“Award” Items

Great Honor for a Student Journalist: Kilgore Award

In late summer, I received notice that I had won the  Barney Kilgore Award sponsored by the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation [later renamed as the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation].  The award included $2,500, which would be presented at the SDX national convention in November in Chicago.  The convention would present an opportunity that would change my life. Learn more about Barney Kilgore here.

In a statement of journalistic philosophy that accompanied my entry, I wrote “a good newsman and a good newspaper will provide the news with creativity, honesty and integrity.”  I also said:

A good newspaper must be aware of the changes in its community.  It must be able to present facts without fear or bias and interpret the news so that its readers can understand their every-changing and complex world.

Those words still work, 45 years later.  I also wrote:

For some people, newspapers are the only to government.

Sadly, too many people in too many cities have no daily newspapers and hence little access or oversight of their government officials.

 

Chicago Tribune Award Was Extra Sweet

When I worked at the Chicago Tribune, the newsroom had a special awards dinner every December. It was called the “Beck Awards Dinner.” Here’s where the top staffers received recognition [and a very nice check] for accomplishments during the year.  Prior to the ceremony, Joe Leonard, an assistant managing editor, told me to make sure Kathy Oakley got to the dinner.  Joe knew I was dating Kathy and that she had said that she wasn’t planning to attend the dinner.  Joe knew she would win the Johnrae Earl Award for editing.

Kathlyn E. Oakley, who currently occupies the late Mr. Earl’s position in the copy desk slot, was honored for her dedication to good editing, awareness of writers’ sensibilities and grace under deadline pressure.

I also won.  An award for professional performance.  The next year I would win again. Better still: Kathy [now called Kate] and I got married.

An Award Dinner That Has Lots of Intersections for the Future

One of the great honors I’ve received is the Bernard Kilgore award from SDX [now known as the Society of Professional Journalists].  I was a student at San Francisco State University and the award came with $2,500 check [ about $15,000 in 2102 dollars].  Robert W. Chandler, who was president of the SDX Foundation, presented the award.  The award ceremony was in Chicago and at the head table I sat next to Clayton Kirkpatrick, editor of the Chicago Tribune.  Here’s what I remember from that night:  Kirkpatrick said that “if you ever want to work in Chicago, let me know.”  Two years later, I did.  But that’s a different story.

Here’s the irony of the that awards ceremony.  Nelson Poynter, board chairman of the St. Petersburg Times, gave the keynote speech.  This is years before he founded the Modern Media Institute, which later became The Poynter Institute and which I joined in 2003.

While I don’t remember his remarks, I think I must have heard them because his thoughts about how to improve the relationship between reader and editor.  Poynter was ahead of his time.

“Today we need better two-way communications between reader and editor, between viewer and broadcaster. We are merely transient agents.” Poynter said. “The white space in the paper and time on the air belong to our clients.”

A Telegram From Washington: Named a 1971 Sears Congressional Journalism Intern

In 1970, big news arrived on paper, delivered to your door. Not email, not a phone call, not a text message — a Western Union telegram, all capital letters, punctuation spelled out or dropped, and the sender paying by the word. This one came to my parents’ house on Ortega Street in San Francisco while I was a journalism student at San Francisco State.

THE AWARDS COMMITTEE HAS NAMED YOU A 1971 SEARS CONGRESSIONAL JOURNALISM INTERN AND IS ARRANGING FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT TO A CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE STAFF, FULL DETAILS WILL FOLLOW BY LETTER IN MID-JUNE, PLEASE SEND IMMEDIATELY YOUR SUMMER ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER ROTH AT RESIDENCE AND PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT. CONGRATULATIONSS

The telegram is dated May 20, 1970, and it is signed by:

JOHN L WHEELER, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, SEARS, ROEBUCK AND CO, 1211 CONNECTICUT AVENLE WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056

Note the address: the telegram was sent by a corporate executive in Washington, D.C. The awards committee named the interns; the details — where you would actually be working, and for whom — would follow by letter in mid-June. In other words, you were told you had won before anyone could tell you what you had won.

The image itself is a reminder of how these documents were made. The routing codes across the top, the operator’s marks, the transmission time stamps, the form number at the bottom — all of it printed around a message that a machine typed out at the receiving end. The optical character reader stumbles over parts of it, which is fair; so does the eye. “BOTH” became “ROTH.” “AVENUE” became “AVENLE.”

Looking at it now, more than fifty years on, what strikes me is that a piece of news that changed the direction of a young journalist’s year came as a fragile sheet of paper with a glued-on tape of type. Today the same message would be an email, or a notification on a phone, gone from view in a week and unfindable in a year. The telegram survived because it was an object, and because I thought it was worth keeping. That is a decent argument for archives, and part of why these documents are here.