. “I’d be glad to pay,'’ he said. “Can I send a check?'’ The answer was, well, no.

From Advertising Age | The Kindle’s popularity among consumers has let Amazon run roughshod over magazine and newspaper publishers, commanding as much as 70% of subscription revenue and refusing to tell publishers the names of their own subscribers on the device. Now rivals are giving publishers what they want.

To all our members and clients, Happy Thanksgiving from the board and staff of MPA/MPS. We will be closed Nov. 26-27 for the holiday.

Mississippi Economic Council President and CEO Blake Wilson will be roasted by the state press association during a charitable benefit Jan. 28 at the Jackson Hilton Hotel.

Wilson, a former journalist who is only the third chief executive for MEC in its 60-year history, will be the guest of honor during the 20th anniversary Mississippi Press Association Education Foundation Celebrity Roast. The event is held annually to raise funds to underwrite internships for aspiring journalists and grants for journalism education.

Wilson will be the second roastee to receive the S. Gale Denley Memorial Journalism Award. The MPA and MPAEF boards of directors voted in 2009 to rename the foundation award in memory of the longtime educator and publisher of the Calhoun County Journal. Denley, a past president of MPA and past chairman of MPAEF, died in 2008.

Wilson came to MEC in 1998 from the Florida Chamber of Commerce where he served as Executive Vice President — and where he developed the most sophisticated grassroots member legislative action program in the nation.

Click here for the complete release and registration information.

MPA and the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information will seek to stiffen penalties for public officials who willfully ignore or circumvent the state’s public meetings laws.

Members of both organizations, including MPA’s Governmental Affairs Committee, have decried the current penalty of $100 for such infractions as being woefully insufficient. In addition the relative insignificance of the fine, proponents of strengthening the penalty also want to make the public officials who violate the rules to be held personally accountable. Under the current law, the public body pays the fines, essentially putting taxpayers on the hook for the wrongdoing of officials elected to serve the public.

The renewed interested in increased penalties follows a complaint filed over the summer by state Central District Transportation Commissioner Dick Hall over a “secret meeting” held between other members of the commission with public officials in Madison County. The Ethics Commission later ruled the officials were in violation of the state Open Meetings Act.

Preliminary discussions call for increase the fine up to $1,000 for each offense and making the responsible elected officials personally responsible for payment.

Additionally, discussions  are underway that would introduce legislation to reduce the turnaround time on responses for public records requests from 14 working days. A bill introduced last year that would have sharply cut the response time died in committee.

In other legislative matters, MPA is also seeking relief for newspapers where independent contractors have been ruled eligible for unemployment benefits by the state Department of Employment Security. As many as six newspapers in the past year have had rulings against them when contract labor agreements ended.

The Jackson Hilton Hotel is now accepting reservations for the MPA Mid-Winter Conference Jan. 28-30. The event kicks off on Thursday with the annual MPA Education Foundation Celebrity Roast. Education sessions and business, advertising and other topics will be held Friday and Saturday and the event will conclude with the customary Better Newspaper Contest-Advertising Division Awards Luncheon.

Call the Hilton direct at 601-957-2800, or visit the Hilton Mid-Winter Web page for reservations online. Deadline for the MPA group rate of $105 is Jan. 6.

From SNPA | Three-quarters (74 percent) of U.S. adults, or nearly 171 million people, read a newspaper – in print or online – during the past week. This is according to the latest Integrated Newspaper Audience finding from Scarborough Research, the audience ratings measurement service for the newspaper industry. The company examined newspaper readership in its recently released Scarborough USA+ Study, which captures media patterns and other consumer behaviors of adults across the country. The data analysis indicates that newspapers are still read in print or online by a critical mass of adults in the U.S. on a daily and weekly basis.

From NNA | The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has launched a comprehensive online guide to covering pandemic flu. Written by and for journalists, www.coveringflu.org is a one-stop resource designed to help reporters, editors, producers and other media professionals understand the complexities of the flu story. It also offers guidance and best practices for reporting on the topic.

From NAA | Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 74 million monthly unique visitors on average in the third quarter of 2009, more than one-third (38 percent) of all Internet users, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.  Newspaper Web site visitors generated more than 3.5 billion page views during the quarter, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 596 million total sessions.

The MPA Mid-Winter Conference will be held Jan. 28-30 at the Jackson Hilton. This year’s event will feature a slate of speakers on a number of sales, new media and management topics and is co-sponsored by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.

Sessions will be held throughout the day Friday, Jan. 29. Saturday events continue with the annual Silver Dollar Breakfast, more training sessions and the traditional BNC-Advertising Awards Luncheon.

Agendas and registration materials will be available to members in early December.

The conference will again be preceded by the MPA Education Foundation Benefit Roast, also slated for the Jackson Hilton, on Thursday, Jan. 28. This year’s “roastee” is Blake Wilson, president of the Mississippi Economic Council. More details on the roast are forthcoming in December.

Members attending the conference should call the Hilton direct and mention the Mississippi Press Association to receive the special room rate of $105. Call the Hilton at 601-957-2800.

The cut-off for reservations is January 6, 2010.

Members are encouraged to send in their 2010 rate cards now so that increases will be in effect with MPS clients when the calendar rolls over to the new year. Media buyer Andrea Ross is collecting the information to get updated rates, personnel and other important information on members in to the MPS database. Please forward a PDF copy of your rate card via email, or via fax to 601-981-3676. Old-fashioned mail still works, too: MPS, Attn: Rate Cards, 371 Edgewood Terrace Drive, Jackson, MS 39206.

Members who have not yet registered for the ArkLaMiss Circulation Conference still have time to take part in this year’s event. Sessions begin Thursday afternoon at 1 pm at the Riverwalk Hotel and Casino in Vicksburg. The event is preceded by lunch in the Riverwalk Buffet, sponsored by The Vicksburg Post.

Keynote speaker Frank Mastromarino, a circulation and marketing consultant from Fayetteville, N.C., and a career newspaperman, leads the program. Max Heath,  postal and circulation consultant for Landmark Community Newspapers, Publishing Group of America and the National Newspaper Association will speak Thurday on 26 Promotional Ideas for newspapers and then update attendees on changes with the United States Postal Services. MPA legal counsel John Henegan and Malissa Winfield will also speak Thursday on maintaining carrier agreements and dealing with employment law.

A Thursday reception is sponsored by the ArkLaMiss participating press associations. Breakfast Friday is sponsored by Schermerhorn Brothers and Advantage Newspaper Consultants.

Friday’s sessions include a Hot Ideas general session and the return of Mastromarino to discuss Old-School Circulation Management principles. The conference will adjourn at noon Friday.

For more information or to register for the event, visit the ArkLaMiss Circulation Conference webpage.

From MediaLife | There were a few winners buried in the gloomy newspaper numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.  Two papers with circulation of 50,000 or more actually saw double-digit percentage growth, and another four were up by 1 percent or more.

MORE: Even some dark clouds had silver linings for those who posted circ declines.

From Editor and Publisher | A new National Newspaper Association survey found that 81% of respondents read a local weekly paper each week, 73% read “most or all of it,” and those readers spend an average of 40 minutes with the paper.

From Mediaweek | Consumers are loathe to pay for Web content, new research from Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD reveals. Simply put, they’ve been trained to equate online with free. The collaboration confirms as much: 55.5 percent of survey respondents indicated they would be very or extremely unlikely to pay for online newspaper or magazine content. Only 16.5 percent agreed they are extremely, very or even somewhat likely.

Biloxi Sun Herald executive editor Stan Tiner will be presented the Silver Em from the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi during an Oct. 29 banquet in Oxford.

The announcement was made Wednesday.  Tiner is credited with guiding Sun Herald news coverage through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, for which the newspaper was presented a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. A Louisiana native and former U.S. Marine, Tiner is the former editor of the Mobile Press-Register.

Presented annually, the Silver Em honors a print or broadcast journalist, living or deceased, whose career exemplifies the highest ideals of American journalism. The Silver Em is the highest honor given by the department, and since its inception in 1958 it has been given to several Pulitzer Prize winners, editors, distinguished reporters and nationally-known figures.