Scroll down for latest JAWS newsletter, membership survey and more JAWS information.

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JAWS is going to Texas.

YEE HA !

Time to roll up your selves and saddle up your ride. Join your JAWS colleagues Oct. 22-24 at the Tapatio Springs Resort in Boerne, Texas. JAWS Fall Symposium 2010 promises to be a wealth of practical learning and how-to tips to keep you ahead in the fluctuating world of journalism.

The program  is shaping up and chairs Janet Vitt and Sharon Walsh see a real hands-on theme emerging this year. Some of the highlights for “Practical JAWS” include:

• Special guest and keynote speaker — Maria Hinojosa.

• The Shanahan Speaker will be Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• “Alchemy, Phase II” for women who are re-inventing themselves.

• A panel aimed at journalism educators and those who would like to teach.

• Building a portfolio career

• JAWS foodies are cooking up a session on food — the news that’s on everyone’s plate.

• Covering the Border.

• Techno Ideas to Steal.

Click here for more program details.

OTHER Important details:

Registration:  Still only $265 — $250 if you register before Aug. 31.   Click here for registration form.

Hotel:  Tapatio Springs Resort

Special conference rate for JAWS: $94 for standard room   (other rooms are available if you ask)

Reservation numbers: 800-999-3299 or 830-537-4611

ROOM RESERVATION DEADLINE is Sept. 21.

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Some of the stories you’ll find in this edition.

PRESIDENT’S LETTER:The Power of Networking

By Megan Kamerick

At the recent Edge of Change conference at the Poynter Institute I was struck by a comment by Pam Johnson, one of the earliest members of JAWS and one of the editors of the “Edge of Change” book. She said years ago, JAWS members helped her get a job in Arizona. Johnson went on to hold executive and managing editor positions at The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette.

The most powerful thing we have as women, she said, is networking. To read more of this article click here.

JAWS Meets in Southeast Michigan Journalism      By Fara Warner

Board member Fara Warner and JAWS members Carol Guensburg and Birgit Rieck hosted a JAWS get-together in Ann Arbor, Mich. … Mary Morgan, founder and publisher of the hyper-local news website AnnArborChronicle.com, talked about entrepreneurial journalism with more than 20 journalists, educators and students gathered at Wallace House, home to the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellowships in Journalism.  To read more of this article click here.

Poynter Conference Focuses on the Future of Women in Journalism

By Megan Kamerick

An impressive group of nearly 70 women representing the best of journalism gathered at the Poynter Institute in May to talk about the past, present and future of women in the profession. The focus of the gathering was a new book, The Edge of Change: Women in the 21st Century Press, edited by Pamela Creedon, Pamela Johnson, Wanda Lloyd and June Nicholson. It includes essays by several JAWS members, including Peggy Simpson, Arlene Morgan and Geneva Overholser.        To read more of this article click here.

For Shark Bytes and more JAWS news download the complete news letter.  Log into JAWS members only with your JAWS password.

Not a member of JAWS?  You can join JAWS now.

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JAWS Members Speak Up.

Survey of the JAWS membership gives details on what members like, what they want and what they see as the future for JAWS.

Click here to download survey results.

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Have you renewed your membership for 2010?

Click here to renew your annual membership to JAWS and keep those connections fresh!

JAWS 25th Anniversary in Snowbird, Utah.

JAWS celebrated our 25th Anniversary with a great conference Oct. 2-4 at Snowbird, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City. Check out the conference blog.

Molly Ivins

The first time I met Molly Ivins was in Houston back before half of you were born. A college friend of mine was working for one of the newspapers there (and they had two then, by golly) and so several of us got together and swilled down more bottles of Lone Star beer than I care to remember.

Anyway, Molly said that night that she had named her dog Shit so she could go out in her backyard and swear and only be calling the dog. The New York Times, as only the Times would do, said in its obituary when she died January 31 at 62, that she had a dog whose name was an expletive. (Bl–ping obfuscation was one of the qualities that drove Molly nuts about her days at the Great Gray Lady. Talk about square pegs in round holes!) Our own Betsy Wade remembered that during a Times strike when Molly was the Rocky Mountain correspondent, “I would call her weekly from Guild headquarters and we would laugh and tell jokes. She just hated not working and said she would go out into the mountains and shout obscenities to listen to the echoes. It was wonderful to be able to count on having a big name like her as a psychic presence on the picket line.”

Molly Ivins skewered politicians, especially Texas politicians, especially The Shrub (Dubya, to her) with an unmatched style. Nobody had a right to be that smart, that engaged, that devastatingly barbed. On top of that, she also cared deeply about freedom of the press and often waived her lecture fees for groups that shared her concern, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. She had promised her good friend John Henry Faulk, who had been blacklisted in the days of Senator Joe McCarthy, that she would keep up his First Amendment fight when he died. And she did.

So thanks to the grace of my friend Saralee Tiede – with whom I had worked at The Daily Collegian at Penn State – anytime I would go to Austin where she had moved, we would get together and laugh and carry on with Molly. And Molly came to JAWS at Teton Village in Jackson Hole in 1992 and wowed everybody. There’s a picture I’d love to find in my hopelessly jumbled files that was in the newsletter and showed the audience – especially Eileen Shanahan – doubled over in laughter over something Molly said. She had an incredibly serious side, too, and she said that the press failed to uncover and pursue aggressively many of the central stories of the 1980 – this was the Reagan era, remember – in part because “there’s a terrible tendency to quote people with titles and they all lie.”

This isn’t about what Molly wrote. You can read that online. And you should definitely check out the Austin Statesman of February 1. Rather, this is about the incredibly funny person Molly Ivins was, and generous even to a relative stranger. Perhaps the truth is that Molly didn’t know any strangers.

Normally when I went to Austin to do a story or book research, I stayed with Saralee. But at one point she was working in Houston and suggested I contact Molly. Of course, no problem. Stay with me. She even had a “guest wing” on her remodeled home. So I would go off to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library each day and come back at night and tell her what I found in my quest for information about the establishment of the Head Start program for poor children. Molly was genuinely interested. She thought I was a model guest in that I got up quietly before she woke up, made my breakfast, cleaned up, departed and came back at the end of the day and told her tales from the 1960s.

My visit occurred a week before the 1996 presidential election. Molly had just gotten back from time with the Clinton campaign. So as we sipped our drinks and watched the evening news, Molly would give her running commentary. You may recall that Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes were at issue even then – way before Monica Lewinsky appeared. Some of Molly’s commentary therefore was quite ribald.

What you may not know about Molly was that she had studied in Paris for a year after majoring in history at Smith and earning a master’s in journalism at Columbia. Paris had rubbed off on her and she was a damn fine cook. One night she created a “Poulet Roti Grand-Maman” with garlic that was the most moist and tasty chicken I had ever had. It was a Patricia Wells recipe, she confided, and I now have that Wells cookbook and the dish has become one of my specialties. I may rename it “poulet roti a la Molly.”

When I complimented Molly on her well-equipped kitchen, she confessed that she and several friends were members of Williams-Sonoma Anonymous. “Every time the catalog comes in,” she said, “we call each other up to keep ourselves from buying everything in sight.”

While I was in Austin that time, a slew of the tapes from Lyndon Johnson’s White House era had just been released. So one night Molly and I went over to the home of Liz Carpenter, who had been Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, and listened to some of the tapes. Now this may not count on your radar as big-time entertainment, but it was one of the funniest evenings I have ever had. Liz could match Molly in wit, and she was giving commentary on the context for the tapes. One I recall had Lyndon giving a major speech and then calling Lady Bird, who was out of town, for her critique. It was probably one of the few times that LBJ was at a loss for words as Bird, with her twang, told him, yes, she thought it was a good speech but he could have done X, Y and Z much better. Another tape had Johnson trying to get a vote for a tax bill to support the Vietnam war from Indiana Senator Vance Hartke. Hartke was a hack but a Democratic hack and usually a reliable vote. He balked because he wanted protection for makers of musical instruments in his state. Johnson exploded that he was trying to finance a war and all Hartke was worried about was his damn band. Well, you had to be there, but it was quite an evening.

As I end this remembrance, I must steer away from the saccharine, which Molly would have hated. She lived life to the fullest. She was a hoot and a half and I’m glad our paths crossed. And so, one last story, about Halloween.

In Austin, Halloween is one big deal. Molly decided we should be in the parade, which was actually a stroll down 12th Street. Problem was it was about 6 p.m. and we didn’t have costumes. No problem. The red tide was killing fish along the coast then, and Molly decided that’s what we would be. We put on red shirts and tied some wooden fish Molly had gotten in Mexico around our necks.

Of course, we needed to wear signs to tell people that we were the Red Tide. But when you were with this six-foot redhead who knew everyone in Austin, it didn’t matter. You just went along with the red tide.

The Journalism & Women Symposium joins the National Association of Black Journalists and others who have expressed disgust and outrage at the racist and misogynist remarks made by radio personality Don Imus.

Last week, Imus called members of the Rutgers basketball team – who had just played for the national championship – “nappy-headed hos.”

The comments insulted not just the young women who displayed the grit, discipline and athletic talent to reach the national title game. JAWS, a national organization of female journalists, believes he demeaned women in general. He disparaged not just African-Americans, but people of all races and ethnicities who care about decency and fairness.

After a storm of criticism, Imus offered a three-sentence apology on his Friday morning show. On Monday, he further acknowledged his remarks were “disgraceful” and “repugnant.”

As contrite as Imus now appears to be, these apologies are not enough.

Imus has made a career of such inflammatory nonsense. This is not the first time he’s been called to task – or that he has vowed to clean up his act. It’s too easy to mumble an apology at 6 a.m. and expect the fuss to go away.

This time, MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, Imus’ employer, should consider stiff disciplinary action. It’s time to make Imus think before casually spewing more such hurtful invective.

By Karlyn Barker

The Journalism & Women Symposium’s officers and directors gathered April 13-15 in Albuquerque to help craft a new leadership framework for the future. As part of this effort, the board voted to recommend changes to the by-laws, the most significant of which would set two-year terms for future JAWS presidents.

Talking late into Friday night, most of Saturday and again Sunday morning in a combined spring meeting and strategic plan retreat, the board plowed through an agenda of pressing issues for JAWS, including efforts to boost financial resources, build a diverse membership and expand programs and services.

But the focus of the weekend was a new strategic plan for JAWS, one of the promised payoffs from the past year’s matching fund campaign. President Julie Dunlap set up a full-day session with Anne Hays Egan, a Santa Fe-based consultant who specializes in helping non-profits chart their futures and meet new challenges.

Egan, who has also put together a survey for the general membership to help set program priorities, led board members through a discussion of the mission and vision of JAWS. She is also working with JAWS through the summer as we finalize the strategic plan and finish other projects to provide a roadmap for future activities.

The proposed by-laws revisions, subject to approval by members attending this September’s conference, are designed to provide more organizational continuity, clarify the terms and duties of officers and other board members, and better define categories of membership and voting eligibility. First vice president Julia Kagan and board member Eunnie Park worked with JAWS veteran Betsy Wade, a past member of the board, to draft the changes.

In other action, the board agreed JAWS needs to do more to help members build technical and leadership skills. It also informally endorsed a plan to enhance the profile of JAWS by being a more visible presence at national journalism conferences and by continuing to take stands on media-related issues, such as the board’s recent vote condemning the racist and sexist remarks of Don Imus.

Board member Megan Kamerick, who heads the membership committee, bluntly flagged a chief obstacle as JAWS seeks to attract younger members who work in a range of media outlets. For some, she said, “Coming to JAWS Camp is a whole month’s rent.” The board suggested several ways to make JAWS more accessible, including holding down the cost of fall camp, seeking more support for scholarships and sponsoring more regional events.

President-elect Dawn Garcia gave an update on the ongoing re-design of the JAWS web site, which this summer will move to a new host, Westhost. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out www.jaws.org. There are plans to provide more job postings on the site.

Board members and other JAWS supporters have taken on several tasks with impact this year, including soliciting contributions to match the $20,000 grant from the Challenge Fund for Journalism. (JAWS blasted past that goal, raising a final total of $34,126 by the May 31 deadline! See Dawn’s report on page 1.) The board has also worked with member Sydney Shaw to contact “Lost Campers” and lure previously active members back to the fold. JAWS’ current membership stands at about 350, with 100 to 135 attending camp in any given year.

Board members also discussed how to mark the 25th anniversary of JAWS in 2009 – details to come – and how to develop or strengthen programs to mentor new and aspiring women journalists, improve career skills and help members find jobs or change careers.

The weekend wasn’t all business, though. Longtime member Martha Burk, who writes for Ms. Magazine and has led the effort to open the Augusta National Golf Club to women, threw a party at her new Albuquerque home for the board and several dozen women journalists and educators from northern New Mexico. JAWS signed up seven new members!

Karlyn Barker is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C..

We did it! In fact, we blew way past the finish line with more than we ever dreamed. The Journalism & Women Symposium greatly exceeded its goal of matching a $20,000 grant from the Challenge Fund for Journalism by May 31.

Drum roll, please: Members and supporters of JAWS donated $34,126!

We received 122 donations. Almost all of those came from members, plus a few supportive spouses, partners, parents and friends. The donations ranged from $25 to $1,000 and more, with some members getting their companies to match their donations. Every member of the 13-member JAWS board donated to the cause, with a number of JAWS board members donating $1,000 or more each.

Two other sources of donations helped put JAWS over the top:

* Shanahan Fund.
This fund supports camp speakers and honors founding board member Eileen Shanahan. Donations of $2,135 counted toward our match. A big thank you to Glenda Holste, Kay Mills, Kate Sylvester and all those who sent out a special Shanahan appeal letter.

* Round it up!
Becky Day’s idea to offer JAWS members the opportunity to “Round it Up” while renewing their membership resulted in $1,450 in donations.

The Challenge Fund, a collaboration of three foundations – the Ford Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Ethics & Excellence in Journalism – was created to help journalism groups thrive and broaden their bases of support in difficult economic times in the news business. JAWS was one of 17 organizations awarded challenge grants for the 2006-07 grant year.

Under the grant’s terms , JAWS needs to spend its $20,000 from CFJ on activities that help grow its leadership, support its mission and put it on a path toward self-sustainability. JAWS will use the money to plan a strong future for our organization and to improve and expand our services to you. We will spend the money to provide quality programs at our annual Camp, hold more regional events to reach out to women journalists where they live and improve the JAWS Web site so it’s more helpful for you. We are looking to expand our mentoring and scholarship programs, as well as to help women in all stages of their careers and lives prepare for this rapidly changing journalism landscape.

Work toward these changes has already begun. We will be seeking your thoughts on our proposals in Door County Sept. 28-30. A new strategic plan covers everything from what services JAWS should provide its members and how to increase our regional efforts to what external face JAWS presents to the world of journalism. For those of you who cannot attend Camp, we will provide other options to gather your feedback.

We also are using the free fundraising coaching that comes with the grant money to look toward the future of JAWS and determine how we can have enough money to make this organization thrive.

JAWS is a labor of love. Devoted volunteers and one overworked, part-time business manager do their best with an extremely lean budget – too lean to do all the good work that needs to be done for women in journalism. By raising more than our goal, we not only have $34,126 to spend on quality programs, we also position JAWS for receiving future grants because our members showed such initiative and support in this endeavor.

Dawn Garcia is the JAWS president-elect.

Journalists today know that they must innovate for their print, broadcast and online media outlets to survive. Key to developing those innovations will be the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, headed by executive director (and JAWS member) Pam Johnson.

In the institute’s journalism futures laboratory, teams of students, faculty and visitors will develop prototype innovations for delivery to media audiences. The most promising prototypes will be used in the journalism school’s own real-world local newspaper, radio and TV stations and online media. Planners anticipate that new online services might also emerge from the Futures Lab.

A nearby demonstration center will house “skunk-works” projects that experiment with new hardware and software to determine how communications professionals might use them. Rather than developing the technologies, this lab will emphasize how those technologies can be used to create better journalism and advertising. Among the questions the institute planners ask, for example, is whether citizen reporters can be trained to use interactive cell phones to report on local events. Or can reporters at small newspapers or television stations use new, cheaper technologies to present international news that relates to the readers and viewers in their communities? Or how might emerging Web, video and audio technologies be shaped to serve mom-and-pop advertising clients?

The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, established by Reynolds, who founded the Donrey Media Group, gave $31 million to the School of Journalism to establish the institute. The award covers construction costs, technology and furnishings for the high-tech facilities, and staff salaries, programs and operations for six years. Reynolds was a 1927 graduate of the journalism school.

One project involves upgrading the 115-year-old Sociology Building in the school’s corner of the university quadrangle. University and institute officials had hoped to move in this summer but construction workers discovered crumbling bricks and unsteady walls after construction began, so the move-in date is now June 2008. The institute will also occupy renovated space in Walter Williams Hall, part of the journalism school complex and near the upgraded building. Construction will soon be under way on a building, linking Walter Williams and the renovated sociology building, that will house the journalism futures lab.

“We have very ambitious goals for the institute. We expect it to be a major force for improving journalism, and for increasing the crucial support of all citizens for the vigorous journalism that democracies depend on,” said Dean Mills, dean of the School of Journalism, which is also the institutional home for JAWS.

One key area of the institute’s work will be the Reynolds Fellows program. Johnson said applications for the inaugural fellowship class of four visiting fellows and two Missouri fellows would be available this fall. Each fellow will complete a major experimental or scholarly project; serve as a guest lecturer, professional resource or editor for regular classes in the School of Journalism or elsewhere in the university; participate in forums and other activities of the institute; and provide leave-behind content regarding the project that becomes part of the institute’s permanent resources. Visiting fellows will serve nine months and receive an $80,000 stipend.

Other activities of the Reynolds Institute will include forums in which professionals and academics from journalism engage in dialogue with those from business, law, medicine, education, computer science and other fields to improve coverage of specialized areas and to improve non-journalists’ understanding of journalism as an institution. The institute will also work to educate other professions and citizens on the role of journalism in a democratic society as well as conducting international programs to help strengthen free-press systems in democratizing nations.

Kay Mills is an author and the editor of the JAWS newsletter

For more information, contact: Becky Day, Journalism and Women Symposium
beckyd@jaws.org

For more information about JAWS:
http://www.jaws.org

Dawn Garcia, deputy director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, has become president of the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), a national organization of women journalists.

Garcia, who spent 18 years as a newspaper reporter and editor before being appointed to her current position at Stanford University in 2000, will serve as the organization’s first two-year president. She succeeds Julie Dunlap, a freelance editor in Santa Fe, N.M.

“I feel especially privileged to be leading JAWS at a time of major change in our industry,” Garcia said at JAWS’ annual conference Sept. 28 to 30 in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. “We live in challenging, chaotic and exciting times in journalism – and women have a very important role to play in creating the future of journalism.”

Board members elected at the conference were:

Peggy Collins, multimedia editor/producer, MSN.com
Nancy Day, chair, Department of Journalism, Columbia College Chicago
Cheryl Hampton, director, news staffing and administration, National Public Radio
Merrill Perlman, director of copy desks, New York Times
Janet Vitt, night city editor, Sacramento Bee

Other board members are: Mary Kay Blakely, journalism professor, University of Missouri; Adrienne Drell, journalist and educator, Chicago; Julie Dunlap, freelance editor, Santa Fe, N.M.; Sandra Charlier Fish, journalism instructor, University of Colorado; Carol Guensburg, senior editor, Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families; Julia Kagan, health director, Ladies’ Home Journal; and Eunnie Park, reporter, The (Bergen) Record of Hacksack, N.J.

Garcia started her journalism career as a general assignment reporter at the Blade-Tribune (Oceanside, Calif.) from 1981 to 1982, covered legal affairs and city politics for the Modesto (Calif.) Bee from 1983 to1986 and wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 1991 about San Francisco politics and immigration issues. She also was on the investigative projects team. Garcia was a Knight Fellow at Stanford in the 1991-92 academic year, when she studied U.S.-Mexico relations, focusing on immigration issues. She worked at the San Jose Mercury News from 1992 to2000, as assistant managing Editor, city editor and state editor.

She has been a Pulitzer Prize juror four times, and served two terms on the Accrediting Committee of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She has taught journalism courses at San Francisco State University, Hayward State University and has been an adviser for students in Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism in the Department of Communication. Garcia earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1981. She has been a leader in diversity issues in the newsroom and in newspaper coverage.

“Dawn is a vibrant leader who understands the power of a rich blend of voices,” said Geneva Overholser, who holds the Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting in the Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington bureau. “At a moment when the future of journalism is at once unsettled but wonderfully hopeful, her election as the president of JAWS brings a promising surge of energy.”

The Journalism and Women Symposium, a nonprofit organization of women journalists and journalism educators in print, broadcast and online media, promotes the professional empowerment and personal growth of women in journalism and works toward a more accurate portrayal of the whole society.

JAWS members helped lobby the American Society of Newspaper Editors board in 1998 to include women in its annual newsroom surveys on diversity.

The most recent ASNE newsroom census, released in March 2007, showed the percentage of women in daily newsrooms decreased slightly, from 37.7 to 37.5 percent, and the percentage of women supervisors dropped from 35.5 to 34.7. Following that trend, the percentage of minority journalists working in daily newsrooms also decreased from 13.9 to 13.6 percent.

“These declines in women and people of color in America’s daily newsrooms should alarm anyone who values diverse voices and leadership,” Garcia said. “As journalism struggles to redefine itself in a nation with rapidly shifting demographics and media markets, the best journalistic minds from all backgrounds are needed now more than ever.”

JAWS Founder Honored by Washington Press Club

By Patricia Sullivan

Tad Bartimus

Tad Bartimus was the Associated Press’ first female bureau chief and its first female special correspondent, a rare title only a few reporters earn (including JAWS member Linda Deutsch).

Tad received the Washington Press Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award Feb. 13, 2008, at the annual Congressional Dinner.

As a young woman, Tad was one of the few female war correspondents in Vietnam (and contributed to a book about that experience, “War Torn: Stories of War by the Women Who Reported the Vietnam War.” She covered Alaska and the Mountain West for the AP for many years, then left the wire service, taught at the University of Alaska, and now writes a syndicated feature column for the United Feature Syndicate and a blog for Eons.com from her Hawaii home.

Her alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has also given her a lifetime achievement award. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing (1989, 1991), she also has been honored for her writing by the Associated Press Managing Editors Association more times than any other living AP journalist.

She also wrote the text for “Requiem,” a collaborative effort with David Halberstam, Horst Faas and Tim Page that won Overseas Press Club and George Polk awards in 1998. She co-authored “Trinity’s Children: Living Along America’s Nuclear Highway” with Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney, and was a co-author with other band members, including Stephen King, Amy Tan and Matt Groening, of “Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude.”

By Margie Freivogel

Launching the St. Louis Beacon has been thrilling and terrifying, meaningful and confusing. Every day, I’m grateful to be part of this nonprofit online-only regional news adventure.

We’re casting a stone into the pond of the future of journalism. You should throw some, too.

Mike Miner of the Chicago Reader captured why this is so much fun when he asked me, “Doesn’t it feel good to be on the right side of history for a change?” Yes, it does.

Much as I hate to admit it, Sam Zell is right when he says the business model that used to support newspapers doesn’t work anymore (though the Tribune Company’s owner is wrong on what to do about it.) The same goes for broadcast. This has consequences —and not just for employees and stockholders. Mainstream print and broadcast organizations still provide the basic diet of facts and disclosures that the rest of the Web chews on and all of us need.

So-called citizen journalists enrich this news diet. But they can’t entirely substitute for a press corps that is trained and paid to ask tough questions and feels obliged to represent all sides fairly. (Whether the press lives up to this standard is a discussion for another day.)

If we want good journalism to continue, then we’ve got to find a way to make it happen. It may be midnight for old media, but it’s barely dawn in the new media world. There’s no guarantee what the day will bring, but there’s still plenty of opportunities to shape it.

Of all the things I learned while developing plans for the Beacon, this surprised me most. I had assumed that online journalism was already well established. In fact, it’s more like television in the early ’50s — still open to experimentation, still searching for its economic underpinnings, still finding its nature as a unique medium rather than an echo of others.

At the Beacon, we hope to help create a responsible and vigorous new journalistic form. News that matters is our motto. We feature original reporting and thoughtful discussion of the kind that is getting squeezed out of traditional media. Depth, context and a distinctive approach are what we’re looking for.

Some examples from our first few weeks of operation: An explanation of why Anheuser-Busch is vulnerable to a takeover, video interviews with alums of the St. Louis area school desegregation program, reflections on why we love to hate “Richard III” while the play was being produced in St. Louis. The story that’s drawn the most traffic to date was an extensive interview with two abuse victims who met with the pope. Other media could do these pieces. But they hadn’t.

With a paid staff of about a dozen, including a core group of ex-St. Louis Post-Dispatch veterans, we’re one of the heftier Web-only regional publications. Some of us once tried to purchase the Post-Dispatch through an employee ownership arrangement. Now we’re glad that failed. We’re unencumbered by the rhythms and obligations of print, and that leaves us freer to explore the potential of online.

While we may compete with the Post-Dispatch on some stories, we’re not competing to put them out of business. The whole point is to provide more reporting, not less. We think a little healthy competition will be good for everyone — us, the Post-Dispatch, journalism in general and especially the readers.

Some of you may remember that our original plan was to call ourselves the St. Louis Platform. That honored Joseph Pulitzer’s Platform, or statement of journalistic principles, as well as evoking platform as a tech term and a place from which to speak. After we began operations, the Post-Dispatch launched a blog for its editorial page called, surprise, “The Platform.” Rather than fight over the name, we switched to avoid confusion.

Our success will depend partly on making good use of what we already know as newsroom veterans with deep community roots. It will depend more on what we can learn, with help from younger journalists and others in our community.

The Web has fantastic potential. We can publish instantaneously but also provide depth and context through links to earlier stories and other sources. We can use whatever tool makes the most sense to tell a story — images, video, graphics or text.

Most important, we can engage people in a rolling conversation that draws out their experience and wisdom for the benefit of everyone. All this makes journalism fun again.

Now you’re wondering how we’ll pay for all this. To get us started, St. Louisans pledged more than $1 million in donations. That includes a challenge grant from Emily Rauh Pulitzer of the family that used to own the Post-Dispatch and a major donation from William Danforth, retired chancellor of Washington University and brother of the Republican former senator. We’re working to raise another $1 million so the seed money can carry us while we ramp up other revenue sources. We expect to achieve economic self-sufficiency through a combination of ads and ongoing small donations in the manner of public radio and television.

A key partner is the local public television station, KETC. The station has given us office space, and we’ll eventually share some content.

During the 18 months we were planning the Beacon, JAWS friends were invaluable in providing moral support, practical advice and a wealth of ideas. Special thanks go to Pam Johnson and Esther Thorson at the University of Missouri, to Geneva Overholser, Gina Setser, Martha Shirk, Pat Sullivan, Rita Henley Jensen, Jane Stevens and to many others. I hope I have many chances to pass their good will along to others.

You may or may not be ready to start something new like the Beacon. But whatever your situation — working or bought-out, in an organization or on your own — you have a role to play in securing the future of good journalism. Find the stone you want to cast into the pond. Watch the ripples.

Margie Freivogel is a founder and editor of the St. Louis Beacon and a former JAWS president. She worked for 34 years as a reporter and editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.