PRESIDENT'S CORNER
Heather Senter, Greater Fort Worth PRSA
Think back to your last few months before college graduation. Regular visits to the career center, attending job fairs, circling ads in the paper, sending your résumé on job web sites. How did you land your first job out of school? Was it through the friend of a friend, a job posting, surviving several rounds of interviews? It's a tough obstacle to overcome, but one of the most rewarding.
Local and national chapters of PRSSA, the student society, and PRSA provide resources to help students build a bridge to a career. Locally, we actively support the TCU and ACU PRSSA chapters. Our members speak at PRSSA meetings and provide mentoring opportunities as well as internships.
On Friday, Feb. 18, PRSA welcomes visitors from the TCU and ACU chapters for the annual Pro-Am Day. These eager and talented students are already on the right track, and by giving up a morning to go on a "Mystery Tour" of area businesses and organizations, they'll get the inside scoop on the world of PR. Following the tour, they'll join us for lunch at the Petroleum Club.
Let's all put ourselves in their shoes and offer encouragement during our short time together. You could be the stepping stone to a rewarding career. Hope to see you at Pro-Am Day!
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PRESIDENT'S COLUMN
Tim Tune, IABC/Fort Worth
ABC, BBC, CNBC, DBU, EDS. Looks like a Wall Street ticker or alphabet soup. But each group of characters represents a brand, and every company and organization has one, strong or not. The strongest, of course, form the foundations of their organizations. There is power in the brand.
Helping organizations get the most power out of their brand is Scott Yaw's specialty. A key player with the integrated branding firm Deskey in Cincinnati, Ohio, he will present "Bottom-line Branding" at the IABC/Fort Worth meeting Tuesday, Feb. 1. Scott has extensive expertise spanning brand planning, product launches, end-user research, sales strategy, and naming and identity development. His clients have included Proctor & Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Newell Rubbermaid and Nestlé.
Have an identity crisis? You won't after this meeting.
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OVER & OUT
John Dycus, Fort Worth SPJ
Former SPJ national president Georgiana Vines had this to say when Dan Christensen received the 2004 Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award for reporting on secret court cases in the U.S. District Court in Miami: "Dan Christensen's work on behalf of the First Amendment is an excellent example of one journalist's dedication to exposing secrecy that is becoming all too common." Christensen, who writes for the Miami Daily Business Review, broke the story in March 2003 of Mohamed Bellahouel, an Algerian-born U.S. resident who was detained secretly for five months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that to her knowledge, "no other case filed with the Supreme Court has been handled with such excessive secrecy. Only through Christensen's reporting did the public have any idea what the case was about." This is the same Dan Christensen who will address Fort Worth SPJ's First Amendment Dinner on April 9. Details in due time, but save the date. Some speakers you just want to hear. Others you need to hear. Christensen is both. ...
This is what we have to look forward to. Penny Cockerell spent the last six months helping plan the coronation. Everything she saw and did, you and I didn't. Which is why we'll all be at Joe T.'s on Wednesday, Feb. 23, to hear the tales and see the slides. ... And this is what we've lost. http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/01/20/closed20.htm.
It's not too early to start thinking about the national convention, Oct. 23-25 in Las Vegas, Nev. SPJ offers internships to 12 student staffers for The Working Press, the daily tabloid of the convention. Writers, photographers and designers may apply at spj.org/convention_twp.asp. ... At least 18 members of the Alliance of Independent Journalists, an Indonesian group affiliated with the International Federation of Journalists, died in the tsunami disaster. The organization is offering support to victims' families and to its surviving members. Contact AIJ president Eddy Suprapto at eddy6@yahoo.com.
Closing words: "If editors corrected quotes, Yogi Berra would be just another pretty face." -- Star-Telegram ombudsman David House ... "I tried to call the director-general of the meteorological office, but his phone was always busy. I tried to phone the office, but it was a Sunday and no one was there." -- Samith Dhammasaroj, former chief of the Thailand meteorological department, on his frantic attempts to generate an alert that might have saved thousands of lives; he said he was sure a tsunami was coming as soon as he heard about the massive Dec. 26 earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island that measured magnitude 9.0, the world's biggest in 40 years ... "Get some devastation in the back." -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to a photographer taking pictures of Frist and his aides just before their helicopter lifted off from near a pile of tsunami debris ... "Ted is understandably bitter, having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind. We wish him well." -- a Fox News spokesman on Ted Turner calling Fox a propaganda tool of the administration and indirectly comparing the Fox News Channel's popularity to Adolf Hitler's popular election to run Germany before World War II; Turner spoke before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Association for Television Programming Executives conference last month, frequently drawing loud applause and laughter
Closing words II, world at war division: "I feel a strange kinship with Michael (Moore). They're trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it's a hologram. ... There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on (in 'Fahrenheit 9/11'). However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we're there, why we went there and why we're still there." -- Mel Gibson ... "The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict." -- Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush ... "I got back to the White House, and Laura said, 'What did you say that for?' Well, it was just an expression that came out. I didn't rehearse it." -- President Bush on his getting Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" remark six days after 9-11
