Advice & inspiration

The importance of professional organizations in our industry

With tight budgets these days, memberships to professional organizations might be the first to get the boot. However, I would argue that these organizations are one of the only things keeping us going in these hard times. Think about it: where else do passionate members congregate at annual meetings to better their craft, and dedicated volunteers organize and judge competitions to highlight exceptional work?

Megan Taylor posted a listing of 30 great journalism organizations on del.icio.us that I wanted to pass along to everyone. It gives a brief overview of each organization and some detail about membership stats. If you are curious about who else is out there, this list is a great start.

I have always been a fan of SND – serving as it’s UNC president in 2007, and judging the 2008-2009 SNDies and 2009 S-SND competitions. But, I have to admit that even though the annual conferences look tempting, I have only been able to attend the 2006 get-together in Orlando due to personal budget restraints.

I have started to become more interested in NPPA as I continually admire the monthly competition winners and BOP archives.

I also advocate for The Poynter Institute, where I was lucky enough to attend the 2007 student summer fellowship. The faculty there is incredible, with Sara Quinn, Kenny Irby, Kelly McBride, Regina McCombs, and others instilling ethical practices and high-quality standards across the industry.

For some reason, Will Sullivan’s Journerdism blog is not loading here in Costa Rica, but awhile back he blogged in detail about four specific organizations and the pro’s and con’s for each. Hopefully this link that I bookmarked back in January of 2008 will work for others. Otherwise, hopefully Will can dig through his archives and provide a working link.

So my question is how can we guarantee that these professional organizations survive despite our hardships? We all know that group morale is low in newsrooms, and these passionate professional groups may be the only thing we have left. Should they lower the membership price to entice new members? Or, should they create partnerships with Universities to ensure continued growth?

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about what professional organizations you belong to and how you decided on one over the other …

Other posts that might interest you:

• The importance of multimedia competitions within our industry
• 15 multimedia training opportunities for 2010
• Ease into programming with Poynter’s August seminar “Programming for Journalists / Journalism for Programmers”

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