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 MORE PHOTOS OF ACES MEMBERS AT THE BANQUET
 MORE PHOTOS AND THE FULL TEXT OF HANK'S SPEECH (new photos added 5/2/05)
READ HANK 'S BIO
By Matthew Crowley
Hank Glamann has a rich, sonorous voice; people hear it from
across a room and remember it as his. At the American Copy Editors Society conference
in Hollywood this week, that voice has led people through lessons on language and
headline writing. It has bounced among friends in hallways and lounges.
For the past nine years, Glamann's voice has spoken
loudly for copy editors everywhere, as he helped found and lead ACES.
But Glamann announced recently he intends to exit
journalism. Friday, as he gave the keynote address at the society’s annual banquet
-- his last -- he advised the society’s members to find their own voices and use
them, for the better of the craft.
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| Nicole Werking (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill senior) thanked ACES
for awarding her a $2,500 Aubespin
scholarship. Werking also will serve as a nonvoting student representative
on the ACES Executive Committee for a year. |
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Glamann recalled the 1976 movie “Network”, in which
the protagonist, Howard Beale, a well-respected network news anchorman, looks around
him and “goes over the rainbow.” He snaps.
“We know things are bad, worse than bad,” the character
says. “They’re crazy. It’s like everything is going crazy so we don’t go out any
more, we sit in the house and slowly the world we’re sitting in gets smaller, and
all we say is let ‘Please leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster
and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.'”
But Beale wouldn’t leave his viewers alone. He told
them to leave their comfortable chairs, open their windows and tell the world there
would have to be change.
“I want you to go to the window,” Beale said, “open
it, stick your head out of it and yell: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take
this anymore.’”
Glamann said he and Pam Robinson had their Howard
Beale moments in the fall of 1996, when they met at the University of Kansas. They
were attending a meeting organized by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to
address issues facing newspaper copy editors. Glamann and Robinson said they knew
one way to solve some of these issues: form a national organization for copy editors.
“It was clear the idea had widespread support; it
was also clear no one was actually going to do anything with it,” Glamann said. “Pam
and I were sitting there thinking about this and I will never forget the moment when
we realized the truth of the situation, because it hit us simultaneously and drew
both up short ... something that doesn’t happen often to us.”
Executing the idea was risky, Glamann said, and
brought him well out of his sphere of experience. He and Robinson learned how to
create a nonprofit organization and hired a lawyer to help them incorporate it. They
registered with the Internal Revenue Service. They launched a Web site and sent fliers
to people they knew and to people they didn’t know. They paid for everything.
And, in 1997, they planned for the first national
conference. Glamann said Robinson had hoped for maybe 50 people, 100 if they were
wildly lucky. Glamann said he was more optimistic, but had nothing on which to base
his optimism.
Nobody knew, he said, whether anybody would show
up.
But 300 people did show up. And ACES has grown ever
since.
The society started a national headline contest,
launched an educational foundation, formed regional chapters, expanded its Web site,
provided speakers to schools.
“All of this, and much more, has been done, and
is being done to advance the cause of the copy editor … to improve understanding
of what we do and to make our voice heard in our industry,” Glamann said. “But none
of this would have happened if two people hadn’t decided to do something that you’d
never find in their job descriptions. To think outside of that famous box. To make
a choice beyond the narrowly personal.”
Glamann said the society members attending Friday’s
dinner had the same choice. If people wanted to bring change they would have to try;
they’d have to stop themselves from sitting back and saying: “But I’m just a copy
editor.”
Copy editors would have to think of themselves as
important members of the newsroom, Glamann said, and also recognize their colleagues
as important. Approach people constructively, Glamann advised, stop e-mailing them
and talk to them. And when questions come up during editing, ask them.
Most of all, Glamann said, speak up.
“I’m not talking about crying in your beer with
your fellow copy editors,” he said. “Most of us are good at that, but it does precious
little good.”
Glamann started in journalism at age 12, using his
voice to read radio weather reports for KLEY in Wellington, Kan. Glamann said that
over his 40-year journalism career, he’s worked with wonderful people and drawn great
satisfaction in his roles as language guardian and last line of defense.
But of all his accomplishments, Glamann said helping start ACES was his proudest.
And as he left, he urged the membership to continue his efforts.
“Much work remains, many situations in all of our
newsrooms and in our industry at large cry out for change,” he said. “But others
must answer that call, for the time has come for me to step aside.
“And so I ask, if not you, who? If not now, when?”
Matthew Crowley is a business copy editor for
the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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| ACES President John McIntyre thanks Glamann for his service to ACES. |
|
MORE PHOTOS OF ACES MEMBERS AT THE BANQUET
MORE PHOTOS AND THE FULL TEXT OF HANK'S SPEECH (new photos added 5/2/05)
READ
HANK 'S BIO
|
