What kind of training would you like to see?

The Illinois Associated Press Editors Association has been offering a low-cost training seminar each year for the last four years. The day-long seminar is held in January and the cost is usually $25 for each participant, with a discount for multiple participants from a single paper. The cost includes lunch and the event is held at the Springfield Journal-Register.

The topics over the last four years have included political reporting, education reporting, business reporting and sports reporting. It's the goal of the editor's association to structure the seminar so participants from any size of newspaper will receive something from the training.

We're interested in what sort of training needs you have in your organization. Would you like to see a day-long seminar on investigative reporting that reporters can do while reporting on their beats? Or, is there another topic you'd be interested in?

The IAPEA board would like to hear from you.

New contest category: Web sites

The IAPEA board has created a new category for its annual news contest that focuses exclusively on newspaper web sites.
Contest Committee Chairman John Lampinen of Arlington Heights proposed the addition which the board accepted unanimously.
This new contest category will be broken down into the organization’s three circulation-based size groupings. While some details remain to be worked out, judging will be based on the overall newspaper website, considering design, freshness, content and interactivity.

iapea.org site enhancements

By JACK BRIMEYER
Membership and Nominating Committee Chairman

A new piece of blogger software added to the iapea.org web site should yield fresher content and more interaction with the 80-plus Illinois newspapers and their news staffs who rely on The Associated Press. Basically, it removes the “Bottleneck Known as Brimeyer” who fell behind in updating content.
The web site of the Illinois Associated Press Editors Association is believed to be the only one of its kind operated by a state AP members’ group.
This blogging content will appear through a so-called “frame” on the site’s home page. It was set up by Jeff Kepler, Editorial Systems Manager at the Journal Star in Peoria.
All 12 members of the IAPEA executive board, along with two Chicago AP staff members, will be able to post information. We expect that to be along the lines of seminar plans, contest changes, AP bureau staff changes, board reports, conference schedules and such.
Also, site visitors will be able to post comments on those blog entries. Those comments, however, will need pre-approval before posting by either Brimeyer or IAPEA president Gary Sawyer of Decatur. This is because sophisticated spammers can otherwise flood blogs and render them useless.
Also, the site now has a more prominent “Contact Us” link so that visitors can offers ideas and pose questions to the entire board.