Society of Professional Journalists

The South Florida Society of Professional Journalists recognized the deserving winners of its 2009 Sunshine State Awards during a ceremony tonight at the Art & Culture Center of Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida. The Sunshine State Awards honor excellence in journalism in the state of Florida. This year marked the 15th anniversary of the awards. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners, including the winners of the prestigious James Batten Award for Public Service: Jack Dolan, Matthew Haggman, and Rob Barry of The Miami Herald. Find out the names of the other winners here.

Technology, Innovation and Insight for Traditional Journalists
WHO: We’d prefer that you’re a newspaper refugee, but we won’t turn away working journalists or anyone working in communications. Sorry – this time, we will not take technologists, consultants, academics or students. We’re going to check, so don’t try to pull a fast one on us.
WHEN: Wednesday, March 25th at 3pm Eastern Time. The training session will last 75 minutes.

Columbia Journalism Review: Listening to Kilgore
“Barney Kilgore, the inventor of the modern Wall Street Journal and, in important respects, the best of America journalism as we know it, died back in 1967. But he has something to say about journalism today, and we ought to listen.”

Poynter: Cloud Journalism and the Fate of Beats
Jobs — including jobs in journalism — just aren’t what they used to be. Earlier this week, consultant Robert Patterson observed after reviewing trends in unemployment statistics that “the idea of a ‘job’ as a full-time object that can support a person or even a family, is disappearing.”

U.S. daily newspapers shrank their newsrooms by 2,400 journalists in the past year, a 4.4% workforce decrease that’s the biggest year-over-year cut in ranks since the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) began conducting its annual census 30 years ago.
Shrinking Newsrooms

AJR Senior Editor Carl Sessions Stepp explains why it is time to “launch a counteroffensive to preserve serious journalism.
Maybe it is Time to Panic

You can register now at the national SPJ website for the regional conference, planned for March 28-29 in Columbia, S.C.