Once again this year the New England Newspaper & Press Association will identify our 
region’s very best daily, weekly and specialty newspapers, and recognize them with the prestigious “New England Newspaper of the Year” award.
This is a one-of-a-kind competition – it is the only distinction in our industry that is judged by the audience members. New England newspaper readers will be appointed to evaluate the entries from a news consumer point of view and decide which deserve the honor of being named “Newspaper of the Year”. Plus, all newspapers in the contest will receive in-depth feedback from the judges about the strengths and weaknesses of their publication (on both print and digital platforms) and how their paper stacks up compared to similar-size papers in our region. Each editor that enters will receive a summary scorecard with the readers’ ratings across a range of attributes that are typically associated with quality newspapers, along with written verbatim comments.
Mail Entries To: NENPA , 1 Arrow Drive, Suite 6, Woburn, MA 01801
Entries are also being accepted for five other prestigious awards:
Publick Occurrences Awards
This award recognizes individual or team stories, series, spot news coverage, columns or photojournalism that ran in print and/or online. Editors should view this entry as their “very best work of the year.”
Allan B. Rogers Editorial Award
This award recognizes the best editorial on a local subject that ran in New England in the past year.
New England First Amendment Award
This award will recognize a New England newspaper for its exceptional work inupholding the First Amendment and/or educating the public about it.
Bob Wallack Community Journalism Award
This award celebrates the accomplishments of someone who, over a sustained period of time, has faithfully served the communityfor which they are responsible and has played an active, constructive role in contributing to its quality of life.
AP Sevellon Brown New England Journalist of the Year
This award is bestowed by the New England Society of News Editors, and it recognizes an individual for producing journalism of distinction in New England this past year.
The awards will be presented at the New England Newspaper Conference on Thursday October 11, 2018 in Natick, MA. This conference is one of the most prestigious functions in the newspaper industry. This event includes expert speakers, the New England Newspaper Awards luncheon and the New England Academy of Journalists’ Yankee Quill Awards Dinner. If you are interested in sponsoring or being an exhibitor at the event email Christine at c.panek@nenpa.com. Registration and more information to come!
information, said Monday it is exploring the sale of its newspaper properties in 22 states.
Mildred “Millie” Siegel, 93, of Danbury, wife of Morton Siegel, died on Wednesday, May 30, 2018 at her home.
Pamela Holley Wood, writer, teacher, journalist, pioneer in documentary field studies and founder of Salt Inc., died May 29, 2019, at her home in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Phebe Ann Clarke Lewis, 103, died peacefully May 5, 2018, in Manchester. She drew first breath November 2, 1914, and received her double first name and its uncommon spelling in honor of her mother’s mother, in whose Lake Forest, Illinois, home Phebe Ann was born.
Elsie Talanian, 98, of Pelham, NH died peacefully on Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at Salemhaven.
Gail P. Delmolino, 71, passed away on June 6, 2018, at her home, after a lengthy illness.
Peter M. Casolino, Jr., died on June 15, 2018 at the age of 51 at St. Raphael’s Hospital, New Haven, CT following a brief illness.
Dorothy Frazer Carpenter was born June 17, 1926 in Rockville Center, N.Y. and grew up in Long Beach, N.Y. a short walk from the white sand beach and ocean of the south shore of Long Island. She graduated from the Long Beach public schools and the University of Vermont. She was a member of several honor societies, an editor of the UVM Cynic, and did graduate work at the University of South Carolina.
Roger Conrad Bowman, 84, of Greenfield died Thursday, June 7, 2018 at home. He was born June 28, 1933 in Derby, CT to Llewellyn H. Bowman and Mabel (Young) Bowman. He moved with his family to Mechanic Falls, ME where he graduated as valedictorian from Mechanic Falls High School. Roger received his BA in English from the University of Maine where he was an ROTC student and entered the Army following graduation. He was stationed at the Pentagon for the duration of his service.
WINDHAM – Richard “Dick” Johnston, 83, died peacefully at Genesis in Lebanon, NH on June 3, 2018 with family around him. He was born September 8, 1934 to the late John and Genevieve Johnston of St. Johnsbury, VT.
Hannity Hassle: Let’s apply ‘Five Ws and How’
Gene Policinski
Inside the
First Amendment
Gene Policinski is president and chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.
If the burning national question of the moment is whether Fox News Channel star Sean Hannity is a “journalist” or not, let’s use the long-held set of journalistic questions to investigate: The proverbial who, what, when, where, why and how?
First, the “who”: Sean Patrick Hannity is a cable TV conservative talk show host and best-selling author. Most recently he is said to serve as an unpaid adviser to President Trump — some people say that relationship is so close that he “has a desk” at the White House. Hannity was born in New York City, and has spent much of his broadcast career there.
Next, let’s go to “when” and “where”: Hannity’s TV show anchors the Fox prime-time lineup with an audience of about 3 million nightly. His syndicated radio show goes out via the Web and on a host of radio stations. He spent a few early years at TV stations in Alabama and Georgia, before returning to that self-proclaimed urban liberal bastion of New York City to find conservative fame and fortune.
“How” and “why” generally are outside the realm of First Amendment consideration. The nation’s founders didn’t include any specific definition of a free press practitioner, and why Hannity — or any of us — speaks or writes about politics is none of the government’s business.
So, what about the “what”? Hannity said that he is a journalist in a 2016 interview with The New York Times — and said that he is not a journalist (“I’m just a talk show host”) in a 2016 interview with The Boston Globe. The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi just wrote that in an interview with the Times earlier this year, Hannity said, “I’m a journalist. But I’m an advocacy journalist, or an opinion journalist.”
As it happens, the First Amendment’s protection of a free press covers any and all of those roles in terms of free expression. Objective or biased, nonpartisan or politically motivated: All protected.
But it’s trickier when it comes to the professional definitions and codes of journalism, where ethical standards come into play. And yes, journalism does have ethics — and most journalists follow them, despite some people’s claims to the contrary. Transparency about business relationships is a basic rule, along with the admonishment to avoid such complications if at all possible.
Did Hannity have an obligation to let viewers know of his connection to President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen — which for some as-yet unknown reason he and Cohen reportedly sought to keep secret? Yes, but not because of politics. In plain terms, we should just know “where he’s coming from.”
No one has been shocked that Hannity is highly critical of federal authorities who served search warrants at Cohen’s office, home and hotel room and confiscated records and computers, and that he defends Trump’s privacy and attorney-client privilege. But was that defense rooted in a personal matter? There were audible gasps in the courtroom, reports say, when Hannity was revealed during a recent hearing in New York to be a client of Cohen.
Was the non-disclosure in any way connected to the fact that Cohen’s two other clients (Trump and a high-ranking GOP official) apparently used the lawyer to broker financial deals with women who claim a sexual relationship with them? Or could it be just a simple defense of a friend, rather than one related to legal standards or constitutional concerns?
To some degree, the “Hannity Hassle” afflicts much of the cable talk show world, where the motivation seems focused more on generating chatter (i.e., ratings) than doing actual journalism. And then there’s the larger problem that reporters from news organizations so often now appear on such shows as pundits, while the networks’ hosts — often former politicians — claim at times to be reporting “breaking news.”
It’s not just on TV that the crossover duties have impact: In some large part, a push for a national shield law protecting journalists and their confidential sources has failed because of the difficulty of defining who is a journalist.
Making it harder for all of us to determine whether the “what” we see and hear is fact or opinion, which damages the very foundations of self-governance.
When the nation’s founders protected a free press, they presumed it would be part of an independent system that would keep an eye on government and society on behalf of the rest of us — not just generate ratings or circulation.
We cannot make the required decisions of a self-governing society if the facts on which we base those decisions come to us via blurry “news” sources whose role and motivations are suspect — or worse, kept secret.
And that admonition does not just apply to Sean Hannity.