“SPJ” 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.

 

Editor & Publisher personnel page from September 12, 1970 announcing the $2,500 Barney Kilgore Award winner

Editor & Publisher, September 12, 1970: Winning the $2,500 Kilgore Prize

A short item in the personnel pages of Editor & Publisher for September 12, 1970, reporting the winner of the Barney Kilgore Award from the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. The page around it is the usual mix of industry news: AP bureau chief moves in Latin America, a retirement at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, editor changes at papers from Corning, N.Y., to Findlay, Ohio.

Howard I. Finberg, senior in journalism at San Francisco State College, is the winner of the $2,500 Barney Kilgore Award sponsored by the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

The item also names the four other finalists, all senior journalism students, who received special award certificates:

Carl W. Schwartz III of Danville, Ill., U. of Illinois; Roger W. Smith of San Bernardino, Calif., U. of Southern California; Stephen E. Stewart of Monroeville, Ala., U. of Georgia, and June Ellen Tyhurst of Bartlesville, Okla., Oklahoma State University.