CONFERENCE ROUNDUP

From Carolyn Lumsden

Commentary Editor, The Hartford Courant

 

For the 15th AOPE annual meeting, some two dozen people traveled to hospitable Fut Wuth, Texas.

 

The conference began with a nifty reception in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, a fabulous little museum where the Star-Telegram kindly fed us Mexican food and entertained us with a band and an artist who drew caricatures of those willing to be cartooned.

 

Friday morning at the Radisson hotel, we heard from a panel about Latinos on opinion pages. Javier Aldape, publisher of the S-T's La Estrella, pointed out that Hispanics are now the single largest minority group and half of the Latino population lives in urban areas. What matters to Hispanic readers are families and communities, said Dallas Morning News columnist Mercedes Olivera. Syndicated columnist Linda Chavez noted that half the Latinos in the United States today are foreign-born, with serious school-dropout rates, rather like early 20th-century Italian immigrants, and there's a wide divergence of ideology in the entire population. Syndicated columnists Patricia Rodriguez and Roberto Gonzales talked about the fluidity of identity of a population that can't check off either "white" or "black" on the census.

 

Panel 2 was a panel discussion on the city where the West begins, where Sally Rand did her fan dance in 1936, and vast fortunes and national decisions were made in smoky back rooms. To understand the frontier way is to understand George W., one panelist said. That way is about debating fiercely in private and then publicly standing behind the back-room consensus to achieve things in the public interest.

 

Then there was a walk to the charming Fort Worth Rail Market, where columnist Marvin Olasky told us that missing from oped pages were Christian fundamentalist "third way" viewpoint that were neither strictly pro- nor anti-abortion, welfare and so on, but a humanistic alternative transcending the usual conservative/liberal polarizations.

 

Panel 3 was on dissent writing in these patriotic times. Radical journalism professor Robert Jensen said that oped editors were perceived by leftists as tools of capitalist running dogs, and he confessed that he didn't try to publish opeds after Sept. 11 because "to craft for your pages took a lot more trouble" than writing for the web. Yet we editors have an obligation to seek out leftist writers, he told us. Molly Ivins, some of us were surprised to learn, was not one of them.

 

Panel 4 explored tax incentives in luring business to cities, which some panelists maintain put cities on maps and others say act like giant vacuums, sucking up taxpayer money with nothing to show in return. Why risk taxpayer money if a lender won't risk his own money? asked the persuasive Dallas activist Sharon Boyd.

 

For Nuts & Bolts, AOPE President Richard Burr played "You Be the Censor" with two Mideast cartoons, one likening Israelis to Nazis, the other showing a Palestinian mother giving birth and the doctor saying, "Congratulations, it's a martyr." Most editors in the room agreed they wouldn't publish either cartoon because both lacked sophistication in tackling complex issues. There was discussion about intense lobbying by pro-Israel and pro-Arab groups.

 

Then dinner on the Reata balcony, overlooking some spectacular architecture -- almost as good as the BBQ shrimp enchiladas and pecan pie. Afterward, some of us stopped at a public square on the way back to the hotel and stared at Texans doing the funky chicken - not a sight you see in Connecticut.

 

Saturday morning, Richard told us right after breakfast that the judges had trouble with vague criteria for the Tom Wellman award that say the winner should best reflect the community. Well, how? the judges reasonably wanted to know. Should entries detail the effects that writers had on their communities? Perhaps another committee will straighten that out.

 

The 2003 conference at the University of Connecticut was touted÷New York Times editorial page editor Gail Collins is lined up to speak, and there will be a trip to the second largest casino in the world. Candidates for the 2004 conference were discussed÷Washington? University of Maryland?

Treasurer John Timpane announced that AOPE is in the black by $1,800. The newest officers were announced: Marjorie Pritchard as president, V.P. Bob Davis, Treasurer Lou Ann Frala, and Secretary David Beasley, who will get the minutes out much faster next year than I was able to this year. The

advisory council consists of Richard Burr, Mr. Timpane, me, Lee Moriwaki and Charles Coulter.

 

Mr. Beasley led the Nuts & Bolts topic of how to handle the overwhelming volume of submissions with too little staff. The brilliant suggestions÷answer the phone only three time a day, let the e-mail pile up while you edit, let writers know that if they don't hear from the paper in two weeks they can assume they've been rejected÷were quickly adopted by this writer. There was discussion of how much documentation is required for writers' wild

op-ed claims, how much pressure editors get from on high to publish/reject

op-eds (little if any), contracts, 9/11 coverage, elections.

 

S-T Senior Designer Meda Kessler, who didn't look that old, then came at 10:45 to tell us to throw out the design rules, that black ink was free, that flatbed scanners could scan everyday objects for instant art, that logos that jump are OK, gray is good on oped, bra ads are bad, ads should be surrounded by lots of white space and ad-layout people should be given nice

presents at Christmas (designers too).

 

Then, the awards. And Newsart's scooping of all the really good prizes. But that's OK. As long as they keep their rates down.