Membership Chair Shares Ideas

NSNC Membership

Rose A. Valenta
http://www.rosevalenta.com

Being elected to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (NSNC) Board of Directors as Membership Chair is both a privilege and an honor. I will do my best to do a great job for you.

As usual, I have set my goals high. I’d like to increase membership by at least 100 before my two-year term is over.  I will be proactively seeking folks, whom I believe strive for excellence in their writing careers whether they publish a blog, books, contribute interesting articles, or have a successful column in a print newspaper or magazine; people who understand the responsibility that we owe to our readers, peers, and colleagues.  We are a family and I am happy to be a part of this growing organization of dedicated writers.

Every time I hear someone say “I write because I love it!” I find that they produce excellent work. It comes naturally to those who love the craft.  This was apparent at the NSNC “Rebound in Motown” Conference in June. Attendee columns were placed in our conference handbook. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.

I’d like to thank everyone involved with our conference in Detroit. It was amazing and I took away a wealth of knowledge from all the panels and sessions.  A special thanks to Bob Haught, Luenna Kim, Brian O’Connor, Sheila Moss and Ben Pollock for your hard work and dedication. E.B. Heron thanks you too, we had fun. Congratulations to Bob and Mary Haught for establishing the Will Rogers Foundation. Bob can fill you in about that in the newsletter.

I strongly believe that the key to anyone’s success is honing both written and oral communication skills. I’m also a firm believer in social networking as a means to promote people that produce quality work. As a family, we should strive to help each other professionally.

I will be presenting an idea to the Board in August that I feel will assist our members in their endeavor to land paid freelance assignments and speaking engagements on our website. Without going into detail here, if it is approved by the Board, it will benefit all members, even those who are not at liberty to take freelance assignments. I worked on staff for a McGraw-Hill subsidiary in the 1990s. We were not at liberty to freelance on our own, but we were allowed to give seminars and accept speaking engagements that pertained to the genre of our employer. Many editors hire freelancers for topics not covered by in-house staff. As we face the economic downslide and the transition from print to electronic media, I hope to encourage them to come to the NSNC to seek professional writers as a solution to their publishing needs.

Your end, of course is to maintain your membership, encourage others to join, and be prepared by developing your own ideas for presentations and workshops suited to your skills, so you can take advantage of a new revenue stream. I am open to suggestions, so if you have an idea that you believe will benefit the organization and increase membership, please send me an e-mail. I will follow up on your ideas.

I also want to encourage dialog in the NSNCdiscussions at Yahoogroups newsgroup. If you are not in the group already, you are missing some great discussion. Our NSNC Facebook page is informative, as well. By all means, if you read a column you especially enjoy that was written by a NSNC member, please promote them and their work by sharing the link on your Facebook page, on our wall, in your other newsgroups, Twitter, and any other social networking sites where you regularly participate. Each of us adds value to the NSNC.

Thank you again for your support and I hope to see you at the next conference.