SPJ 2014 REGION 12 SPRING CONFERENCE

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

#Region12SPJ

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Saturday Agenda 8 - 9 a.m. Registration, Atrium

9 - 9:10 a.m. Welcome, Auditorium

9:15 - 10:15 a.m. Breakout Session 1

Web Journalism, Auditorium

Data Visualization, Seminar Room A

10:30 - 11:30 a.m. Recruiting Tips From The Pros, Auditorium

11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. Mark Of Excellence Awards Luncheon, Auditorium

2 - 2:30 p.m. Today’s Society of Professional Journalists, Auditorium

2:45 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. Breakout Session 2

Data Tools, Seminar Room A

Environmental Panel, Auditorium

4 - 5 p.m. Breakout Session 3

Broadcast Journalism, Seminar Room A

Freedom Of Information, Auditorium

6:30 - 8:30 p.m. Dinner, 1550 E. Zion Road

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to the 2014 Re-gion 12 Spring Conference.

We’ve got a great mix of attendees from all over the region and beyond. We’ve planned this conference to pro-vide opportunities for professional development, a little career advice, networking and social fun with your Socie-ty of Professional Journalists peers.

As of April 6, we have 32 students and 30 educators and professional journalists. Of the total 62, 45% are SPJ members, so welcome to our large number of guests.

Join us at Tanglewood Branch Beer Co. at 7 p.m. Friday at 1431 S. School Ave. We’ll have a local food truck serving tacos and other treats. There’s overflow parking at the Marvin’s IGA gro-cery store that’s caddie corner to the pub on 15th.

With many of you driving in Friday, we chose to keep Friday night low key and play a little AP Style trivia, a

game created by the Northwest Arkan-sas SPJ chapter. Winner gets the most recent AP stylebook!

The University of Arkansas student chapter will host Saturday’s conference, and I wish to thank UA faculty and staff for their support to the conference.

Most of all thanks to Kristen Coppola, Kevin Kinder, Ray Minor, Amanda

Womac, Bret Schulte and Joel Walsh, the planning team for this conference.

Bio’s for our speakers and planning team are in the following pages, and as always, don’t hesitate to find me if you have any questions.

Tony Hernandez Region 12 Director

Welcome, Thank You

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The Northwest Ar-

kansas Chapter of the

Society of Professional

Journalists seeks to fos-

ter quality journalism

and provide opportuni-

ties to grow as a writer,

reporter or editor.

We are based in

Fayetteville, Ark., and

we’re one of two profes-

sional chapters in the

state. Members of our

organization come from

all disciplines of journal-

ism — print, television,

radio and freelance, to

name a few.

Our chapter sponsors

several successful pro-

grams per year, chief

among them the annual

Lemke Journalism Pro-

ject in the spring and the

NWA Gridiron comedy

revue in the fall.

Kevin Kinder is as-

sistant features editor for

the Northwest Arkansas

Media

group. In

that role,

he writes

about mu-

sic, food,

theater and other enter-

tainment topics while

also editing content from

other reporters.

A native of Kansas,

Kevin started a career in

journalism as a general

assignment reporter and

photographer. In 2006,

he moved to Arkansas to

pursue a beat he contin-

ues to love — music. A

graduate of Wichita State

University, he spends his

free time traveling to

concerts, writing fiction,

cooking and performing

with a local improv com-

edy troupe. Kevin is pres-

ident of the Northwest

Arkansas Chapter of the

Society of Professional

Journalists.

Joel Walsh covers the

city of Fayetteville for

the Northwest Arkansas

Times newspaper. Be-

fore that,

he in-

terned

with the

Kansas

City Star

and the Orange County

Register’s Washington,

D.C., bureau.

Joel holds a bachelor’s

degree from Washing-

ton University in St.

Louis and a master’s

degree from the Univer-

sity of Missouri, despite

being a diehard Kansas

basketball fan.

Donald W. Reynolds Center For Enterprise Development

Parking at the Harmon Ave. Park-ing Garage just west of Duncan Ave.

Attendees to come from all over the region, beyond

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Monthly Media Goes Digital

In today’s media environment, digi-tal news content is an important piece of the publishing puzzle.

How do journalists navigate digital news production? What are the chal-lenges and opportunities of moving a traditional-bound print publication into the daily digital space?

For insight into these questions, join National Geographic Digital

News Director Dan Gilgoff as he talks about what he learned during his first year leading daily content for NationalGeographic.com.

Dan Gilgoff is Director of Digital News at National Geographic,

where he leads the daily content operation for NationalGeograph-

ic.com. He was previously Religion Editor at CNN.com, where he led a

team that won the 2011 Online Journalism Award for beat coverage

and served as the inaugural Religion in Public Life fellow at Georgia

State University.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington

Post and USA Today and he is the author of “The Jesus Machine: How

James Dobson, Focus on the Family and Evangelical America are Win-

ning the Culture War.” He has also worked as the political correspond-

ent for U.S News & World Report as the Politics Editor at Beliefnet,

where he won the 2008 Online Journalism Award for commentary;

and as an adjunct journalism professor at Montclair State University in

New Jersey. He has frequently appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel,

MSNBC and NPR.

Breakout Session 1 University of Arkansas SPJ

The students in the University of Arkansas Chapter of the Society of Professional Journal-ists are proud to help organize the Region 12 conference.

They have grown from a chapter just large enough to qualify as a registered student organization at the UofA to a larger group with members from each of the three con-centrations of journal-ism majors: Adver-tising/Public Rela-tions, News/Editorial and Broadcast.

Kristen Cop-

pola is an under-

graduate journal-

ism student at the

University of Arkansas.

Her area of focus is

news/editorial.

Coppola is the presi-

dent of the UA SPJ

chapter. She is also the

Managing Editor of The

Arkansas Travel-

er, the student-run

newspaper. She

graduates in May

with a Bachelor of

Arts in Journalism

and will continue

her education next

year as she workds to-

ward a Master of Arts

through the University

of Arkansas’s Center for

Ethics in Journalism.

Ray Minor is an instructor in print jour-nalism at the University of Arkansas. Minor joined the department in 2012, teaching re-porting and writing classes after more than two decades working in newspapers across the country, including Illi-nois, Texas and Arkan-sas. He reported for pa-pers in Arkansas and Illinois before being named assistant city

editor for the Daily Herald near Chi-cago. He later joined the Sun-Times Co.

as editor of Sun Publi-cations, a chain of 15 suburban Chicago pa-pers. He moved to the San Antonio Express-News, where he helped oversee coverage throughout Texas, Mex-ico and the Gulf Coast

as part of the state desk. He is the former City Editor of the Ar-kansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest

Edition. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Dr. Tacy Joffe-Minor and their two daughters.

Data Visualization Have data? Need display? From bar charts to interactive maps, there are a lot of free tools that will help any report-er start visualizing data today.

This session will give a quick into in data visualiza-tion, a look at good/bad charts and determining the best time to create maps.

You’ll jump into making charts through Google Spread-sheets and also an introduc-tion into Leaflet map making — a little bit of coding with source codes and files provid-ed.

Jon Schleuss is a reporter and graphic artist at the Los Angeles Times. He focuses on interactive graphics and data-base reporting.

He earned a bachelor’s de-gree in journalism from the University of Arkansas in 2013 and has worked for the Seattle Times, Northwest Arkansas Media and KUAF 91.3 FM.

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Getting Recruited

Panelists

Excited for a career in jour-nalism? Join us for a recruit-ing panel with the pros.

This panel of professionals from local, regional, and na-tional media outlets will give you insight into what recruit-ers are looking for in a job candidate.

They’ll discuss best practices for cover letters, resumes, and interviews, while sharing tips for how to stand out from the crowd.

Learn the skills and habits of highly successful job appli-cants across broadcast, digital and print platforms.

Moderator Bret Schulte is an assistant professor of journalism at the Uni-versity of Arkansas and a free-lance journalist. He teaches feature writing and enter-prise reporting, magazine writing, literary journalism, and multimedia journalism. Schulte is the Arkansas stringer for The New York Times and has freelanced for Columbia Journalism Re-view, American Journalism Review, Nieman Reports, and National Geographic News.

Before academia, Schulte worked as a reporter and associate editor at U.S. News & World Report, covering a number of Washington poli-cy battles and political races, including the 2004 presi-dential campaign. He in-terned at The Washington Post and was a Style editor and writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

He is the winner of three

Green Eyeshade Awards,

which recognizes the best in

Southern journalism, and

was a 2012 finalist for a na-

tional Mirror Award.

Panelist Sonny Al-barado is projects editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a statewide, family-owned daily newspaper based in Little Rock. As pro-jects editor, he supervises a staff of two reporters and assists other editors and reporters in long-term investigative and explana-tory journal-ism.

He has worked as a journalist since 1970, when he became editor of his college newspaper. His first professional newspaper job began in December 1972 in Houma, La. Except for an 18-month period when he helped a couple of friends start a monthly trade maga-zine in New Orleans, he has worked in newspapers all of his professional life.

Albarado is the immedi-

ate past president of SPJ and

has been a member since

March 1979. Albarado be-

came SPJ Region 12 director

at the 2006 convention. As

regional director, he also

became co-director with Re-

gion 3’s director of the annu-

al Green Eyeshade Awards

program, which recognizes

excellence among journalists

in 11 southeastern states.

Panelist Tracy Bou-

cher is the director of news development at the Los An-geles Times, where she runs the internship and Metpro training programs.

She started her career at The Times as an intern in 1992 and was hired as a copy editor in its Orange County edition in 1993. Boucher worked on the paper’s Metro and Features desks as a split-shift copy desk chief before taking a position as deputy innovation editor in 2007. In that role, she helped trans-form separate web and print operations into a single newsroom feeding multiple platforms, among oth-er duties.

She pre-

viously

worked at

the Orange

County Register, the St. Pe-

tersburg Times and

theOrlando Sentinel. A grad-

uate of the University of

Florida, she is married to

journalist and author Geoff

Boucher and has two chil-

dren, both of whom get their

daily news from the print

paper, iFunny and YouTube.

Panelist Paul Folger

anchors KOCO 5 News at 5, 6 and 10 p.m., with his co-

anchor Jessica Scham-bach. He joined KOCO 5 in 2008 from WTEV, the Jack-sonville, FL, CBS affiliate, where he was weekday morning and noon anchor since 2002.

Folger has worked all across the southern US, including four years report-ing for KDAF in Dallas, TX as an anchor and producer for WCTI in New Bern, NC, and News Bureau Chief for WHSV in Harrisonburg, Va. In addi-tion to anchoring in studio at 5, 6 and 10 p.m., he also re-ports and anchors live from all around the region, taking viewers to the scene of big breaking stories.

Folger is a graduate of the

University of North Carolina

— Asheville. In his free time

he enjoys the outdoors and

cycling on local trails with

his mountain bike.

Panelist

Dan

Gilgoff

works for

National

Geographic

and his bio

can be found

on page 3.

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Mark Of Excellence Awards Luncheon

Our Keynote Speaker Most of Roy Reed’s working life was spent as a reporter for three newspapers: The Joplin Globe, the Arkansas Gazette, and The New York Times. During his work for the Times, he was based in Atlanta, Washington, New Orleans and Lon-don. He covered the civil rights movement, the White House, presi-dential campaigns, and a broad ar-ray of political and cultural changes at home and abroad.

He taught journalism for sixteen years at the University of Arkansas. He retired in 1995 to write books and freelance articles. He has writ-ten three books: Looking For Ho-geye; Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, and Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Corre-spondent’s Adventures with the New York Times. He edited Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History. All were published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Presenters Each year, the

Society of Profession-al Journal-ists pre-sents the Mark of Excellence Awards, honoring the best in student journalism.

The awards of-fer categories for print, radio, tele-vision and online collegiate journal-ism. Entries are first judged on the regional level. First place region-al winners ad-vance to the na-tional competition and are recog-nized at SPJ spring confer-ences during the Mark of Excel-lence Awards Luncheon.

Immedi-ate Past SPJ Presi-dent Sonny Albarado (page 05 for bio) and Professor Gerald Jordan with the Universi-ty of Arkansas will help with handing out the MOE awards.

Gerald Jordan is an associ-ate profes-sor of print journalism at the Uni-versity of Arkansas. Profes-sor Jordan

joined the depart-ment in 1995 from The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a Washing-ton correspond-ent. He became an assigning editor for The Inquirer in 1989 and worked in the sub-urbs and on the City Desk before he was named North Zone editor, with responsibility for a two-county edition which reached about 110,000 readers. He has also worked for The

Kansas City Star and The Boston Globe and his other as-signments have includ-ed features

and sports, edito-rial writing and work as a TV and radio critic.

Congratulations to our finalists from the follow-ing universities:

Grambling State University

Harding University

Lipscomb University

Louisiana State University

Louisiana Tech University

Loyola University - New Or-

leans

Southeastern Louisiana

University

University of Arkansas

University of Central Ar-

kansas

University of Louisiana -

Lafayette

University of Memphis

University of Mississippi

University of Tennessee -

Martin

University of Tennessee

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Breakout Session 2 Data Tools For Journalists

From parking tickets to police reports, nearly all information govern-ments and businesses collect gets plugged into spreadsheets or data-bases. The trick for reporters is sorting through the data and making sense of it for readers and view-ers. Chad Day is a reporter on the investigative projects

desk at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He specializes in computer-assisted reporting and long-form investigations. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism and has worked for the Kan-sas City Star. Day was named the Arkansas Young Journalist of the

Year in 2011. In 2013, he won the Arkansas Press Association’s Freedom of Information Award. He and colleague Cathy Frye also won the I.F. Stone Award for Investigative Reporting and the Socie-ty of Professional Jour-nalists’ Robert S. McCord Freedom of Information Award.

The “environmental

beat” is a thing of the

past at most daily

newspapers across the

county. However,

when the environment

is THE story, who co-

vers it?

During this session,

panelists will discuss

the good, the bad and

the ugly of environ-

mental and science

reporting. Seasoned

science writers will

share tips on how to

interview scientists,

what to look for in re-

ports and press releas-

es, as well as other

tools of the trade jour-

nalists need their

toolbox when covering

the environment.

Journalism, Science & the Environment

Brandon Hollingsworth is the local host of All Things Considered on WUOT-FM, Knoxville’s NPR member station. He’s served in that role since December 2010. In addition to his daily duties of newscasts, weather reports and traffic updates, Hollingsworth is a feature reporter for the station. His long-form work includes in-terviews with national figures from former Attorney Gen-eral Alberto Gonzalez to co-median Steve Martin. Hol-lingsworth has covered Ten-nessee’s growing Hispanic population, legisla-tive redistricting and the controversy over hydraulic fracturing on the Cumberland Plateau. Hollingsworth’s work has appeared on NPR’s national newsmagazine Morning Edi-tion, as well as the network’s extensive Newscast Unit.

Dr. Steve Boss is the director of the Environmen-tal Dynamics Program and a professor in the De-partment of Geosci-ences at the Univer-sity of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He re-ceived his PhD in marine sciences from the University of North Carolina. His has both a MS and BS in geology from Utah State Uni-versity and Bemidji State University, respectively. Boss is interested in the application of high-resolution geophysical meth-

ods to document and interpret the depositional geome-try, stratigraphy, and regional geologic history of lakes, coastal regions, sedi-mentary basins, con-tinental margins,

and carbonate platforms. Peggy Brenner has 14 years of experience in scien-

tific writing and editing. She holds a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from

the University of Cal-ifornia, Davis, and she also taught and conducted research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Peggy Brenner has written her own funded grant appli-

cations, as well as abstracts, manuscripts, and slide presentations. As an editor, she is skilled in a broad range of areas, including substantively editing research proposals, manuscripts, bro-chures, and reports, as well as organizing and preparing fig-ures. Peggy is a board-certified Edi-tor in the Life Sciences and is a member of the American Medical Writers Association. Amanda Womac is a freelance science writer and nonprofit marketing consult-

ant based in Knoxville, Ten-nessee. She has been a member of SPJ since 2008 and is past president of the East Tennes-see Pro chapter. Amanda is also a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the current president of the UT Science Forum. Amanda received her master’s degree in Science Journalism from the Univer-sity of Tennessee, Knoxville. During that time, she worked in the Office of Engineering

Communications and completed an intern-ship in technical writing at Oak Ridge National Lab’s Spall-ation Neutron Source. Her work has appeared in publica-tions from UT’s Col-

lege of Engineering and UT’s research magazine, Quest. Amanda is former editor and publisher of Hellbender Press, East Tennessee’s nonprofit en-vironmental newspaper.

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Breakout Session 3 Freedom of Information

Join us for a discussion and Q&A with Brenda Blagg as she tells about her experience as a reporter with the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

A longtime advocate for open govern-ment, Blagg was a founding member of the Arkansas Free-dom of Infor-mation Coali-tion. She was assistant coor-dinator for the FOI Arkansas Project, which surveyed compliance with the state’s open records law in each of Arkansas’ 75 counties.

Brenda Blagg has more than 40 years of experience covering Arkansas politics. She has worked full time for the Newport Daily Independent, Arkansas Democrat and Morning News of Northwest Arkansas and freelanced for numerous publications, includ-ing the Arkansas Gazette, The National Observer and The New York Times.

Her 2012 book, “Political Magic: The Trials, Travels and Triumphs of the Clintons,” chronicles the hundreds of vol-unteers who traveled the U.S. campaigning first for former

President Bill Clinton and later for Hilla-ry Clinton in her quest for the Democrat-ic presidential nomination in 2008.

Blagg is cur-rently a col-umnist for Northwest Ar-kansas News-papers, pub-lisher of the Northwest Ar-kansas Times, Springdale Morning News, Rogers Morning News and

Benton County Daily Record newspapers.

A longtime advo-cate for open gov-ernment, Blagg was a founding member of the Ar-kansas Freedom of Information Coali-tion. She was assis-

tant coordinator for the FOI Arkansas Project, which sur-veyed compliance with the state’s open records law in each of Arkansas’ 75 counties.

Blagg is the recipient of nu-merous awards and recogni-tions. In 2001, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Journalism Department named her the state’s journal-ist of the year. She is a 2009 inductee into the University of Arkansas’ Walter J. Lemke De-partment of Journalism Hall of Honor.

A career in Broadcast

Are you interested in broadcast jour-nalism? Join Paul Folger, Oklahoma City’s KOCO news anchor, as he shares “lessons learned” in his nearly two dec-ades of covering lo-cal daily news.

During this ses-sion, Folger will talk about how broad-cast reporters han-dle long packages, anchor introduc-tions and live shots in order to give stu-dents the tools they need to tell a story quickly and precise-ly.

Folger will also share his experienc-es covering severe weather. He will focus on the May 2013 tornado that devastated an Okla-homa City suburb when more than 1,000 homes were destroyed within 45

minutes. Folger anchors

KOCO 5 News at 5, 6 and 10 p.m., with his co-anchor Jessi-ca Schambach. He joined KOCO 5 in 2008 from WTEV, the Jacksonville, FL, CBS affiliate, where he was week-day morning and noon anchor since 2002.

Folger has worked all across the south-ern U.S., including four years reporting for KDAF in Dallas as an anchor and producer for WCTI in New Bern, N.C., and News Bureau Chief for WHSV in Harrisonburg, Va. In addition to an-choring in studio at 5, 6 and 10 p.m., he also reports and an-chors live from all around the region, taking viewers to the scene of big breaking stories.

Folger is a gradu-ate of the University of North Carolina — Asheville. In his free time he enjoys the outdoors and cycling on local trails with his mountain bike.