By Scott Underwood, Herald Bulletin Editor
Industry associations can free individual businesses from a feeling of isolation. If you’re going it alone, without connections to similar businesses, solutions can be harder to find, challenges can seem unique and insurmountable.
Thankfully, there are lots of strong trade organizations in the newspaper industry that offer a continual stream of opportunities for interaction among employees from different newspapers, as well as training seminars and materials.
In Indiana, newspapers bond together to form the Hoosier State Press Association, which currently has about 175 member newspapers.
Among its many initiatives, the organization promotes state legislation that helps newspapers fulfill their public watchdog mandate. For example, in each of the past two years, the HSPA has pushed hard for reform of the state’s public access laws to add fines for public officials who deliberately break the law — $100 for a first offense and $500 for each repeat offense.
This year the bill won unanimous support in the House but perished when a Senate committee chairman declined to give the bill a hearing. The sticking point: the law had an anticipated annual cost of $4,000, and Senate leadership had issued a moratorium on bills with anticipated negative fiscal impact.
A similar bill to add civil fines to deliberate violations of state public access laws passed the Senate 49-0 last year but did not get a committee hearing in the House. So, essentially, everyone in both branches of the Legislature agrees that the bill should become law, but technicalities keep sidelining it. When the process works like this, is it any wonder that a great number of Hoosiers are disillusioned with state government?
Another way the HSPA serves its members is an internship program that places journalism students at newspapers for the summer. The Herald Bulletin benefited from this program last summer when HSPA intern Garrett Stack, an Indiana University student, was placed at our newspaper. Garrett wrote a wide variety of stories for us, many of which you can still find at our Web site, www.theheraldbulletin.com.
Last week, I had the pleasure of serving on a committee that selected the interns for this coming summer. The committee gathered at the HSPA offices in downtown Indianapolis and spent much of the day poring through dozens of applications.
Several of the applicants, clearly, weren’t yet prepared for the sort of immersive experience that an HSPA internship offers. Narrowing the rest of the list down to 10 and a handful of alternates was difficult and interesting. Their applications reflected intelligence, ambition, awareness of public policy issues and a good blend of classroom, student newspaper and professional experience.
The HSPA will now work with the selected students and member newspapers to place them this summer in newsrooms that will help them develop as job-ready journalists. It’s a great program and just one of the many reasons why the HSPA is so vital to the continuum of high-caliber journalism in Indiana.
Editor Scott Underwood’s column appears Mondays. Contact him at scott.underwood@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4845.
