Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
Book Browse, 5:00-6:30 p.m.
featuring more than 20 historians, novelists and photographers
Dinner and Panel Discussion, 6:30 p.m.
"Writing & the Writing Life"
featuring:
Elizabeth Crook, author
Greg Curtis, author and former editor, Texas Monthly
Stephen Harrigan, author and former editor, Texas Monthly
Jim Hornfischer, literary agent and author
Steven Weinberg, author and professor, University of Texas
* * *
On October 24, the Headliners Foundation honored its 2009 beneficiaries. Board of Governors and other Club members greeted winning journalists and students who the Foundation is financially supporting this year with grants and scholarships.
Keynote speaker, and fellow club member, Dan Rather, and wife, Jean, mingled easily with the crowd of current and aspiring journalists. Mr. Rather discussed the challenges facing the traditional press, namely newspapers, as circulation drops and staffs are cut. He warns that real news, journalism with integrity, not second hand online news, is the foundation for our democracy and should be considered sacred. “There is a crisis in American journalism,” Rather said. “Never has the question of the future of news seemed less like of a rhetorical question as it does now.”
As a result of the unstable media market, the public has begun to distrust what it hears and reads because it does not believe the media represents the public view, but rather corporate partisanship.
But the outlook is not all bad, Mr. Rather recommends reading Alex Jones’s book, Losing the News, to understand the full story. As Jones explains, Americans are realizing that newspapers do the heavy lifting on which other media rely, and therefore, most loyal subscribers are willing to pay more to keep the lights on in the newsroom.
Click here for complete lists of journalism winners and scholarship recipients honored at the luncheon.
