I. General Chapter Information
List the name of the chapter and
the officer submitting the report.
Middle Tennessee Pro Chapter. The officer submitting the report is Jennifer Peebles, chapter president.
List the current chapter
officers along with their addresses and phone numbers. Indicate the date these
officers were elected and the term of office they will serve (for example,
January 2004 through January 2005).
A spreadsheet of the officers is attached to this report.
List the name of your chapter’s
representative at the 2004 national convention and the 2005 regional
conference. If the chapter was not represented, indicate why.
Our chapter was represented at the 2004 national
convention
Include a report of the
financial condition of the chapter. You may use the attached form or copies of
your treasurer’s report.
A financial report is included as an addendum. We had our books audited this past fiscal year for the first time in several years, and we are glad to report that everything turned out OK.
Enclose a copy of your chapter’s
current bylaws.
A copy of the bylaws is included with this report. Our bylaws are largely modeled after those of the Greater Los Angeles Pro Chapter. They have not changed in the past year.
II. Chapter Activities and
Programs
List and describe the
professional development chapter meetings held during 2004-05. Four-star
chapters should hold at least six full-membership meetings on
journalism-related topics such as diversity, Freedom of Information, Project
Watchdog, ethics or any other topic relevant to SPJ missions. Include topics,
dates and whether you felt the meeting was successful. You are encouraged to
include meeting notices, programs, news releases or brochures that could be
shared with other chapters.
Our chapter had three professional development chapter meetings in this review year. We think they were all successful.
1. Our first program this past year with a
luncheon meeting with speaker Mark Gwyn, the new head of the Tennessee Bureau of
Investigation. We had about 30 people attend at Merchant’s Restaurant in
downtown
2. Our second program was the most successful professional development program we have put on in the time I have been a chapter officer. “Ethics in Journalism: A Matter of Public Trust,” featured as panelists former Neiman Foundation curator Bill Kovach, SPJ Ethics Co-Chair Fred Brown, and Vanderbilt University English Prof. Cecelia Tichi, along with moderator Wendell Rawls, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Our event, which was held at the First Amendment Center on the Vanderbilt campus, had about 50 attendees and was funded with the help of an ethics grant from the SPJ National Headquarters. It was taped and later aired on a 24-hour local cable news television station.
3. Our most recent program was in May 2005, a luncheon featuring as keynote speaker the new editor of The Tennessean newspaper. We had more than 20 people attend the meeting at Merchant’s Restaurant.
We regretted not being able to have more professional development programming this year. This will be a key area for us to work on in the coming year. We spent a lot of our effort restarting our annual Gridiron Show fundraiser for our scholarship, which we had not staged since 1999, and that ate up a lot of our time.
Describe chapter projects,
seminars, awards competitions or activities designed to encourage professional
development which are sponsored in addition to regular chapter meetings. List
any contribution your chapter has made to the SPJ Legal Defense Fund, and
describe how the funds were raised.
This year our chapter was involved in the startup
of a new group, the Tennessee Coalition for
Open Government, headed by former SPJ National President Frank Gibson.
Through TCOG, several of our members helped take part in
Last year our chapter made two donations to the
Legal Defense Fund silent auction for the national convention in
Describe the chapter’s efforts
at interaction with area students, including scholarship programs.
This year we restarted the Nashville Gridiron Show, which had been held annually from 1962-1999. With a change in format and business model, we think the show was a huge success, and we “made” more than $5,000 on it for the scholarship fund.
We sold between 220-230 tickets for show night, and had almost a full house on the night of our public, reduced-ticket dress rehearsal. The show was also taped by WTVF-Channel 5 and aired locally on their 24-hour cable all-news station. We also created Gridiron’s own Web site, www.NashvilleGridiron.com, and used the event to sell Gridiron t-shirts and copies of the biography of Drue Smith, for whom our scholarship fund is named.
Another major change we made in the scholarship this year was in the chapter board deciding – after about two years of debate and study – to turn our scholarship fund over to a local charity, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, for oversight. From now on, the Community Foundation will invest the money and manage the fund, and will use a panel of independent judges to give out the scholarship according to criteria we, the chapter board, set up. All SPJ has to do from now on is raise money for the fund.
The Community Foundation also informed us just the other day that they have picked the winner of the 2005 Drue Smith Scholarship. Actually, there are two winners: Chasity Gunn, a student at Belmont University, and Brandi Fleck, a student at Middle Tennessee State University. Each will receive $500. We would like to have a reception in the fall to honor them for their award.
In recent months we have also begun initial talks with the Middle Tennessee Scholastic Press Association to see if there are ways where we can help them and vice versa. Aside from our scholarship program, our chapter has not done much in the way of educational outreach in recent years. We have already committed to funding the visit of the keynote speaker to next year’s MTSPA meeting; Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center has tentatively penciled us in on his calendar. We are continuing to discuss among the board and the MTSPA leadership how else we can work together.
Describe the chapter’s
membership recruitment efforts and indicate whether you felt these efforts were
successful. Have you added members to your chapter this year? Are you retaining
members you already have? Include copies of recruitment letters, brochures,
videotapes, or other materials that may be helpful to other chapters. If there
are any local chapter members who are not listed on your national roster,
provide their names and addresses.
We believe membership went up by one person to 75 members this year, for an increase of about 1.3%. Our roster on spj.org lists 70 members right now — but two of our board members swear they have sent in their membership renewals, and two other board members not on the roster are being hit up for renewals as I write this. Also, one other person has informed us she joined through www.spj.org and is not yet listed in the online roster. So we count 75.
Describe your chapter’s communications efforts; include descriptions of board communication and full-membership communication. Chapter should display consistent communication with the full membership via vehicles such as newsletters, e-mail or a Web site. Board members should be in regular communication with each other, national headquarters and their regional director. Include copies of any printed materials for the 2003-04 program year.
We have continued a strong communications effort this year through e-mail newsletters and our chapter Web site at www.spj.org/nashville. Examples are attached as an addendum to this report. We just recently overhauled the Web site to incorporate some of the new “blog” technology that will allow our site to be easily updateable, interactive (allowing for comments from readers) and also to create an RSS feed for it. And Gridiron has its own Web site, www.nashvillegridiron.com.
We also did chapter-wide mail-outs this year for both our golf tournament and our Gridiron show invitations.
We also have started our own Yahoo! Discussion group, which is reachable at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middletnspj/. We don’t have many subscribers yet, but, well, we’re trying.
III. Chapter Evaluation
Evaluate your chapter’s
strengths and weaknesses and mention any activities or projects that you would
like to see conducted at the national or regional level.
We were very honored this past year to be named Outstanding Small Chapter in Region 12.
We also were very grateful for the opportunity
from the national organization and the Scripps-Howard Foundation to have one of
our officers attend the 2004 Ted Scripps Leadership Training in
Strengths
• Revived the Gridiron Show, so eventually we’ll have money coming back in to our scholarship fund.
• Breathed a little new life into our main chapter fundraiser, our golf tournament, and made a little more money than last year.
• We have a small, core group of dedicated volunteers who are committed to the chapter.
• Chapter communication with the membership remains strong.
Weaknesses
• Professional development programming. We need more of it. We have lots of ideas and just need to put them into reality.
• Member recruitment and retention. Membership held steady this year, but we hope to get more members next year.
• Involvement from broadcast journalists. The board has discussed some strategies on this in recent weeks.
• Fundraising. We need to breathe still more life into the golf tournament and/or find some other way to raise money for the chapter’s operation.
• Diversity. We have a mostly white membership, and as far as I know,
all the members of our chapter board are Caucasian. We should be more
reflective of the community at large.
Using the attached system of graduated chapter requirements please rank
your chapter. In your opinion, the chapter reached the following level in the
past year:
____ One Star____ Two Star ___X_ Three Star ____ Four Star
Financial
report
The
following is a transcript of the chapter’s treasurer’s report to the national
headquarters. The actual form was written out by hand.
Current
treasury conditions for the Middle Tennessee Pro Chapter
Name of
the chapter’s financial institution: AmSouth Bank
Account
number: Withheld from this transcript for security reasons
Cash on
hand as of April 1, 2005: $1,806.29 in the main SPJ account; $11,489.31 in the
Gridiron account
Investments
on hand as of April 1, 2005: $0
Total
cash, investments and assets: $13,295.60
Outstanding
debts: $0
Restricted
funds: $20,000 in possession of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee
(for scholarship)
Closing
bank balance as of this report: SPJ, $1,651.15; Gridiron, $19,718.21
Chapter’s
Federal Tax ID number: Withheld from this transcript for security reasons
Did your
chapter receive more than $25,000 in gross revenue during the past fiscal year?
NO
Record
review: We the undersigned committee, appointed by the chapter adviser, have
reviewed the treasurer’s books, the treasurer’s report and the accompanying
records and find them to be in order.
[Signed]
Gail M.
Kerr
C. Ellen
Margulies
Laurie
E. Holloway