The Society of Professional Journalists, a couple of years shy of its hundredth anniversary, gets more digital every year. On Feb. 1, the venerable almost-monthly Quill magazine will go online in a new interactive digital edition. Along with SPJ's annual, The Journalist, Quill issues have been online as PDF files in the fast. The new edition uses the NXTbook Media online publishing system, which can incorporate video, audio and hyperlinks. Part of the magazine's education issue from last August is online as a demo.
(I had let my SPJ membership lapse for a while and missed some of these developments, but I'm catching up. In fact, the first posting of this message didn't acknowledge the earlier PDF versions of the Quill. Its searchable online archive of them could be a useful resource for journalism students and teachers.)
Not that "digital"� is a new concept with the organization. I first subscribed to Jack Lail's SPJ e-mail list around 1994, and I helped set up a couple of SPJ chapter Web pages a few years ago. More recently, I signed up for an e-mail collection of media news briefs called Press Notes, when my UT colleague Dorothy Bowles started editing it last year. (That all should pass for admission of my card-carrying lack of objectivity about SPJ.)
Press Notes is also available in bloglike form on the SPJ website, but SPJ also has gotten into interactive-style personal blogs, complete with conversations between bloggers and their readers. Example, the society's president, Christine Tatum, calling Grambling State University to task for suspending its student newspaper. (Tatum is an assistant business editor at The Denver Post and a UNC grad, but I don't think our paths crossed in Chapel Hill. Enough with the disclaimers.)
Other SPJ blogs focus on several of the organization's major areas of interest, including newsroom (and news) diversity, its legal defense fund for journalists and Freedom of Information issues. Northwestern University prof John Marshall's SPJ blog, News Gems: Highlighting the best of American journalism, is one I'll suggest to that students in my news writing classes add to their bookmark lists. Recent "gems": MSNBC's "word clouds" approach to covering the State of the Union address, a couple of sports stories that are way more than play-by-play (and one of which we discussed in a couple of my classes last week), and the Detroit Free Press's coverage of Michigan troops in Iraq.
Like most blogs, the SPJ ones have RSS feeds and room for comments on blog posts, sometimes getting some real conversations going. Elsewhere, the SPJ site also has a dozen discussion boards.
All of this blogging and discussion is separate from the site's sections about SPJ awards programs, annual convention and other resources, or its own news releases, although some of the topics get picked up in the blogs and discussions. Here are a few recent headlines:
Last but not least, the society has even embraced Web commerce with an SPJ Online Store selling the usual "membership organization" collection of logoed coffee mugs, ball caps, T-shirts and whatnot. (I may send off for a few of those official-looking reporter's notebooks myself. And, no, I'm not trolling for free samples.) | ![SPJ now sells a reporterâo[dot accent]s notebook](http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/images/2007/01/26/spjnotesg.gif)
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