Deborah Blum PHOTO by Kristen Jaloviar, Express Portraits

President’s Letter

by Deborah Blum

If you were in Seattle for our annual conference, first let me say, it was great to see you. We had our most successful professional training workshops yet, with more than 400 science writers attending. And we had one of our most successful-and genuinely interesting-business meetings, with rare standing-room-only attendance.

It’s the business meeting that I want to focus on here, because the reason it drew such a crowd was that we were talking very specifically about the future of our national meeting. For context, I’m going to partly repeat information I shared earlier with you in a post to nasw-announce, -talk, and -freelance.

At its February meeting, the NASW Board voted unanimously to physically separate our national conference from the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.

We still plan to meet in Washington, DC next year, in the two days preceding the 2005 AAAS annual meeting. But our activities will no longer be commingled with that of AAAS. The workshops, business meeting, and Science-in-Society Awards will be consolidated into a separate conference held at a different location within the city.

In addition, the board voted to devote time and resources this year to investigating other possible venues in which to hold the NASW national conference. We have already begun discussions with the American Chemical Society and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Board members plan to explore those and other options during the next year.

This action was precipitated by unusual difficulties obtaining AAAS press registration for our members this year, especially for freelancers and those involved in the book publishing industry. In fact, our vice president, Laura van Dam, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, was initially refused press credentials, forcing us for the first time to schedule our business meeting outside the AAAS press area, in Seattle. The problems and their temporary resolution were detailed in my fall president’s letter.

It’s fair to say that AAAS responded to our increasingly strong protests. The news office agreed as an interim measure to give press credentials to all NASW members attending our workshops in Seattle. Still, we dealt with sporadic registration problems all fall. One former magazine editor was given press credentials only after I personally vouched for him. One former national magazine writer was asked to show proof that she was still a credible freelancer. She did receive credentials but decided not to come to the meeting.

And then we learned at the last minute that AAAS had scheduled six press conferences opposite our workshops, forcing our registrants to choose between the conflicted schedules. One of the AAAS press conferences was a high-profile cloning session, causing many NASW members to have to drop out of workshops they had paid for in advance.

While the conflict forced us to begin evaluating the design and function of our national meeting-and, in fact, whether we should continue meeting in conjunction with AAAS-the timing is ideal. We have grown in the past decade into an organization that provides professional training workshops, member-oriented listservs, and a Web site (currently undergoing a major redesign), job services, and travel fellowships. We are also preparing a second edition of its internationally published book, A Field Guide for Science Writers. As we extend our reach and ambitions, it’s time for us to take a serious look at the shape of our national conference and how to improve it.

We are the only journalism organization I know of that links its national conference to a meeting of its sources. We, along with many science organizations, are an affiliate of AAAS-this, due in part, because NASW has traditionally held its business meeting in the AAAS convention facilities. Moving our meeting means we may be able to drop the affiliate designation, and that is my inclination.

As I mentioned, our business meeting will now be held in conjunction with the off-site training workshops. It is also my inclination-and that of the board’s-to continue try to improve the situation with AAAS. In Seattle, I had an opportunity to speak briefly with Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS, about our issues. He indicated his strong support for continued linkage of the two meetings and invited NASW officers to meet with him in Washington, DC. That meeting is scheduled for late March.

Many of us like the working journalist “feel” of our national conference and members have also indicated that it helps them secure funding for the trip. Still others have argued that an independent meeting builds a stronger and more connected association, looking toward the Society of Environmental Journalists as a model. We devoted an online survey in December to reevaluating the NASW-AAAS relationship. Results suggested that our members put the highest premium on professional training and networking.

But at the business meeting many members also said that they didn’t fully understand the survey when we sent it out. We plan to develop another, more pointed questionnaire as we explore our options and work to strengthen our organization. In the meantime, board officers will be monitoring nasw-talk and we hope you will continue the thoughtful discussion begun at the business meeting.

I want to mention a couple of points that came up at the membership meeting in Seattle. There was real support for the idea of the contained meeting, which would allow those science writers who only wanted to attend the workshops and perhaps a day or so of the AAAS meeting to keep their trip short and financially manageable.

The presidents of the Society of Environmental Journalists (Dan Fagin) and of the Association of Health Care Journalists (Andrew Holtzman) were present and discussed their meetings, which are both stand-alone. SEJ’s meeting draws more participants than ours; AHCJ’s draws fewer. But both said that that a separate meeting builds a sense of solidarity among participants.

Some of our members said they found the combined NASW-AAAS meeting’s dual personality made them feel unfocused. And some argued that the concept has worked for years and that AAAS is still the best all-purpose science meeting around. Without the ability to report stories and be paid for that, there was concern that the size of our conference would drop.

These are all legitimate questions and concerns, which is why we’re taking our time to explore them. I think our first step, both cautious and radical in its way, is the right one. We do need to step away from a meeting too tightly connected to the organization we cover-and I’m far from the first president to nudge us in that direction. We do need to be responsible first for our members and our meeting and take care of both. We have long ties to AAAS, but if our members continue to have trouble getting in, we need to figure out how best to respond to that reality. And if, as we hope, we can resolve that, we still should take advantage of this opportunity to plan ahead for the organization we hope to be.

#

Deborah Blum is a freelance writer and professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin. She can be reached at dblum@wisc.edu.