By Roy Harris
ASBPE Foundation President

When jurors for this year’s Stephen Barr Award selected American Farriers Journal editor Frank Lessiter — for his remarkable series on equine abuse, a shameful but little-known part of competitions among “gaited horses” — Lessiter became the sixth business-to-business writer chosen to receive ASBPE's top individual prize for feature writing.

Further, the latest winner once again extended the widely diverse range of work honored with the Stephen Barr Award, which is keyed to evidence of “inventiveness, insight, balance, depth, and impact.”

The first one, in 2004, went to Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based freelance journalist who had produced a groundbreaking series on the Chinese recycling industry for Scrap magazine. It was a series, focusing on China's rapidly expanding, but then little-understood role as a repository for the world's refuse, and especially hard-to-process computer parts. Since then, winners have been recognized for work on legal affairs (John Gibeaut, ABA Journal); swimming-pool drownings (Shabnam Mogharabi, Aquatics International); Harvard missteps in a Russian initiative (David McClintick, Institutional Investor); and fuel choices by trucking companies (David Cullen, FleetOwner.)

What all six writers have in common — besides the handsome crystal trophies on their mantles — is that their stories won over a prestigious pair of jurors, who spent weeks analyzing the best journalism among national gold-award winners in the year's Azbee competition. This year’s jurors — long-time journalists and educators George Gendron and Lou Ureneck — have been involved with Stephen Barr Award judging since the beginning.

Gendron, perhaps best known for his two decades as editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine, now is director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Clark University in Massachusetts — a program he founded. Years ago, Gendron also created the Inc. 500, the annual listing of America's fastest-growing private companies.

Ureneck, now the director of Boston University's journalism program, formerly was deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and before that the editor and vice president of Maine's Portland Press Herald. He has been editor-in-residence at Harvard's Neiman Foundation, where he pursued a comparative study of the methods of historians and the practices of journalists. He is also a frequent commentator on national media issues.

In past years, Gendron and Ureneck have been joined by Walter V. Robinson, a veteran Boston Globe reporter and editor who now holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Boston’s Northeastern University. As assistant managing editor for investigations, Robinson headed the paper's Spotlight Team, whose projects included the Pulitzer Prize-winning disclosures of sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests, and a Church cover-up of the situation.

Since helping to found the Stephen Barr Award — endowed by Stephen’s parents not long after his death from cancer at age 43 — I have been honored to coordinate the judging process, and to work with these busy journalists as they give their time to ASBPE matters. Their dedication to candor, to six years of “getting it right,” no matter how long it took, has been truly impressive.

But my favorite job related to the Stephen Barr Award is sneaking behind the backs of the unsuspecting winners, and maneuvering with associates and relatives to make sure that recipients will be in the audience, to get the surprise of their lives. So far, four of the our six winners have been in attendance — to be blindsided from the lectern at the Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet. This year, Frank Lessiter's son Michael managed to persuade his dad to make the trip, knowing that his father was about to receive the honor of a lifetime.

Six impressive Stephen Barr Award winners. Six extraordinary projects. And six triumphs for ASBPE. George Gendron, Lou Ureneck, and Walter V. Robinson: our membership salutes you.

Labels: Azbee Awards, Journalism, Roy Harris

By Roy Harris
ASPBE Past President

Several ASBPE chapters are known for their powerful program planning. But it would be hard to top the work done by the Chicago chapter in designing this month's half-day workshop titled "B2B Survival Strategies for Difficult Economic Times."

Featured speakers at the Nov. 7, program, held at Columbia College in the Loop, were

Marina Dock Age and Boat & Motor Dealer editor Peter Gallanis discussed how to use interns to your greatest advantage. Addressing multiplatform editorial strategies were Telephony editor-in-chief Carol Wilson, Time Out Chicago web editor Scott Smith and Pierce Hollingsworth, president of his own marketing consultancy. Just seeing a variety of websites up on the screen and the different way editors handle making them work for readers helped produce insights. Carol's dedication to devoting slower afternoon hours to getting stories ready for early-morning runs, for example, pays off by giving other outlets good material from her site to be picked up during the day. That brings Telephony an extra promotional benefit from such stories.

As impressive as the firepower that Chicago leaders called in to discuss survival, though, was the careful thought that they gave to the program lineup. By making the first topic of the day ethics—the discussion I was honored to moderate—they took note of how vital it is that publications maintain the trust of their readers, especially when times are hard and the financial challenges are greatest.

It was clear to all the attendees—when the examples started pouring in during the Q&A—that newsroom ethics are far more than window-dressing. And that editors are the ones on the spot, not just for training writers in ethical behavior, but for confronting publishers who may be tempted to go over the edge when advertiser pressures mount. It is more and more important, in fact, as the advertising dollar looks to some companies like the ultimate goal, whereas we know that the goal must continue to be reader service.

I was proud to be able to point out in Chicago that ASBPE's redesign of our ethics code has provided useful guidelines for editors to follow in examining ethical questions and finding answers to practical questions. The proof has been in the response we've had since we installed a redesigned ethics program that uses a standing Advisory Committee to deal with inquiries reflecting real-life quandaries. We now get answers back to member questions within three days, and stand ready to back them up with their publishers, if that's required. And I was glad that the 30 attendees seemed so eager to learn how the code has been working of late under its new committee chairperson, Spring Suptic. The one-word answer: effectively.

For chapters seeking a model for programming, I suggest getting in touch with Chicago Chapter President Nikki Golden, or with Vice President Erin Erickson, who managed the program so well. Congratulations, Chicago.

Roy Harris is senior editor of CFO magazine.

Labels: Digital, Ethics, Roy Harris

By Roy Harris
Past President ASBPE National

Awards: Don't win 'em, and you drive your management crazy. Win 'em—or, heaven forbid, win too many! —and you open yourself to charges that you're somehow in bed with the prize-judging system.

Matt Kinsman suggests in his April Folio: magazine Reality Check column, "No Love for the Little Guy" that there's such hanky-panky going on in award programs like the Ellies (National Magazine Awards) and Neals (Jesse H. Neal Awards, from American Business Media.) Some of it may be unintentional, reflecting how Gotham-centric the programs are, for example. Matt tallies 78 New York-based Ellie finalists, with only 50 coming from "elsewhere." Pretty amazing.

And then there's the corollary issue: "Them what has, gets." From a MarketWatch piece delicately titled "Why the National Magazine Awards Are a Crock," Matt quotes Jon Friedman. "Two words neatly sum up the selection of the nominees and winners: popularity contest," Friedman writes. He then further suggests that the industry would be better off if Ellies were determined by "something more relevant, such as a magazines' primary subject."

The Folio: discussion—which, by the way, excluded mention of Folio:'s own Eddies and Ozzies — got me to thinking. Having headed up ASBPE's Azbee Awards of Excellence as national VP for two years, and later overseeing the program as national president until last year, I had to handle plenty of complaints. Most related to second-guessing the judges. But other gripes did indeed target the seeming concentration of awards each year in a relative few publishing-company hands. We take such concerns very seriously.

My own conclusion about the program over the years, however: whatever their shortcomings, the Azbees are dedicated to honoring as wide a variety of work, and worthy publications, as possible.

For one thing, we give so many awards — 20 categories in print editorial alone, and each of those categories divided into large and small magazines — that more publications simply have a chance. (And digital awards, of course, are now our fastest-growing area.) Beyond that, for most award categories we give regional recognition across four regions, making sure that excellent work from around the U.S. gets its day in the sun. And, by the way, we work hard to make sure that our judges represent a diverse variety of large and small publications.

Diverse judging carries through to the Magazine of the Year and Web Publication of the Year, which along with our Stephen Barr Award for feature writing are ASBPE's most prestigious honors.

Are there problems with the Azbees? Of course. Lots of them. And many issues stem from the program's very expansiveness. One frequent complaint: The sheer volume of prizes not only leads the national and regional award programs to drag on (it couldn't be the hosts, of course!), but also tends to make individual Gold, Silver, and Bronze seem less precious.

My personal response to that charge is that the Azbees have managed, by carefully monitoring the process, not to cheapen the honor of a prize. I'm extremely proud of the stories I've written and edited that have won Azbees. (I'm especially proud of one "East Regional Bronze" because it was for a story I had to fight to get in my magazine, and turned out well against all odds.) Besides, the new acrylic plaques are downright neat.

Harris is senior editor at CFO magazine.

Labels: Azbee Awards, Media Industry Awards, Roy Harris

By Roy Harris

Labels: Book Writing and Publishing, Pulitzer's Gold, Roy Harris