John Bednarowski
Marietta Daily Journal
APSE Third Vice President
You asked for it. You got it.
I’m happy to announce that for our Class D papers, the game story will be back in the contest this winter.
I was made aware of that last week during a conference call with our other officers.
First Vice President Mary Byrne said the suggestion I made to bring back the game story was a good one. While the compliment was nice, this had very little to do with me.
Back in the summer and fall I had some lengthy conversations and email dialogues with many of the other small paper editors. We talked about the contest and ways it could be better. Overwhelmingly, you said bringing back the game story was what you wanted.
The game story is a lifeblood of small papers. If you work at a paper like ours, often in the shadows of a major city, readers can get the Braves, Falcons or Hawks gamer just about anywhere. What you can’t get is the story from the McEachern-Marietta, Auburn-Opelika, Cheyenne East-Cheyenne Central or Reed-Carson games unless you read the local community newspaper.
These are the stories and the photos that end up framed on the wall in the house, put into scrapbooks, or hung on school walls and in lockers. These are the stories that cause the rack sales to go up on Saturday’s during football season or when the local team wins a state championship — regardless of sport.
So thank you to Second Vice President Tommy Deas, Justin Pellitier, Dana Sulonen, former third VP Ben Brigandi, Robert Gagliardi and so many others for your ideas and suggestions in helping get this done.
While the game story will be back, there will be some other exciting changes that I believe will help streamline the contest. Hopefully, it will mean less work for everyone involved when it comes to preparing entries. I’m going to leave it at that for now, because I don’t want to give too much of Mary’s announcement away. Check back for that soon.
While the contest news is exciting, something that isn’t is our membership numbers. Our summer push to try to help President Mike Sherman reach his goal of 50 members from 50 states has gone from a promising start, to a cold middle to now staring into the abyss.
While that may be a slight exaggeration, it is only slight. Many small papers have yet to renew their membership for 2015. I have reached out to most of them, but you all know what it means to be part of APSE.
You all know the benefits, the camaraderie and all the good works that have been done by the organization to help keep sports journalism the profession we all want it to be. I would like to ask everyone to call another paper in your state and try to recruit a new member or two, and tell them all the organization can offer, and then tell them what APSE means to you. If that doesn’t convince them, nothing will.
One final note. Thank you to everyone that participated in the football tab exchange. We had 33 papers partake and hopefully we will have more next season. I have sent the first large group of packages back out. There is a second one still to come, so if you haven’t received your copies yet, please be patient. I am trying to finish up the football season that will never end and I will get them to you soon.
Thanks for all your help. I’m sure I’ll be asking for it again.
