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Exit Interview: Outgoing NABJ President looks back, aheadBy Josef Sawyer NABJ Convention Online Staff  With just a few days remaining in her tenure, a recently slimmed down NABJ President Condace Pressley spoke candidly about her two years in office, who she thinks should lead the organization next and her plans for the future.Being the first radio journalist and the fourth woman elected as president of NABJ, Pressley took over an organization grappling with a $340,000 deficit. Now, as she prepares to walk away from the helm, the organization is in the black. On Friday someone new will stake claim to the position and Pressley hopes that that someone new will be current NABJ Vice President, Broadcast Mike Woolfolk, who is also an anchor and Managing Editor at WACH-TV in South Carolina. Pressley wholeheartedly endorses Woolfolk, whom she feels has all the tools to be the next president. Her qualms about his opponents, Herb Lowe, a reporter for Newsday, and Cheryl Smith, Region VII Director and Editor-in-Chief of the Dallas Weekly, run deep. “Certainly president of NABJ is not a birth right and I don’t know why he [Lowe] wants to be president other than he believes he should be president. He does not bring the skill set that’s necessary to be president,” Pressley said. She noted that Lowe filed several late board reports and expressed concern that Lowe is not progressive in his thinking. Lowe is glad the vote will not be left up to Pressley. “I am relieved to know the president has but one vote, and encouraged to know scores and scores of other voting members don’t share her opinion,” Lowe said in response to Pressley's comments. Pressley showed equal disdain for Smith’s candidacy. She characterized Smith's attempt to secure votes to bring this year’s convention to Dallas as under-handed. Pressley said Smith’s last minute private phone calls to absent board members snatched votes away from Atlanta, where Pressley is based. That city will host the convention in 2005. “I have integrity issues when it comes to Cheryl,” Pressley said. “There were times when I would have to chastise her about a regional conference and how it was being managed and how registration fees were being handled.” Smith denies any under-handed deals were made and said she has always been fair with NABJ. “I did what smart people do when trying to get something passed, and since then a number of people have used that method,” Smith said. “There’s nothing sneaky about making sure people vote, and that’s what I did.” As NABJ members head to the polls, it’s clear that Pressley will leave her mark on the organization. She leaves with revenue up by $170,000, attributing the increase to better management and doing more with less. For example, she targeted regional conferences that, in her opinion, were costing the national organization too much for too little benefit. Some were sparsely attended. Reworking the budget was just part of Pressley’s plan to bring stability to NABJ. Next she moved to fill gaps in staffing in the national office. Too much time was spent micromanaging and there was a lack of trust between the board and the staff, Pressley said, as her face showed traces of past frustrations. She explained that the new hires had more experience in association management. With the staff in place and working to make sure NABJ’s daily operations were running smoothly, Pressley turned her attention to the organization’s communication vehicles. She brought back the NABJ Journal and created an e-mail newsletter to replace the NABJ Update, a print publication that was published sporadically. Pressley’s tenure was far from one dimensional and she says her proudest moment was not salvaging an organization in the red, or bringing stability to NABJ, it was teaching ideologies that she believes worked. “Our goal was if someone wanted to look at the minutes of our meetings 100 years later, they could see exactly what and why we made the decisions we made,” Pressley said. She calls her methodology “knowledge-based decision making,” and says it took some time for all board members to cozy up to the idea. If financial problems or membership problems weren’t the issue, she was under the microscope as the representative of NABJ, answering questions about hot topics such as Jayson Blair or the FCC’s decision on media ownership. Pressley said she hopes her comments about Blair on ABC's Nightline helped turn a disastrous situation into a learning experience for all journalists. “Journalists need not wear the Scarlet Letter of Jayson Blair, whether we put it on ourselves or our editors put it on us,” Pressley said. “It forced us all to have conversations about diversity and it showed young journalists you don’t always have to start out with the big boys because there are jobs out there in the smaller markets that need us.” Pressley saved kinder words for Glenn Rice, the former NABJ Treasurer who recently resigned. A Kansas City weekly brought to light allegations of plagiarism by Rice. Pressley felt Rice was targeted in the wake of the Blair incident by those against diversity efforts in the newsroom. “It was just an embarrassment attempt because to my knowledge Rice was disciplined by the Kansas City Star for his actions more than a year ago, and later when the story broke it seemed more a personal issue rather than ethical,” Pressley said. One of Pressley’s few regrets lies in what she can’t do, which is serve a second term. “Two years is just enough time to get your feet wet and I am just hitting my stride,” Pressley said. When her term ends Pressley will turn her attention inward. To date she has shed 30 pounds of the 70 she plans to lose. “I am the type of person who always needs projects to do to keep busy, so my next project is going to be myself,” Pressley said. “I am not getting any younger.” Anthony Stokes of the NABJ Convention Online staff contributed to this report. |
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