I. General Chapter Information

A. Reporting officer

This report is the annual report for 2003-04 for the Middle Tennessee Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The officer submitting the report is Jennifer Peebles, chapter president, SPJ member ID number 444665.

B. Chapter leadership

A list of the current chapter officers and board members, including their terms of office, are included with this report on a page marked Appendix A, “Chapter leadership.”

C. Convention representation

Our chapter was represented at the 2003 national convention in Tampa by Jennifer Peebles, chapter president, member ID number 444665, and by Frank Gibson, chapter treasurer and vice president/FOI, member ID number 48280.

Our chapter hosted the Region 12 conference, held April 2-3 here in Nashville, and we had several members who attended, including:

• Jennifer Peebles, chapter president

• Frank Gibson, treasurer and VP/FOI

• Kent Flanagan, immediate past president

• Kathy Carlson, member

• Amy Green, member

• Clint Brewer, our regional director

• Ellen Margulies, member

• Phil Williams, member

D. Chapter finances

The overall financial condition of the chapter is healthy. Our Treasurer’s Report Form, along with the Annual Report Guide, is included in this report as Appendix B.

E. Chapter bylaws

A copy of our chapter’s current bylaws are included with this report as Appendix C, “Current chapter bylaws.”

II. Chapter Activities and Programs

A. Chapter programming

This has been an extremely active year for our chapter. Here are the programs we put on this year:

· Bob Rose, who at the time was the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, spoke to our chapter luncheon Oct. 29 at Amerigo restaurant. We received many compliments from the attendees, who asked many questions about how they do things at the Wall Street Journal. I thought the luncheon went pretty well.

· David Fox, a longtime Nashville business journalist, was our featured speaker at our Feb. 4 luncheon at Merchant’s restaurant downtown. Fox talked about the new magazine he has started, Business Tennessee. We had a small crowd, but it was in an intimate setting and people got to talk directly to Mr. Fox to ask whatever questions they had.

· We had a very good meeting March 24, when Nashville’s new police chief, Ronal Serpas, spoke to our group. The chief pulled up a chair in the middle of the room and started talking and then welcomed questions. People asked the new chief, who has come to us from New Orleans via Washington State, about both his new management practices as well as his stance on press relations and FOI issues. This program was a huge success for us.

· On April 2-3, we helped our regional director put on the first regional conference Nashville had hosted in several years. Our two-day event was at the Holiday Inn Express at 910 Broadway, and we wound up with a surprising 50-plus attendees, including college students from as far away as Appalachian State in North Carolina (they’re not even in our region!). Our sessions included panels on “After Graduation: Making the most of your college degree,” “Mining Public Records,” “Inside the Big Game: Covering Pro Sports” and “So You Want to be a Rock’n’Roll Star: Entertainment Writing 101.” Our keynote Saturday luncheon speech was given by Phil Williams of WTVF-Channel 5 here in Nashville, who just a few weeks ago won a Sigma Delta Chi award for his investigative reporting. We put the conference on by the seat of our pants, admittedly, and we only wound up $200 in the black, but all things considered, we did a great job — we pulled it off without any major snafus like panelists not showing up, hotel rooms being overbooked, meeting rooms switched around, or any students drunkenly jumping off the roof into the swimming pool and missing it. I think it was a huge success. A copy of our registration form for the conference and the financial report for it are included in this report as Appendix D.

· Our best chapter luncheon of the year was our most recent one. Our speaker was Rebecca Paul, the president and CEO of the new Tennessee state lottery. She spoke to our group April 22 at Merchant’s restaurant and fielded questions from the audience after speaking without notes all about her post and about the lottery itself.

· We are also currently trying to schedule a panel discussion on the topic of journalism ethics in the wake of the Jayson Blair/Jack Kelley scandals. With the help of the $1,000 ethics grant we recently won from SPJ National (thank you!!) we are planning to bring in Fred Brown, one of SPJ’s national ethics co-chairs. Mr. Brown is willing to come, but we’ve had to put off the date twice now because we are really trying hard to get Mr. John Seigenthaler to be on the panel with him, and Mr. Seigenthaler is right busy and is out of town a lot. But we’re working on it.

B. Chapter projects

Our major chapter project this year has been involvement with a new startup organization, the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government. Our chapter is a charter member of TCOG, and we donated money toward its creation.

I am happy to report that in this past calendar year, TCOG has become a reality — it now has its official 501(c)(3) designation from the Internal Revenue Service and has its own fledgling Website (soon to be updated, hopefully) at www.tcog.info. I am even happier to report that just a few weeks ago, TCOG won its first victory in the courts for FOI access, when a Tennessee state appeals court ruled that Chattanooga police could not keep closed the official mugshots of its officers on the grounds that some of those officers might, at some time, work undercover. TCOG had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, which was brought by a Chattanooga television station. Both myself and Frank Gibson, our chapter treasurer and VP/FOI, serve on the TCOG board.

C. Student outreach

We had two major chapter student outreach efforts this year, one through our regional conference, the other through our scholarship program.

Our regional conference this past April was targeted and designed for college students, and most of our attendees were students. The campuses represented included Tennessee State University, Lipscomb University, Belmont University, Arkansas Tech, the University of Louisiana at LaFayette, Ole Miss, Loyola University, Northwestern State (Louisiana), the University of Arkansas and Appalachian State. Our programs for the conference were aimed directly at college students, with programs on how to get the most out of your college experience to make you most wantable in the job market; how to get started covering sports and how to get started as a music and entertainment writer. Keynote speaker Phil Williams talked to the students about developing their “investigative mindset.” And of course, we happily handed out the Mark of Excellence winners’ certificates as well.

Meanwhile, our longstanding scholarship program is getting back on its feet again, I’m glad to say.

Our scholarship program, which is named for our late former chapter president Drue Smith, has been around for many years, but when our chapter went dormant for a while in the late ‘90s or so, the scholarship wasn’t given out. In fall 2002 we resumed giving out the scholarship, with our first winner of $1,500 being Terra Grant, the news director at the Channel 10 campus television station at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, about an hour outside Nashville. In 2003, our board voted to give the scholarship to Terra for a second year.

Since then, we’ve come a long way. Earlier this year, our board (possibly for the first time ever) formally enacted qualification criteria spelling out who is and is not eligible for the Drue Smith scholarship. After much discussion and consideration about the residency requirements for the winners, eligibility was limited to college students who are graduates of high schools in Middle Tennessee. Other rules were built in to help ensure that the winner of the scholarship is a person who is truly serious about using their education to become a journalist. Complete rules for the scholarship are now permanently posted on our chapter Web site at http://www.spj.org/Nashville. The rules are also included in this report as Appendix E.

Our board is also in the process of trying to determine the best way to look after the money end of the scholarship. As president, I have been concerned that our chapter does not have any kind of 501(c)(3) nonprofit status from the IRS (SPJ national is a 501(c)(6), but our chapter has no such designation – all we have is a charitable solicitations permit from the state). Thus, donors to the Drue Smith Scholarship Fund cannot write off their donations on their taxes. I think this is limiting our ability to raise money for the scholarship.

In light of that, our board has voted in the past report year to put our scholarship money — currently around $30,000 or so — in the oversight of an existing, reputable charity. We are currently considering proposals from the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation and the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee for this purpose.

With that decision on the horizon, our chapter has voted to try to bring back our major fundraiser for the scholarship, the Gridiron cabaret, in October of this year. It will be a major undertaking, and I hope to be able to write next year that it went well and that we raised a lot of money. As of this writing, we’re also trying to put on our other major fundraiser, the 34th annual SPJ Duffers Golf Tournament, scheduled for June 6 at Henry Horton State Park. The golf tournament is another thing we’re trying to breathe some new life into — we’ve finally got a steering committee together to try and better market it and get more attendees.

As for the 2004 winner of the Drue Smith Scholarship, that will soon be decided. The deadline for applications is May 19.

We also had one small fundraiser for the chapter this report year, a fall book sale, maybe the first one we’ve ever done. We arranged with Marion Street Press, which sells how-to books for journalists (they’re at www.marionstreetpress.com) to sell some of their books to our chapter members. We wound up selling 21 books and netting $190. It wasn’t much, but every little bit helps! Included in this report is our invoice for the books in Appendix F.

There was also one other thing we did this year that doesn’t really seem to fit with the topic of “student outreach,” but I did want to mention it somewhere in this report. Last August, someone stole nearly the entire press run of an edition of The Sidelines, the student newspaper at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro — out of about 8,000 copies, all but 800 were snatched within a couple of hours of their hitting the racks. (The front page of that issue bore a story about how two campus fraternities were in arrears on their rent payments to the university, and there’s been a lot of suspicion that fraternity members played a role in the newspaper thefts.)

When that happened, the chapter wrote a letter to the president of MTSU, encouraging him to see this as a serious offense to freedom of the press and asking him to ensure that the theft was thoroughly investigated. That letter, and the university’s responses to it, are included in this report as Appendix G. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, to this day no one has been charged in the theft of the Sidelines copies.

D. Membership recruiting

Membership has been our top priority effort, and I think our work is paying off. In our report last year, we said we had about 65 or so members. As of this week, our roster on spj.org lists 74 people. That’s a 14% increase over last year.

I have written more letters in this past year as president than I have written in all the previous years of my life, with most of the letters asking people to either please join SPJ or make sure they renew their membership.

Here are some of the things we did this past year to get new members and try to retain the members we have:

· Last summer, I sent letters to every member of the staff of our city’s largest media organization, The Tennessean newspaper (where I work), asking them to please join SPJ. We have two former national presidents working here at The Tennessean, but the number of staffers we have who are SPJ members is fairly pathetic. I’m trying to change that. I am happy to report that among the members I recruited this year include Managing Editor David Green, reporter Kathy Carlson, Deputy Managing Editor Laurie Holloway, columnist and former chapter president Gail Kerr, Education Editor Ellen Margulies, Assistant Managing Editor Cindy Smith, and one new member so new he’s not even on the roster yet, cops reporter Christian Bottorff. Included with this report as Appendix H are a copy of the letter and a copy of the flyer I enclosed with it, titled, “Just some of the things SPJ has done in the past 6 months.”

· I put up “Got SPJ?” posters all over the Tennessean newsroom and a huge piece of yellow poster board at my desk screaming JOIN SPJ in big black letters. I also have membership forms and blue glossy membership brochures from National in folders hanging off my desk.

· Last fall I sent personal letters to every single soul on the list we got from National of “former and prospective” members in our area, asking them to please rejoin. I included with it a copy of a “message from the president” that I wrote, titled “Rebuilding the House,” telling them my vision of how we need to rebuild our chapter, and also the “some of the things SPJ has done the past 6 months” flyer. A sample of those letters, and a copy of my “house” memo, are included with this report in Appendix H. I got a few responses, but I was most happy that we got Mr. John Seigenthaler, former editor and publisher of The Tennessean, to rejoin. His being a member means a lot to the leaders of our chapter.

E. Communication efforts

We have worked very hard this year to increase our communication with our chapter members, and as president I have worked to have constant communication with our board members as well.

Communication with board members

Our board has been meeting nearly every month this past report year. After each board meeting, I send out e-mailed updates to the entire board of what went on at the meeting (these don’t substitute for meeting minutes — they’re just quick summaries). Between board meetings, I also send out updates to the board members, which I generally send both in an e-mail and then following with a hardcopy, since some of our board members aren’t very e-mail savvy. Some examples of board communication from this report year are included in Appendix I.

Communication with the chapter membership

We mostly communicate with our membership via e-mailed newsletters and our Web site.

Sharon Fitzgerald, our chapter newsletter editor, has done an excellent job in being prompt and efficient at getting out our e-mail/fax newsletters to sell our meetings and other such items. Included in this report are some examples of the newsletters from this past report year as Appendix J.

Meanwhile, our Web site is updated about once a month and usually heralds our next luncheon speaker, other media-related events in the Nashville area and occasionally some journalism job openings. I am also the chapter Webmaster. Some printouts of our site from over the past year are included in Appendix K.

We have also done a couple of chapter-wide mailings this past year. In the fall, not long after I was sworn in as president to fill in the rest of Kent Flanagan’s term, I sent every member of our chapter a copy of my mission statement for the chapter, “Rebuilding the House,” to let them know what I was thinking. We also did a chapter-wide mailing for the book sale we had in late fall. And we’ve just done another mailing last week to plug our golf tournament.

III. Chapter evaluation

A. Strengths and weaknesses

In last year’s report, we wrote that we had to rebuild our chapter. I think we’ve gotten a lot done this past year. But we still have a long way to go.

Strengths

• We have a dedicated board of directors and a core group of longtime volunteers.

• We have numerous members of our chapter who have been members of SPJ for 20 or more years.

• We are having programs with some regularity again.

• We are giving out our scholarship again after a hiatus.

• We are knowledgeable and vocal about FOI and other public access issues.

Weaknesses

• We still need more members, particularly among people in the electronic media, people 35 and under and members who would bring us more diversity. We still have no diversity, other than gender diversity, on our chapter board. I still think there a lot of people out there who should join the chapter, and we just have to get to them.

• We need to make a decision on which charity should oversee our scholarship fund so that we can begin to solicit major donors and underwriters for our fundraisers.

• We have to try to bring back the Gridiron cabaret fundraiser in this next report year and do more fundraising in general. We’re giving away the scholarship again, so we’re taking money out but now we’re not putting much back in. We’ve got to fix that.

B. Graduated chapter rankings

In our opinion, our chapter met the requirements for earning four stars in this past report year. Here’s why:

• Four-star chapters put on six full membership meetings. We’ve put on five and are pulling together our sixth now.

• Four-star chapters support student journalists. We are in our third consecutive year of giving out our Drue Smith Scholarship to a worthy future journalist.

• Board members of four-star chapters are in regular communication with each other, national headquarters and their regional director. We are indeed in communication with these parties. In fact, many of our board members probably wish the president would shut up and stop sending so many e-mails.

• Four-star chapters display consistent communication through newsletters, e-mails and a Web site. We meet and exceed this goal.

• Four-star chapters file their annual reports on time. Ours will be.

• Four-star chapters are represented at regional conferences and the national convention. We were represented at both this year.

• Four-star chapters are successful in recruiting new members. We increased our membership by about 14% in this past report year.