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PRESIDENT'S CORNER
Pamela Smith, Greater Fort Worth PRSA
One often wonders why people join professional organizations. Many of us whose companies are cutting costs can't avoid the question. The bill must be justified, whether an employer pays it or the individual does. PRSA has many value-added services, with networking being perhaps the most appreciated. Then there are the luncheon programs, mentoring opportunities, job listings, project leads for agencies and sole practitioners, and access to surveys and research.
One area that not enough people know about is our remote learning resources. The Greater Fort Worth chapter has proudly provided a number of teaching modules via teleseminars to members and nonmembers alike. For a low cost (many times no cost), we obtain insight to best practices and learn from the most senior people in our industry how to make a business run smoothly. Plus, we can watch or listen from a convenient location. In some cases, the chapter pays the site-fee registration, but often a local company assists. A special thanks to Alcon Laboratories, the Masonic Home and School of Texas, and UNT Health Science Center for hosting these teleseminars (and to John Peter Smith Hospital, Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Texas Motor Speedway, while we're thanking people, for showing students a slice of PR life on the recent Mystery Tour).
If your company is paying for a teleseminar and you want to invite others to attend, please let me know. If you have not had a chance to attend one of these meetings, keep your eyes open for future announcements. While the chapter board cannot absorb the cost of all the teleseminars offered by national, with your help many will be available to members and future members. So the next time you're asked why you are a member of PRSA, please remember this member benefit.
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OVER & OUT
John Dycus, Fort Worth SPJ
I didn't know Chris Neely, but still I felt a sense of loss at his passing April 30. I had edited his columns at the Star-Telegram, where he was a writer and his young widow is a page designer. People I respect used phrases like "admired colleague" and "talented and dedicated journalist" to describe him. "He had the wonderful ability to find humor in the most unlikely places and write about those situations in a way that never demeaned but celebrated the foibles in all of us," recalled his editor at the S-T Northeast, Larry Lutz. You saw it in his picture that accompanied a letters-to-the-editor tribute. Kind eyes. Intelligent. Inquisitive. No arrogance lurking in there, no smugness. Maybe some mischief, though. Bet he was a good dad. The Neelys' son, Hayden, is 7 months old. Chris was 37. His was a good life cut short. And we all lost a little. ...
Even curmudgeons get it right now and again: Andy Rooney on "60 Minutes," May 23. ...
So I sat down (it's a figure of speech) to condense Lucy Dalglish's address to our First Amendment Awards dinner into a tidy 400 words and couldn't do it. What was I thinking? The executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has a vital message of liberties lost under the Bush administration that must be heard. Summarizing merely dilutes it. So it's here. All of it. Read it and weep. And if you missed it live, you missed one of Fort Worth SPJ's most elegant nights ever. Worthy people won things, and -- here's how you know you did it right -- most of the 118 in attendance were in no hurry to leave. Good job, Gayle Reaves-King, Kristin Sullivan, Kay Pirtle, Dorothy Estes, Dino Chiecchi, et al. And to the poised and thought-provoking Ms. Dalglish: Regardless of how many of these dinners we do, you will always be remembered as the powerful first speaker. No one else could've christened this event with such grace. ...
Quote of any month, from Brendan Gill in "Here at The New Yorker," via Star-T reader advocate David House: "Questioning a comma, he will shake his head and say in his soft voice that he realizes perfectly well what a lot of time and thought have gone into the comma and that in the ordinary course of events he would be the first to say that the comma was precisely the form of punctuation that he would have been most happy to encounter at that very place in the sentence, but isn't there the possibility -- oh, only the remotest one, to be sure, and yet perhaps worth considering for a moment in the light of the care already bestowed on the construction -- that the sentence could be made to read infinitesimally more clearly if, say, instead of a comma a semicolon were to be inserted at just that point?"
Closing words: "It's devious, it's deceptive, it's dishonest, it's valueless. I can't believe they'd pull this kind of fast trick on kids who have already served." -- MariAnn Curta in the Chicago Tribune, saying that a recruiter told her 22-year-old son, Bill, who recently completed a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, that he could be headed back there unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard ... "My soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib are so scared now, they're not even talking to me anymore. I'm like a villain, but would I do it again? Of course I would. ... I knew what was being reported was not true." -- Sgt. Samuel Provance, who has been disciplined by the military for giving an insider's view of the Baghdad prison to the media ... "Cruelty feeds on ignorance. And I have yet to see ignorance effectively addressed by secrecy. On all the tough problems, from AIDS to teen suicide to drug addiction to priests who abuse children, society has made progress when the truth is told." -- Geneva Overholser ... "I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused. I don't think this administration is committed to democracy." -- Michael Berg on the detainment and subsequent videotaped death of his son, Nick, in Iraq ... "All it is, is lack of leadership, lack of instruction and lack of standard operating procedure, and everyone at the top is covering their butts." -- Daniel Sivits, who says he spent 22.5 years in the military and whose son, Spc. Jeremy Sivits, is the first U.S. soldier to face court martial over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib ... "The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over." -- Paul Bremer, administrator, Coalition Provisional Authority, Sept. 2, 2003 ... "(W)e are in a situation that is no longer in control, and we can't make the fairy tale outcome that we would like to see happen in Iraq." -- Charles V. Peña, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank ... "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't." -- poet Theodore Roethke ... "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." -- poet Joseph Brodsky ... "My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it." -- Katherine Anne Porter ... "I once had a rose named after me, and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: 'No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.' " -- Eleanor Roosevelt
