Texas Press Association

From the Texas Center for Community Journalism:

Community newspapers are always looking for ways to stretch their budget and do more with less, and the Texas Center for Community Journalism is helping with a new one-day free workshop that looks at free or low-cost resources any newspaper can use.

It’s called Design on a Dime: No-cost (and low-cost) resources for the community newspaper. It will be presented on Thursday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The instructor is Broc Sears, a popular TCCJ presenter and faculty member in the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism.

The workshop will present free and affordable resources for editors, publishers, photographers, website managers, designers, circulation managers and advertising staffers.

Both the tuition and lunch are free to participants, thanks to funding provided by the Texas Newspaper Foundation.

“We’re always looking for ideas for Texas community newspapers, and Broc Sears has come up with a whole day of them,” said TCCJ Director Tommy Thomason. “This is the type of workshop where participants won’t want to take a bathroom break for fear of missing some great free resource.”

Unlike TCCJ’s three-day workshops, this workshop will allow up to three participants from each newspaper.

Registration is available online at http://digital.community-journalism.net/workshops/apply.

By Kristen Tribe
Wise County Messenger

Sometimes we go find the news.

Other times, it finds us.

Last week Evan Ebel sped into Wise County, guns blazing, and brought a tragic story to our front door.

Although covering tragedy is nothing new at the Wise County Messenger, this time we did it with the national media looking over our shoulder.

The morning of March 21 started quietly, but by noon, we had covered a frenzied chase, a police shootout with a seemingly crazed gunman, and were exploring connections to murders in Colorado. By the next morning our work, primarily the photos by Joe Duty and Jimmy Alford, had appeared in publications, on websites and television broadcasts of at least 27 media outlets around the world. 

It was not a typical news day in Wise County.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, joined by 19 news media, including Texas Press Association, and two public advocacy organizations, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Texas Supreme Court asking the judges to clarify the scope of a defendant’s right to appeal orders under the state’s anti-SLAPP law. The right to appeal when an anti-SLAPP motion is denied, which was rejected in the case at hand by the appellate court, is consistent with the legislature’s intent when it passed the law, the brief argued.

As in 28 states, the District of Columbia and Guam, anti-SLAPP (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”) legislation in Texas is designed to protect the First Amendment rights of speakers who may be frivolously sued to inhibit their speech. The Reporters Committee brief noted that “such rights can only be protected by allowing immediate review if an anti-SLAPP motion is denied.”

In Jennings v. Wallbuilder Presentations Inc., two political candidates, Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, produced a board of education campaign video about school curriculum guidelines that referred to David Barton, the president of Wallbuilder, as someone “known for speaking at white-supremacist rallies.”