A morning-after reflection about yesterday's post...Some SPJers have asked me if it would've been more productive to simply call HQ or president Dave Aeikens to get the mistakes I cited fixed. I dunno.
I started this blog because I wasn't getting answers to my questions. And in fact, the poorly written stuff is still up on our website as of this morning. Would a phone call really have changed anything?
As for "calling out" the staff, as I've been accused of doing, I didn't even know this was the staff's responsibility. And, in fact, one SPJ leader has told me it isn't — there's a convention-planning committee that's really in charge, and it's supposed to possess such "attention to detail." That committee is, apparently, always led by a board member.
But I knew none of this, even though I'm on the board. I still don't know anything more about this mysterious committee. If you log onto the convention webpage, there's no mention of it, and if you hit "email," you get an address of convention@spj.org. I even searched the SPJ website and found this, which mentions a lot of committees but nothing about the convention.
So I know less this morning than I did yesterday morning.
In my feeble mind, I thought I was calling out my own board. My logic went thusly: I know the staff works hard, because I've dealt with many of them and have always been impressed...But I know they're overworked, especially after the death of Terry Harper...The board is supposed to allocate our limited resources....Someone on the board must oversee convention planning...Am I the only board member who actually reads the program?...It's so obvious, and it's already online, I'm gonna blog about it.
I may be a pain in the ass, but I'm not an evil one. And like any good journalist, if I dish it out, I can take it. So if I've done anything wrong, I want to fix it. But I also want SPJ to do the same.
