SPJ

Join us on Saturday, Feb. 20 at noon eastern when the next episode of Studio SPJ will examine a new national movement aimed at strengthening press freedom for student journalists. Our guests will be Frank Lomonte, director of Student Press Law Center and John Tagliareni and Tom McHale, two veteran high school journalism advisors in New Jersey. All three men have been advocating for legislation known as the New Voices Act, which would restore, by way of state-level protection, the rights that the U.S. Supreme Court stripped away from students in Hazelwood. The bill, which passed in North Dakota and curently pending in New Jersey, applies at both the K-12 and college levels, and importantly also includes retaliation protection for student advisers. The national SPJ enacted a resolution at the September convention calling on its members to get involved in supporting New Voices legislation in their own states. We'll talk to Lomonte about the national effort currently taking place in 20 states. McHale and Tagliarini will discuss their efforts to advocate for the bill in New Jersey. Region 1 Director Jane Primerano will serve as host of the 30-minute program, which is co-sponsored by the New Jersey chapter of SPJ. Click here for more information on the legislation.

Tune in on Sunday Nov. 8 at noon when our next broadcast of Studio SPJ will feature a discussion of the possiblity of podcasting. Our guests will include Paul Brubaker, producer of "The Backgrounder," a weekly podcast on New Jersey politics and culture heard at NJ.Com and Brandon Robinson, co-host of "Brown and Scoop." a weekly podcast on sports and entertainment on the CBS Radio Play,it network. The 30-minute conversation will be moderated by John Ensslin, who besides producing Studio SPJ is also the host of Record Talk Radio, a podcast featuring journalists and newsmakers from northern New Jersey. All three will be speakers an SPJ New Jersey workshop called "Podcasting 101" from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the New Jersey Institute for Technology. Click here for information about the workshop.

Record Talk Radio kicks off its fifth season on Friday Oct. 30 at 11 a.m. when Bergen County Executive James Tedesco will be our guest. Tedesco will talk about several county projects, the current political season and his recent recovery from back surgery. Tedesco, a Democrat and former Paramus mayor, became Bergen's fifth county executive in January. Record Talk Radio is an on-going series of conversations between newsmakers and journaliss in Northern New Jersey.

Join us for the next broadcast of Studio SPJ when our guests will be Patricia Calhoun, editor of Denver's alt-weekly Westword and former SPJ President Kevin Smith, deputy director of the Kiplinger Progrom for Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University. Calhoun will talk about her columns on Colorado history and politics, which recently took first place in the 2014 SDX awards. Smith will talk about a "dirty dozen" journalism apps that he presented at SPJ's recent JournCamp in New York City.

Join us on Saturday, May 23 at 10 a.m. Eastern time when our guest on Studio SPJ will be Brad Heath, a reporter with USA Today and the winner of the 2015 Al Nakkula award for police reporting. Heath won the award for a series of stories in which he revealed how police and prosecutors nationwide had allowed nearly 200,000 fugitives to escape justice simply by crossing over state lines. The series led authorities in at least four states to reconsider or reverse this policy. The Nakkula award is named after the late Al Nakkula, a legendary cops and crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. The award is co-sponsored by The Denver Press Club and The University of Colorado's College of Media, Communication and Information. This broadcastis co-sponsored by the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Join us on Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern when our guest on Studio SPJ will be SDX President Robert Leger in a live interview from the Excellence in Journalism conference in Nashville. Leger, a former SPJ national president, will talk about the year ahead for SDx, the non-profit arm of the society which funds journalism programs. We'll talk about a plan for SDX to take a greater role in overseeing that programming.

Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 3 at 11 a.m. Eastern / 8 a.m. Pacific when our guests on Studio SPJ witll be Rebecca Tallent and Kevin Smith. Tallent, an SPJ national board member and chair of the journalism education committee, will talk about SPJ's work in documenting the state of high school journalism education in the United States. Smith, a former SPJ national president and chair of the ethics committee, will talk about the proposed revisions to SPJ's ethic code. Both subjects will be discussed at the Excellence in Journalism convention on Sept. 5-7 in Nashville. This 30-minute program is part of a series of broadcasts leading up to and during the conference

Join us for the next edition of Studio SPJ when our guest will be Michael Koretzky, SPJ's Region 3 director from South Florida. Well talk about the debate over changing SPJ's name from the Society of Professional Journalists to the Society for Professional Journalism. This is a topic that came up during last year's Excellence in Journalism conference in Anaheim and will be aired out again later this week at our conference in Nashville. We'll also talk about a creative program that the South Florida chapter has run in recent years called Will Write for Food. On Labor Day weekend, a group of college journalists from across the county come to Florida to report, edit, photograph and write an edition of a homeless shelter's newspaper. This 30-minute program is part of a series of broadcasts we'll be doing leading up to and during this year's EIJ 2014 conference

Studio SPJ will kick off a series of podcasts called "The Road to Nashville"  previewing our upcoming Excellence in Journalism 2014 conference on Sept. 4-6. Ken Paulson will be our guest for the first of these broadcasts on Thursday at 3 p.m. / 2 p.m. Central time. (Please note: this program was rescheduled from an earlier broadcast date.) Paulson is the dean of Middle Tennessee State University's College of Mass Communication. He previously has served a president of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, as president of the Newseum in Washington D.C. and as editor-in-chief at USA Today. We'll be talking to Ken about Freedom Sings, a musical program at the convention featuring songs that were once banned as well as the tribute planned for the late John Seigenthaler, the former editor of The Tennessean and founder of the First Amendment Center.

Join us on Tuesday, June 17 at noon Eastern when the next broadcast of Studio SPJ will feature two of the people who've assembled the programs for our upcoming Excellence in Journalism Conference on Sept. 4-6 in Nashville. Amy Tardif, station and news manager for WGCU in Fort Myers, Florida and Scott Leadingham, SPJ's director of education and the editor of Quill Magazine, will give us a preview of what's in store for this year's convention, which takes place at Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. This year's convention is another collaboration between the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. Click here for more information on the conference.

Join us at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 2 when we'll discuss the upcoming Region 1 Spring Conference scheduled for April 25-26 at Boston University. Our guests will be two of the organizers of the event, Jeff Cutler and Michael Fitzgerald. We'll talk about some of the programs they've lined up as well as other nearby attractions that conference-goers can take in that weekend. Click here for more information on the conference.

Join us on Saturday, Nov. 16 at 2 p.m. Eastern when our next episode of Studio SPJ will feature a discussion of whether the Society of Professional Journalists should change its name. This issue came up during our national convention in Anaheim when some delegates proposed changing the name to Society for Professional Journalism. SPJ National President Dave Cuillier has appointed a task force to study the issues. Two members of that task force, Region 2 Director Andy Schotz and Region 3 Director Michael Koretzky will debate the pros and cons of the issue.

Join us on Friday, Oct. 4 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific when our guest on Studio SPJ will be journalist and author Seth Rosenfeld.   Rosenfeld, a former reporter of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, is the author of "Subversives, the FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power."   He also is the winner of SPJ's Sunshine Award this year and a past winner (2003) of the SDX Foundation's Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award.   Both awards recognized Rosenfeld's brilliant and dogged work in peeling back layer after layer of secrecy though his skillful and persistent use of the Freedom of Information Act.   His fight to force the government to comply with the Act led to a series of court rulings that strengthened citizen access to federal public records.   It also forced the release of some 300,000 documents and resulted in a judgement of $1 million to pay his pro bono attorneys' fees.   Studio SPJ is an on-going series of conversations with journalists on topics of interest to the profession.   This episode is co-sponsored by the Northern California chapter of SPJ.

Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 18 when our guest on Studio SPJ will be Mark Segal, founder and publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News.   Segal is one of the founders and former president of the National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild.   He founded PGN in 1975, making it one of the oldest gay newspapers in the United States.   He also has covered gay life from place like Lebanon, Cuba and East Berlin during the time when the Berlin Wall was torn down.   He represented the gay press and lectured in Moscow and St. Petersburg at Russia's first openly gay conference.   Recently he was inducted into the GLBT Journalist Hall of Fame by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association.

Join us on Monday, Aug. 26 at 11 a.m. Eastern / 8 a.m. Pacific as we wrap up our live coverage of Excellence in Journalism 2013 with a conversation with two up and coming SPJ leaders. Our guests will be Dana Neuts, a candidate for SPJ President-elect and Paul Fletcher, a candidate for SPJ Secretary-Treasurer. Both are running unopposed. We'l talk about the state of the society and what they hope to accomplish as members of the executive committee. Neuts has been a freelance journalist since 2003. She is the owner/publisher of iLoveKent.net. She currently serves as SPJ Secretary-Treasurer. She previously served as Region 10 Director and as president of the Western Washington SPJ Chapter. Fletcher is publisher and editor-in-chief of Virginia Lawyers Weekly, a newspaper and website for the legal profession in Richmond, Va. where he has worked since 1988. He has served as president of the Virginia Pro chapter of SPJ for the last two years.

Join us for the third in a series of live broadcasts from the Excellence in Journalism 2013 conference in Anaheim, Ca. on Sunday, Aug. 25 at 3:30 p.m. Pacific / 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Our guests will be Linda Petersen, chair of the SPJ Ethics committee and Deidre Woollard, a community editor with Realtor.com. Petersen will talk about the reaction to a recent study her committee  conducted on the relationship between reporters covering federal agencies and the public information officers who represent those agencies. Woollard will talk about a program she will be presenting on Monday called "Owning your beat online."

Join us for the next installment of Studio SPJ live from the Excellence in Journalism Conference on Saturday, Aug. 24 at 6:30 p.m / 3:30 Pacific. Our guests will be Kevin Smith, chairman of the SPJ Ethics Committee and Robert Leger, president of the SDX Board. Smith, a former SPJ president, will talk about whether the SPJ Ethics Code needs to be updated for an age in which journalism has gone digital. The topic is scheduled to be discussed during the EIJ Conference. Leger, also a former SPJ president, will talk about his plans for the SDX Foundation, which is the non-profit philanthropic arm of SPJ.

Join us on Saturday Aug. 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern noon / Mountain time when our guest on Studio SPJ will be M. E. Sprengelmeyer, reporter and publisher of the Guadalupe County Communicator. Before purchasing the weekly paper in New Mexico in 2009, Sprengelmeyer worked at the Rocky Mountain News, where he served in the paper's Washington bureau. He had covered the Iraq War and the 2008 Presidential campaign for the Rocky. But when the paper folded in February 2009, Sprengelmeyer decided to take a new direction as the owner of a small community paper with a circulation of about 2,000. Earlier this year, he served as a speaker at SPJ's Region 9 Conference in Santa Fe.  In this half-hour program, he will talk with Rio Grande SPJ chapter member Laura Paskus about his experience and his belief that "the future of print is print." This program is co-sponsored by SPJ's Rio Grande chapter.

Join us at 2 p.m. Saturday, July 13 for a discussion of our fabulous Excellence in Journalism Convention in Anaheim on August 24-26. Our guest for the half-hour program will be the folks who helped program the convention. They include: Dave Cullier, from the Society of Professional Journalists, Chris Carl from The Radio Television and Digital News Directors Assocation and Mekhalo Medina from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. The year's convention will mark the first time that all three groups have combined to produce a joint national conference. The collaboration has produced some great programs and the convention is expected to draw more than 1,000 journalists from around the country.

Join us on Friday, March 15 at noon eastern when our guest on Studio SPJ will be Pulitizer-prize winning photographer and independent journalist Jim MacMillan. MacMillan, a former photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Associated Press, will talk about one of his latest efforts, the Gun Crisis Reporting Project. The non-profit project is an open source journalism organization that attempts to fill the gaps in coverage of gun violence reporting while seeking solutions to the epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia.  Click here to see the project's website. MacMillan has been teaching Peace Journalism and advising the students who produce War News Radio at Swarthmore Colllege since 2010. He recently left there to join the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University. He also taught convergence journalism at the University of Missouri. Until 2008, MacMillan was senior photographer at the Daily News, where he had worked since 1991. While on leave from the paper in 2004-2005, he was a photographer and photo editor for the Associated Press in Iraq. He was part of the AP photo team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. This broadcast is sponsored by the Philadelphia chapter of SPJ. Chapter President Phil Beck will serve as moderator. Studio SPJ is a series of conversations with journalism on topics of interest to the profession.