Every once in a while, a good deed gets repaid and a smart choices bears results.

This is one of those times.

About 16 years ago, the Denver Press Club started an event called the Damon Runyon banquet.

Each year we celebrated the legacy of one of the club’s earliest members – the great columnist and author of Guys and Doll – by honoring a contemporary journalist of national renown.

We also started a tradition of giving out scholarships to college students who showed a flair for narrative.

In the third year of the Runyon, one of those students was a young woman from Colorado State University named Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly had that Runyonesque knack for telling a story. And like Runyon, she knew at an early age that she knew she wanted to cover a war some day.

Well, she got her chance and made the most of it.

In 2005, Kelly went to work as a reporter for the Gannett-owned Army Times, where she covers military health and medical issues.

 In June 2007, she was embedded with an infantry unit in Iraq and saw some particularly intense fighting.

 Next month, Kelly’s account of what she saw can be found with the publication of her first book, “They Fought for Each Other – The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq.”

And in April, Kelly will return to Denver and to the Press Club as one of the keynote speakers at SPJ’s Spring Regional Conference on April 9-10.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the role of the Runyon scholarship in all this. The dollar amount was modest and Kelly’s accomplishments are the result of her grit and determination.

But it does make me feel good to see things come full circle and to realize that the student who wins a scholarship one day can grow up to be an author and keynote speaker 13 years later.

The fledging New Mexico chapter had an interesting problem recently.

The chapter has not been around long enough to have much in the way of funds.

However, the a non-profit foundation associated with the Santa Fe New Mexican was kind enough to offer a $500 grant to help get the newly revived chapter up and running.

Only one problem though. The foundation could only provide the funds to an IRS approved 501c3. Like most chapters, New Mexico Pro is not set up as a non-profit.

But thanks to the folks at the SDX Foundation, we were able to find a solution.

Last month, the newly elected New Mexico Pro board voted to turn the grant money over to SDX, which in turn, will set up an education fund that the chapter will be able to use.

SDX takes $50 for overhead, but that still leaves the chapter with $450 to use for such educational purposes as bringing in a speaker for a seminar.

There are strict limits on what the money can be used for, but this way the new chapter will be able to get starting with a meaningful event that lives up to the SDX guidelines.

This is a win-win situation both for the chapter and SDX.

The SPJ Chapter at the University of Northern Colorado is showing renewed signs of life.

On March 10 from 5-7 p.m., SPJ will be hosting a Sunshine Week event (a bit early, because of Spring break) on the UNC campus in Greeley.

Panelist include: Bob Moore, executive editor of the Fort Collins Coloradoan; Dale Edwards, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at UNC, Jakob Rodgers, a reporter for the Greeley Tribune and Lee Christian, an attorney who specializes in mass communications law.

For more details, contact chapter advisor Lynn Klyde-Silverstein at lynn.klyde@unco.edu 

Meanwhile, the Colorado Pro Chapter also has some great events planned:

-On Feb. 25 at 6 p.m., SPJ will sponsor a talk with Mike Madigan, author of “Heroes, Villains, Dames and Disasters.” The book recounts the colorful history of The Rocky Mountain News, which closed down last Feb. 28, just a few weeks shy of its 150^th anniversary.

-On March 8 at 6 p.m. Colorado SPJ and the Denver Women’s Press Club will co-sponsor a discussion of the state of investigative reporting.

Panelists include Laura Frank, former investigative reporter for The Rocky Mountain News, Tony Kovaleski, investigative reporter for KMGH – Channel 7, Steve Zansberg and Chris Beall, partners in the Denver law firm of Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz, which specializes in media law.

-On March 25 at 6 p.m., Colorado SPJ will host an evening with James McGrath Morris, author of “Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power. The book is billed as the first comprehensive biography of publisher Joseph Pulitzer in more than 40 years.

All three of these Colorado SPJ events will be held at the historic Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place. For more details, contact Sara Crocker at sara.c.crocker@gmail.com

Utah Headliners member Connie Coyne is our SPJ Region 9 Volunteer of the Month for February.

When chapter President Allison Hess nominated Connie for this honor, here’s what she had to say:

“Connie Coyne has been a member of SPJ for many years. She has served on
the Utah Board for close to a decade in many capacities including ethics
chair. She is passionate about journalism and freedom of information.
She shares her passion in a number of ways. She’s the ombusdman for the
Salt Lake Tribune and writes a weekly column where she educates, informs
and instructs both citizens and members of the media about the role of a
free press. She’s an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah,
where she’s famous for pushing students to ask tough questions and not
be satisfied with the easy answer, and finally she’s a well sought after
speaker, and speaks about First Amendment issues and the role of SPJ to
groups around the community more than 100 times each year.”

I met Connie last spring when we held our regional conference in Salt Lake City. She is one of those dedicated folks whose commitment to SPJ helped her chapter win national recognition last year. Congratulations Connie.

Speaking of Utah, the Headliners Chapter is fielding nominations for a clever and creative way to defending open records. It’s called “The Black Hole Award” 

If you are a public official in Utah, this is one honor you don’t want to win. It goes to the individual or agency that “swallows up public records or shuts the public out of meetings.”

This is a companion award to the chapter’s Sunshine Award, which goes to individuals or public bodies that work to keep government open and fully transparent.

The awards are presented around March 16, which is Freedom of Information Day and the birthday of James Madison, author of the First Amendment and father of the U.S. Constitution.

This is a great pair of ideas that chapters elsewhere would be wise to emulate.

This week (much to my wife’s relief – they are taking up a lot of space on our office table) I’ll be packing up all the entries received in the second annual Region 9 Top of the Rockies competition.

By this weekend, I hope to have them all shipped out to judges in SPJ chapters in other parts of the country.

In all, we received a total of 508 entries. As you can see below, this year’s contest is far more regional than last year, in terms of entries from all four states.

State                       2010                 2009

Colorado                 60%                    88%

Utah                          26%                     10%

New Mexico            11%                       0%

Wyoming                   3%                        2%

My hope is that we can announce the winners by March 15, so that people can decide if they want to come to the Regional Conference in Denver on April 10 to accept their award in person.

Meanwhile, thanks to all who entered and good luck.

The theme of this year’s Region 9 Spring Conference is the “All-Star Weekend.”

Based on the lineup of speakers, the title is well-deserved.

The conference will take place April 9-10 at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place in Denver.

Here is a partial list of the confirmed speakers thus far:

-Barry Gutierrez, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and my former colleague at the Rocky Mountain News.

Barry was one of the key people in the Pulitzer the Rocky won for it’s coverage of a season of wildfires in Colorado.

-Eileen Welsome, my colleague at the Gazette in Colorado Springs and a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter.

Eileen won a Pulitzer for National Reporting for her story “The Plutonium Experiment about a government project in which 18 people were injected with Plutonium.

-Bill McCloskey, one of my colleagues from the SPJ national board where he serves as director-at-large. Bill is a retired director of media relations for AT&T and a former Associated Press reporter.

-Michelle Griego, a reporter for KCNC-TV, Denver’s CBS affiliate.

-Kelly Kennedy, a reporter for the Army Times, where she covers the health beat. Kelly is the author of a new book, “They Fought for Each Other, the triumph and tragedy of the hardest hit unit in Iraq.”

Cost of the conference is as follows:

For SPJ student members: $20

For SPJ pro members: $30

For non-member students: $52

For non-member pros: $89

Watch for more details in the weeks to come.

If you would to register, click on this link:

http://www.blacktie-colorado.com/calendar/index.cfm?FuseCalendar_ID=18815&CurntDate=04/09/2010&region=0&FUSEACTION=ShowEvent

It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting in the airport bar in Casper Wyoming sipping a Bloody Mary and keeping one eye on the Vikings-Dallas football game.

In an hour, I’ll board a plane that looks like it was inherited from one of the Indiana Jones movies, the one with the big lumbering twin-propellers.

And I’m feeling pretty good. You see I’ve had an excellent SPJ weekend.

In the Land of Enchantment

It started in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Hagit Limor, Chris Vachon and I spent an afternoon going over some 80 plus program ideas for our SPJ convention in Las Vegas in October.

There were some impressive proposals. Obviously, we can’t fit them all in but the overall quality tells me that we’re going to have a great three days in Vegas.

For me, perhaps the best news was that Rob Curley of the Las Vegas Sun has agreed to be one of our speakers. I’ve been a fan of Rob’s work for a long time. I think he’s one of the more creative people in American journalism today. It’ll be great to hear from him.

On Friday night, we had a great reception and dinner where members of SPJ’s executive committee had a chance to meet and mingle with the folks who recently revived our New Mexico pro chapter.

It was a wonderful evening. As if on cue, there was a spectacular New Mexico sunset as we walked a few blocks to the reception.

For me, it was fun to meet folks like Julie Ann Grimm, Dan Vukelich, Bill Diven, Gywneth Doland and David Brown, whom I had only communicating with previously by phone or e-mail.

The highlight was Kevin Smith administering the oath of office to the recently-elected New Mexico SPJ board members.

We’re lucky to have this group of talented, hard-working SPJ volunteers. In just six months they’ve started a website, approved a set of bylaws and held the first election in at least 20 years.

Watch for more good things to come from this group in the months ahead.

The New Mexico folks were thrilled to meet the national leadership and showed their appreciation by presenting Kevin and SPJ Executive Director Joe Skeel with official New Mexico passports.

The next time you see them, be sure to ask Joe and Kevin what’s the official state “cookie” and “flower” of New Mexico. Now they know.

The significance of the New Mexico chapter is this. Now for the first time in anyone’s memory, SPJ has pro chapters in all four states.

 My predecessor Deb Hurley deserves much of the credit for this development. Deb worked hard with the folks in Wyoming to help get their chapter going and did the initial development work that led to our adding a chapter in New Mexico.

Howdy from the Cowboy state

My next stop on Saturday was the 111^th annual conference of the Wyoming Press Association, where our Wyoming Pro chapter sponsored an interesting panel discussion on “The Evolving Journalist”

Note to other chapters: this was a very smart idea on the part of Wyoming SPJ. They are a small group of about 13 members. But by collaborating with the larger WPA they were able to stage a successful event that drew about 30 journalists from across the state.

I was one of the speakers on the panel. I talked about my experience with the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and going back to school to learn how to shoot and edit video.

I also talked about my experience with The Sidebar, my court house blog for the Gazette of Colorado Springs. Here’s the link:

http://thesidebar.freedomblogging.com/

Joining me on the panel was my friend and SPJ colleague Jim Clarke the Associated Press chief for Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

Jim made an excellent point to some of the younger journalists in the room: that it’s not enough to master the latest web gadgets. They also need to learn the basics of reporting and writing to succeed in doing journalism on the web.

A photographer named Tim Kupsick from the Casper Star-Tribune showed us the tools of his trade which now included a video camera plus the ability to edit on Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier.

And Jay O’Brien, a journalism instructor at Laramie County Community College gave an excellent talk on the importance of letting readers get involved in a story through social media like Face Book and Twitter.

The day ended with the WPA awards banquet. Although the recession was slow to reach Wyoming, newspapers here are feeling its effect. However, the crowd of about 200 cheered loudly when one of their officers noted that not a single Wyoming paper had folded in 2009.

Well my Indiana Jones twin prop plane is about to taxi in, so I’ll stop here. I think you can see though how this was a very excellent SPJ weekend.

On Tuesday, Oct. 13 Colorado SPJ will host a talk with Matt Latimer, former speechwriter for George W. Bush and author of a new book, “Speech-less.”

The free event at the Denver Press Club kicks off the third season of the Helen Verba Lecture series.

Since its inception, the series has brought a wide range of speakers to Denver, ranging from P.J. O’Rourke and Ralph Steadman to Jennifer 8. Lee and Renee Montagne.

All of this thanks to an unexpected benefactor. Helen Verba wasn’t the most famous journalist of her era, but her impact has been far greater that many.

 Helen worked for many years in the features department of the Denver Post. She served a variety of roles included “club editor.” Prior to that, she had been involved in the early days of Denver radio.

One constant throughout Helen’s life was her devotion to SPJ. For years, she faithfully attended nearly every board meeting. And when she passed away, Helen surprised the chapter by leaving an endowment of $50,000.

Through some wise investments, SPJ was able to grow that sum to nearly $150,000. And while the stock market crash last year put a dent in our portfolio, the fund still serves the purpose Helen wanted, educating young journalists.

For more than a decade, we’ve awarded the Helen Verba scholarship to two deserving college journalists in Colorado. And three years ago, we expanded the scope of the fund to bring in newsmakers and journalists.

Many of the speakers have made campus visits and students are able to attend all our public events for free.

Perhaps there’s a Helen Verba in your chapter as well. If so, it doesn’t hurt to let members know that they can leave a lasting legacy by making a bequest to SPJ.

An important anniversary is approaching.

Sixty years ago, a group of young journalists met at the Denver Press Club and formed the Colorado Professional Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists.

They were an idealistic bunch who believed that theirs was an honorable professional and not just a paycheck.

Reading an early history of the group, I was struck at how their concerns back then are still our concerns today. To mark these six decades of standing for journalism, Colorado SPJ is hosting an anniversary celebration in the very place where it all began at the Denver Press Club.

So on Oct. 22 from 6 to 8 p.m., we will gather to celebrate our heritage. SPJ President Kevin Smith has agreed to join us that evening, which will also feature talks by former President Fred Brown and former Regional Director Deb Hurley.

We’ll also be hosting a silent auction that night, with proceeds to go toward the Terry Harper Memorial Fund.

One of best things that’s happened in Region 9 recently has been the revival of our New Mexico Pro Chapter.

Credit for this development goes to my predecessor Deb Hurley, who made New Mexico her priority and urged me to do likewise.

Tom Hallman also gets a tip of the hat. His narrative writing workshop in Albuquerque earlier this year served as a catylyst to our organizing efforts.

Credit also goes to a dedicated group of SPJ members – some long-time SPJ folks and some relative newcomers – who have done a great job of making the new chapter a reality.

On Saturday, the folks on the chapter’s interim board hold their second meeting. In the two months since they started, they have drafted a set of proposed bylaws, elected officers, appointed committee chairs and created a very user friendly website. Check it out at:

http://www.nmspj.org/

Their hard work is getting noticed. The folks in New Mexico were excited to get the news that the SPJ Executive Committee will hold its winter meeting in Albuquerque on Jan. 15-17.  That will be right around the time that the newly elected New Mexico board members will be sworn in.

Stay tuned for more developments.