FRIDAY BANQUET An evening to remember Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry shares the spotlight with the editing stars at the ACES conference banquet Jenn Bellefeuille of the Eau Claire, Wis., Leader-Telegram has her photo taken with Dave Barry after the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author spoke at the ACES conference banquet. At right is Scott Anderson (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Click here to see more photos from the banquet. By Emily Seawell They got up before 9 a.m. They networked. They scribbled notes and questioned sources. Then they put on dresses and sport coats and sat down to dinner to celebrate life as copy editors. For the past two days, they’ve heatedly discussed how well journalists -- and journalism -- can adapt to change. Take Matthew Dulin of the University of Houston. He just won $2,500. “All I can think about is I just got here,” the Aubespin scholar told a banquet hall full of his future colleagues. “All I can think about is all the people who in small ways and big ways contributed to me getting here.” Aubespin scholar Matthew Dulin of the University of Houston speaks at the banquet. Now he’s ready to help build on the tradition. “When I realized that words could be an agent of truth and of change, that’s when I realized that journalism is my passion,” he said. He encouraged editors to “innovate your minds” and challenge young editors like him. Part of the challenge is preserving that journalistic passion outside print. Guest speaker Dave Barry said he stopped writing his wildly popular column because he had been doing it for 30 years, and it was time to move on. Not too long ago, he started a blog with The Miami Herald, and copy desk chief Jeff Kleinman is pretty sure it is the most popular link on the Web site. “And that’s no surprise,” Kleinman said from the podium. In a short interview after his speech, Barry expressed mixed feelings about the surging popularity of another new-school medium -- tongue-in-cheek newscasts by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, people who scored the highest on a test of current events cited the comedians’ shows as their top sources of news, tied with Web sites of major newspapers. (See The New York Times’ take.) “It is a little unnerving, intimidating,” Barry said. Then again, “it could be some comic who didn’t even read the news.” Or it could be newspapers. “We’re much stupider” than Colbert and Stewart are, he said. “Our business spent way too long telling the readers what they wanted. … We need to be more open and more edgy about what we allow than we used to be.” He likened print editions to pay phones: “Along come cell phones, and we think, ‘Boy, if we could make our paper a different color, or a little easier to use, that’ll keep our customers.’ No, not really. It’s just pay phones are unnecessary if you have cell phones. And that’s what we are. “We’ve finally got it: The problem is more or less the paper. It’s not a good medium for information.” Still, Barry reads The Miami Herald and The New York Times daily before going online for “a combination of blogs and various newspaper pages,” he said. “Mostly really opinion, to be honest.” Kristen Walbolt of the St. Petersburg Times congratulates Robinson Prize winner Tim Lynch at the banquet. Integrating opinions into news coverage is a contentious consideration as community-generated content grows. Barry holds up letters to the editor and blogs as models for giving readers a stronger voice. “I always thought the most interesting part of most newspapers was the letters to the editor,” he said. “I’ve always felt that way, any town I go to. … You read the letters to the editor and it’s real, and sometimes they’re crazy and hostile and everything.” Of course, all of that needs to be monitored, Barry said, comparing running his blog with traditional editing -- he gets to choose what goes up and what comes down. He said he tends to let readers’ comments ride unless they’re overly offensive. “You want to be fair and accurate and all of that, but it’s OK to have controversial columnists and outspoken people,” he said. As ACES turns 10, co-founder Hank Glamann is pushing for outreach and innovation on the home front, too. He asked editors to take back what they learn from the conference, talk to college students, talk to friends, come up with ideas for workshops and, most of all, keep their memberships current. “I hope that many of you will find a way to contribute in your own way,” Glamann said. As an active and enthusiastic party to journalism’s evolution, Dulin is off to a running start. He envisions a future that could literally put news delivery in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s hands and revolutionize the industry. “It’s nothing to be sad or to wring your hands about,” Dulin told the crowd. “I think it’s going to be exciting.” Emily Seawell is a slot editor at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. Dave Barry keeps the ACES banquet crowd in stitches. “We love editing Dave Barry because we don’t have to edit anything -- we don’t have to worry about the truth.” -- Jeff Kleinman, copy desk chief at The Miami Herald Copy editors, life in Miami easy foils for Dave Barry By Emily Seawell Dave Barry took the stage with an announcement: “I’m not done with my speech yet. I’ll get it to you in about an hour.” Way to make an all-editor audience feel right at home. The humorist offered out-of-towners welcome warnings about Miami, attributing its notoriously odd news and bad driving to “some kind of giant weirdness magnet buried somewhere around here.” “People will pass you in a carwash,” he said. Not long ago, a 75-pound bale of falling cocaine nearly killed a suburban police chief as it tumbled from a smuggler’s airplane. “It’s not enough to just say no to drugs; you may need a bomb shelter,” Barry said. Even more recently, 21 Cubans walked ashore here and surrendered – to a startled tollbooth attendant. “What are you going to charge them?” Barry asked, noting “it was a minor story in The Miami Herald.” He pointed to Anna Nicole Smith’s death in South Florida, O.J. Simpson’s plans to move here and the inflammatory presidential election of 2000. “We lived up to our state motto,” Barry said of the election. “Florida -- you can’t spell it without ‘duh.’” The former Miami Herald columnist apologized for any misspellings in his speech and readily admitted he was indebted to editors. “Editors have saved me many, many times,” he said at Friday night’s banquet. Writers “really appreciate that when we think about it, which is not that often.” To sum up writers’ feelings about editors, he relayed a joke: A writer and an editor are stranded in the desert. After days of wandering, they find an oasis. The writer drinks handful after handful of water, then looks at the editor, who is urinating in the pool. “What are you doing?!” the writer demands. The editor replies, “I’m making it better.” The crowd didn’t like it, either, but chuckled as Barry backpedaled. “It’s time you heard that joke! Everybody who works for you has heard that joke!” Barry has often referred to the warfare between writers and editors, and Friday night he offered a rare justification for the hostility. “You think we’re careless,” he told ACES. “We think you’re editors.” But he assumed full blame for a few of his run-ins with readers. In his 30 or so years as a columnist, Barry said, he got the most flak for an offhand remark he made criticizing a Neil Diamond lyric. Fans rushed to his defense, and in the back-and-forth he ended up with more than 20,000 letters devoted to songs people hate. “And people say Americans don’t care about the issues,” he said. Another time, he disparaged North Dakota’s campaign to drop “North” from its name. “I got a letter from everybody in the state, which is nearly 150,” he said. He also got a letter from officials in Grand Forks, who invited him to a ceremony to unveil Dave Barry Lift Station No. 16, a sewage plant. He went, and recalled that the January air and stench didn’t endear him to the state. “Me, I would leave the sewage down there, but in North Dakota they lift it. … ‘Hey, let’s see what we’ve got!’” he said. Experiences like that one, he said, remind writers and editors that they’re on the same team. “You know and I know that writers and editors, that’s who we’re dealing with: the readers,” he said. Barry said he appreciates editors’ discretion. One time, in a travel column about France, he mentioned its landmarks: the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The joke made it to print and syndication, where he found not all readers were as understanding. He received 500 letters and made it a point to personally respond to each reader who provided an address. Dear reader, he wrote. “You’re mistaken. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was moved to Paris in 1994.” One reader replied. “Dear Mr. Barry,” she began, “I checked with my travel agent…” On behalf of all writers, Barry thanked copy editors across the nation for “saving us from ourselves” and invited everyone back to his “fabulous news town,” using its official motto: “Come back to Miami -- we weren’t shooting at you.” Emily Seawell is a slot editor at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. Among those at the head table, clockwise from left, are Kathy Schenck (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), ACES President Chris Wienandt, banquet speaker Dave Barry, Jeff Kleinman (Miami Herald) and ACES Vice President/Conferences Deirdre Edgar. RETURN TO WWW.COPYDESK.ORG